Lex Fridman
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
The following is a conversation with Rick Spence, a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult, and military history. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Okay. So that doesn't make sense. But he is nevertheless at the center of this because he's the glue of the family, right? He exerts a tremendous amount of psychological control over them. How was he able to do that? Sorry to interrupt. Because you said he was a petty criminal. It does seem he was pretty prolific in his petty crimes. He did a lot of them. He had a lot of access to LSD.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But it doesn't seem like the murder or the creepy crawling was the, well, creepy crawling may be, but it doesn't seem like the murder, like some of the other people you've covered, like the Zodiac Killer, the murder is the goal. maybe there's some psychopathic kind of artistry to the murder that the Zodiac Killer had and the messaging behind that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But it seems like, at least the way you're describing it, with the Charles Manson family, the murder was just the... They just had a basic disregard for human life, and the murder was a consequence of just operating in the drug underworld.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So the scale of the infiltration, the number of people, and the skill of it. Is there a case to be made that the Okhrana and the Chaka orchestrated both the components of the Russian Revolution as you described them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So you think there was, if he was an informer, you think there was still a connection between DEA, FBI, CIA, whatever, with him throughout this until he's coming to murder?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
It still is fascinating that he's able to have that much psychological control over those people. without having a very clear ideology. So it's a cult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But there's not an ideology behind that, something like Scientology or some kind of religious or some kind of, I don't know, utopian ideology, nothing like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah, but how do people convince anybody of anything? With a cult, usually you have either an ideology or you have maybe personal relations, like you said, sex and drugs. But underneath that, can you really keep people with sex and drugs? You have to kind of convince them that you love them in some deep sense, like there's a commune of love. You have a lot of people there in the cult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And again, we return to that pull towards belonging that gets us humans into trouble. So it does seem that there was a few crimes around this time. So the Zodiac Killer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And also when he was stabbing the victims, it doesn't seem like he was very good at it. Or if the goal was to kill them, he wasn't very good at it because some of them survived.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So, I mean, there's a couple of questions to ask here. First of all, did people see his face?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
It might not have been. You do this kind of rigorous look, saying, like, okay, what is the actual facts that we know? Like, reduce it to the thing that we know for sure. And in speaking about his motivation... He said that he was collecting souls. Souls for the afterlife. For the afterlife. That's kind of occult-y. Yeah. I mean, that's what I believe. Is it the Vikings or the Romans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
They believed this in battle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Well, one of the interesting things you kind of bring up here in our discussion of Manson inspires this, but there does seem to be... I shared inspiration between several killers here. The Zodiac, the Son of Sam later, and the Monster of Florence. So is it possible there's some kind of underworld that is connecting these people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
You've studied secret societies. You gave a lot of amazing lectures on secret societies. It's fascinating to look at human history through the lens of secret societies because they've permeated all of human history. You've talked about everything from the Knights Templar to Illuminati to Freemasons like we brought up. Freemasons lasted a long time. Illuminati, as you've talked about,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
in its sort of main form, lasted a short time, but its legend... Never gone away. Never gone away. So maybe Illuminati is a really interesting one. What was that? Well, the Illuminati that we know started in 1776.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And you actually highlight the difference between, speaking of publicity, that there's a difference between visibility and transparency. That a secret society can be visible. It could be known about. It could be quite popular, but you could still have a secrecy within it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And then you have the French Revolution. So the idea of the Illuminati, to put it crudely, the branding is a really powerful one. And so it makes sense that there's a thread connecting it to this day, that a lot of organizations, a lot of secret societies can sort of adopt the branding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And if you're effective at it, I think it does attract... It's the chicken or the egg. But powerful people tend to have gigantic egos, and people with gigantic egos tend to like the exclusivity of secret societies. And so there's a gravitational force that pulls powerful people to these societies. Exclusive, only certain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And of course, if we go back to the conversation of intelligence agencies, it would be very efficient and beneficial for intelligence agencies to infiltrate the secret societies, right? Because that's where the powerful people are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Oh, boy. Well, I mean, that's actually, in all the lectures, I kind of had a sense that intelligence agencies themselves are kind of secret societies, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I have this sense that there are very powerful secret societies operating today and we don't really know or understand them. And the conspiracy theories in spirit might have something to them, but are actually factually not correct. So like, you know, an effective, powerful secret society or intelligence agency is not going to let you know anything that it doesn't want you to know, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
They'll probably mislead you if you can stay close.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And in Texas, the thing I love the most is there's a simple kindness to the hello, to the nod, to the aimless and wonderful conversation that you might have at a coffee shop or when you meet a stranger. I don't know. I've really fallen in love with Texas and the long runs along the river. which I consume AG1 after. Sometimes I forget there's a sponsor read going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah, there's a... I mean, the closer I look, the more I wonder the same question we asked about the Russian intelligence agencies is, where's the center of power? It seems to be very hard to figure out. Does the secrecy scare you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And they were sure that there's just a few problems that can be solved. And once you solve them, that you have this beautiful utopia where everything would be just perfect. It'd be great. And we can just get there. And I think it's really strong belief in a global utopia that, It just never goes right. It seems like impossible to know the truth in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
It is fascinating about humans. A beautiful idea on paper, an innocent little idea about a utopian future can lead to so much suffering and so much destruction and the unintended consequences that you see described. The law of unintended consequences. And we learn from it. I mean, that's why history is important. We learn from it, hopefully. Do we? Slowly, or slow learners.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I'm unconvinced of that, but perhaps it's... Speaking of unconvinced, what gives you hope? If human beings are still here, maybe expanding out into the cosmos 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 years from now, what gives you hope about that future? About even being a possible future, about it happening?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And there's similar, sometimes, psychological behavior in traffic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
The road rage, yeah. It's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But also part of the human makeup... difference between humans and chimps is the ability to get together, cooperate on a mass scale over an idea, create things like the Roman Empire did, laws that prevent us and protect us from crazy human behavior, manifestations of a man's type of behavior. Well, human beings are just weird animals. It's not getting around. They're just completely peculiar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I'm not sure that we're altogether natural. But I think we are altogether beautiful. There is something magical about humans, and I hope humans stay here, even as we get advanced robots walking around everywhere, more and more intelligent robots that claim to have consciousness, that claim they love you, that increasingly take over our world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I hope this magical thing that makes us human still persists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Rick, you're an incredible person. Well, thank you. You've done so much fascinating work, and it's really an honor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Thank you so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
This was so fun. Thank you so much for talking today. Well, thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rick Spence. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society, and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I always wonder how much deliberate planning there is within an organization like Akrana or if there's kind of a distributed intelligence that happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Well, that's a fascinating question. I mean, you could see this with NKVD. It's obviously an extremely powerful organization that starts to eat itself, where everybody's pointing fingers internally also, as a way to gain more power. So the question is, in organizations like that that are so compartmentalized, where's the power? Where's the center of power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. That's the other thing about San Francisco that I'm reminded of. That there's these incredible businesses that are born. Just a couple of founders and they're quickly hiring a few folks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Because you would think, given that much power, some individual or a group of individuals will start accumulating that power. But it seems like that's not always a trivial thing. Because if you get too powerful, the snake eats that person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah, just one step away from the very top, somebody there will probably accumulate the most power. You mentioned that the various Russian intelligence agencies were good at creating agent provocateurs, infiltrating the halls of power. What does it take to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Especially engineering heavy teams. And they're all dreamers and they're all pushing forward and they're all trying to do the craziest shit they can. Yes, there is a San Francisco bubble. Yes, there's a bit of a tunnel vision going on in many ways. But on the pure desire to build something cool, something that has a positive impact on the world, I don't know. That's a truly inspiring desire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But of course, sort of from my perspective, I share in that desire. But there's a great cost to it as well. And it's something that is a constant tension in my heart. I would like to do more building than talking. And I'm reminded of that when I'm here. Anyway. There is a bit of a mess, a complexity to the scaling of business and the running of a business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
We got AG1 for nutrition, NetSuite for business, BetterHelp for the mind, Masterclass for learning, and Shopify for selling stuff online. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a bunch of different kinds of reasons, go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now, on to the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah, that there's a boost to the ego when you can deceive, sort of not play by the rules of the world and just play with powerful people like they're your pawns. You're the only one that knows this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I wonder how many people are susceptible to this. I would like to believe that people have, a lot of people have the integrity to at least withstand the M.I., The money and the ideology, the pull of that, and the ego.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But if you don't, we'll rat you out. You'll be exposed. What are some differences to you as we look at the history of the 20th century between the Russian intelligence and the American intelligence, the CIA?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And that is what NetSuite can help you with. They manage all kinds of messy stuff. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need to match it with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Are there laws, either intelligence agencies, that they're not willing to break? Is it basically lawless operation to where you can break any law as long as it accomplishes the task?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I'm reminded of the work and of my conversation with Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and a appreciator of the beauty in the world. What a wonderful human being. Also Paul Conti. These are all friends of Andrew Huberman. And what just deep and interesting people they are. I would venture even to say very different, but both just incredible analysts of the human mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I wonder how often those intelligence agencies in the 20th century, and of course, the natural question extending it to the 21st century, how often they go to the assassination? How often they go to the kill part of that versus just the espionage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And what a mystery the mind is. I've been reading a lot of mechanistic interpretability work, which is this whole field of analyzing neural networks and trying to understand what's going on inside. And there is just wonderful breakthroughs in that field. But whenever I'm reading the papers, I can't help but be caught by the thought that I wish we had this kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So non-direct violence, controlling people's minds, controlling people's minds at scale, and experimenting with different kinds of ways of doing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah, the fact that you're willing to do medical experiments says something about what you're willing to do. And I'm sure that same spirit, innovative spirit, persists to this day. And maybe less so, I hope, less so in the United States, but probably in other intelligence agencies in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
On the topic of mice, on the topic of money, ideology, coercion, and ego, let me ask you about a conspiracy theory. So there is a conspiracy theory that the CIA is behind Jeffrey Epstein. at a high level, if we can just talk about that. Is that something that's at all even possible? That you have, basically this would be for coercion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
You get a bunch of powerful people to be sexually mischievous, and then you collect evidence on them so that you can then have leverage on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
rigor or the possibility of rigor in uh studying the human mind sort of neurobiology neuroscience is too messy there's too many variables there's too much going on and you can't do control experiments like you can on neural networks so anyway the human mind is a beautiful and mysterious thing and if you want to untangle the puzzles going on in there check out betterhelp.com slash lex and save in your first month that's betterhelp.com slash
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So you think even American intelligence agencies would be willing to swoop in and take advantage of a situation like that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
whether it's the CIA or the Accra, maybe that's what the President of the United States sees when they show up to office, is all the stuff they have on him or her, and say that there's an internal mechanism of power that you don't want to mess with, And so you will listen, whether that internal mechanism of power is the military industrial complex or whatever, the bureaucracy of government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Kind of actually the deep state. The deep state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Flex. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Phil Ivey on poker, for example. Great, great Masterclass. There's another guy who I don't believe has a Masterclass, although he should, Phil Helmuth. And I got a chance to meet him and hang out with him, and it was a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
We'll jump around a little bit, but because your work is so fascinating and it covers so many topics. So let's, if we jump into the present with the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg Group. Bilderbergers. So the elites, as I think you've referred to them. So this gathering of the elites, can you just talk about them? What is this gathering?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
What's with the robes? Why do they do weird, creepy shit? Why do they put on a mask and the robe and do the plays and the owl with the... And then sacrificing, I don't know. Why do you have a giant owl? I mean, why do you do that? But what is that in human nature? Because I don't think rich people are different than not rich people. What is it about wealth and power that brings that out of people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
What a cool experience. I just love that this world can produce such interesting, distinct, unique characters. And they are unapologetically true to themselves. Beautiful. I love it. Anyway, there's a lot of such characters on masterclass.com. and you can learn from them. So like I said, I love Phil Ivey's Masterclass, Aaron Franklin on Barbecue, probably somebody I'll talk to eventually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
It's a great idea. So the rich people should just go to a movie, or maybe just go to a Taylor Swift concert. Like, why do you have to put... Well... Why the elf?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I mean, yeah. Where else are you going to do it? If you're interested in vetting, if you're interested in powerful people selecting...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Well, there could also be a much more innocent explanation of really it's powerful people getting together and having conversations and through that conversation influencing each other's view of the world. And just having a legitimate discussion of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I actually watched a couple of episodes of a barbecue show on Netflix. That's pretty good, but not as good as the Masterclass. I just love the science and the art that goes into the whole thing. Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
policies why wouldn't they i mean why would you assume that people are not going to do that it's the owl thing with the with the robes like what why the owl and why the robes um which is why it becomes really compelling when guys like alex jones uh forgive me but i've not watched his documentary i probably should at some point about the bohemian grove
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
where he claims that there is Satanist human sacrifice of, I think, children. And I think that's quite a popular conspiracy theory. Or it has lost popularity. It kind of transformed itself into the QAnon set of conspiracy theories. But, I mean, can you speak to that conspiracy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I set one up miraculously at lexfruman.com slash store. I think about the countless stores that are enabled. I think about the countless stores that are enabled by Shopify and the machinery of capitalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
You've studied a lot of cults and occultism. What do you think is the power of that mystical experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. A drink I have not been consuming for the last few days because I'm traveling, and it's the thing that makes me miss home.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And I was thinking about that when I was talking to Bernie Sanders. And what a genuine human being Bernie is. First of all, still firing on all cylinders in terms of the sharpness and the depth and the horsepower of his mind. He's still there at 83 years old. Still got it. And also, just has not changed over many, many decades. I wish there would be more politicians with that kind of integrity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So that's a, I would say, trivial example of that. but a clear one. I do believe that there's incredible power in groups of humans getting together and morphing reality. I think that's probably one of the things that made human civilization what it is. Groups of people being able to believe a thing and bring that belief into reality. Yes, you're exactly right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And of course, that power of the collective mind can be leveraged by charismatic leaders to do all kinds of stuff, where you get cults that do, you know, horrible things or anything. There might be a cult that does good things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
100%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Do you think, actually, the interesting psychological question is, in cults, do you think the person at the top always knows that it's a scam? Do you think there's something about the human mind where you gradually begin to believe... Begin to believe your own bullshit? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Agree or disagree with him, the man has integrity. And as we head into this election, I think about the kind of politicians and human beings I would love to see lead our world. And to me, integrity is one of the character traits that is of the highest importance because the pressures when you're at the top leading a nation are immense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And there are so many reasons, primary of which I would say is the desire in the human heart to belong. Yes, sir. And the dark forms that it takes throughout human history, recent human history, is something I'd love to talk to you a bit about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
If we can go back to the beginning of the 20th century, on the German side, you've described how secret societies like the Thule Society lay the foundation for Nazi ideology. Can you, through that lens, from that perspective, describe the rise of the Nazi Party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And I would like someone who refuses to ever for any reason sell their soul for convenience or otherwise. Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Let's Freedom podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And by the way, we should take a tiny tangent here, which is that you refer to the intelligence agencies as being exceptionally successful. And here in the case of the Young Turks being also very successful in doing the genocide, meaning they've achieved the greatest impact, even though the impact on the scale of good to evil tends towards evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
you have written and lectured about serial killers, secret societies, cults, and intelligence agencies. So we can basically begin at any of these fascinating topics. But let's begin with intelligence agencies. Which has been the most powerful intelligence agency in history?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So this is almost like to help the war effort with a kind of propaganda, a narrative that can strengthen the will of the German people. It will strengthen the will of some people. Some people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
In Germany. And Marx probably expected the revolution to begin in Germany. Where else? I mean, the Soviet Union is not very industrialized. Germany is. And so that's where it would probably be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Can we sort of try to break that apart in a nuanced way? So it was a nationalist movement. The occult was part of the picture, occult racial theories. So there's a racial component, like the Aryan race, So it's not just the nation of Germany. And you take that and contrast it with Marxism. Did they also formulate that in racial terms? Did they formulate that in national versus global terms?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
How do they see this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Now, was the army doing the similar kinds of things that we've talked about with the intelligence agencies? This kind of same kind of trying to control the direction of political power? Well, it's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I'm in San Francisco, allowing myself to be surrounded and inspired by some incredible software engineering that's going on here, and putting all the other mess of politics and social bubble stuff aside. So I'm doing a lot of programming and having a lot of really highly deep technical conversations. But I definitely miss Austin. I miss Texas. I miss Boston. Walking the halls of MIT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And by the way, for people who don't know, the National Socialist German Workers' Party is also known as the Nazi Party. So how did this evolution happen from that complicated little interplay? We should also say that a guy named Adolf Hitler is in the army at this time. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So how does Adolf Hitler connect with the German Workers' Party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So the interesting thing here is from where did anti-Semitism seep into this whole thing? It seems like the way they tried to formulate counter-Marxism is by saying the problem with capitalism and the problem with Marxism is that it's really Judeo-capitalism and, quote, Judeo-Bolshevism. From where did that ideology seep in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I do wish terms were a little bit more direct and self-explanatory, yeah. Jew hate is a better term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
You gave a lecture on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's widely considered to be the most influential work of antisemitism ever, perhaps. Can you describe this text?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
1903. And by the way, we should say that these are 24 protocols. Well, it varies. It varies. That are, I guess, supposed to be like meeting notes about the supposed cabal where the Jews and Freemasons are planning together a world domination. But it's like meeting notes, right? Protocol, which are...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I love that you're a scholar of people that just kind of emerge out of like the darkness. They just, they just come from nowhere. And there's the Akrona there also. And we should also say this was, I guess the original would be written. I mean, what's the language of the original? Russian? Russian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Why do you think it took off? Why do you think it grabbed a large number of people's imaginations? And even after it was shown to be not actually what it's supposed to be, people still believe it's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But the reality is, just like with a turd on a plate, you take a picture of that in modern day and it becomes a meme, becomes viral, and becomes a joke on all social media and now is viewed by tens of millions of people or whatever. It becomes popular. So wherever the turd came from, it did... Captivate the imagination. Yeah. It did speak to something. Because it seemed to provide an explanation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Can you just speak to Jew hatred? Is it just an accident of history? Why was it the Jews versus the Freemasons? Is it... the collective mind searching for small group to blame for the pains of civilization. And then Jews just happened to be the thing that was selected at that moment in history. It goes all the way back to the Greeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So it's interesting. So this whole narrative that I would say is kind of like a viral meme started, as you described, in 300 BC. It just carried on in various forms and morphed itself into and arrived after the industrial revolution into an, in a new form to the, to the 19th and 20th century, and then somehow captivated everybody's imagination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Just like you said, in one hand, there's a good story. In the other hand is the truth. And oftentimes the good story wins out. And there's something about the idea that there's a cabal of people, whatever they are. In this case, our discussion is Jews. seeking world domination, controlling everybody, is somehow a compelling story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
It gives us a direction of a people's to fight, of a people's to hate, on which we project our pain, because life is difficult. Life for many, for most, is full of suffering. And so we channel that suffering into hatred towards the other. Maybe if we can just zoom out, what do you, from this particular discussion, learn about human nature, that we pick the other in this kind of way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And we divide each other up in groups and then construct stories and like constructing those stories and they become really viral and sexy to us. And then we channel the hatred. We use those stories to channel our hatred towards the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Speaking of the tipping point, you gave a series of lectures on murderers, crimes in the 20th century. One of the crimes that you described is the Manson family murders. And that combines a lot of the elements of what we've been talking about and a lot of the elements of the human nature that you just described. So can you just tell the story at a high level as you understand it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
How would you evaluate Hitler's painting? compared to Charles Manson's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Really, it's the university I intimately know now. And there's something about a university where you can shut off all the mess of the outside world and focus on ideas, on learning and on discovering. Plus the fearless energy of undergraduate and graduate students just boldly going forward, thinking they can completely revolutionize a field. That's really inspiring to be surrounded by.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The following is a conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Ezra is one of the most influential voices representing the left wing of American politics. He is a columnist for the New York Times, author of Why We're Polarized, and host of the Ezra Klein Show. Derek is a writer at The Atlantic, author of Hitmakers and On Work, and host of the Plain English podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So first of all, beautifully put, and second, the big thing that Doge did is make this a sexy topic to discuss, and then you can tear down Doge with the way they're doing it, say it's wrong, criticize, but then people are all of a sudden more and more caring about the efficiency of government and educating themselves, learning about it, and it's creating a culture of transparency to the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So now you can swoop in with a book like Abundance and describe, here's how to do, actually, Thank you. , , , , , , , , , , . , G, , G, I , G, I , G, G, G, S, G, G, G, S, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, S, G, .., .., .., .., .., .., .., .., .., .., .., .., .., .., ..
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I don't know what I'm saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You're right. There's some degree to which when the right speaks about the size of government, it's a little bit rhetoric and not actual policy, because they seem to always grow the size of government anyway. They just kind of say small government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But they don't, you know, in the surveillance state, in the foreign policy in terms of military involvement abroad, and really in every program, they're not very good at cutting either. They just kind of like to say it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Yeah, I definitely think, and all that is brilliantly put, I definitely think that social media is making me dumber. If I spend a week checking social media versus reading books,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And the same goes for AI, whether we're talking about this kind of research. It's more distinct and rigorous. And the other space that I do every single day is programming. I'm definitely becoming a worse programmer by using AI. Offloading, because it actually works really well there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I'm becoming worse at creative thinking at what you're saying, writing the first draft, which require that skill, that first little leap, that little mini leap into the creative genius that we all do every single day. AI is not able to do that, and it's definitely dulling that. All right. We covered a lot of ground today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
On the note of optimism, what gives you hope about the future of this great nation of ours, the future of America, looking out to the next few years and the next few decades, centuries, when we colonize the solar system and beyond? Or we could just stick to the next couple of decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Yeah, and I should say that you make a really great case for investing in weird science, meaning stuff that doesn't on the surface make sense. We said lizard venom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You know, there's all this popular criticism of scientific projects that sound like a waste of money, when in reality, at least in the scientific realm, projects that seem like they don't have any positive effect might actually end up being the ones that transform human civilization as we know it because of the unintended discoveries that happen and all the eureka moments, all the special discoveries happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
truly when you're just passionately pursuing a cool thing in science. That's how scientific minds work. And so it makes sense to invest in things that in exploring weird shit, the weird mysteries of the universe. So anyway, Ezra, what gives you hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Well, thank you to both of you for fighting for abundance and writing this manifesto for abundance and for all the writing and the work you do in the podcasts and just being incredible minds in this world that I'm a fan of. So thank you for talking today. Thanks very much, Lex. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Napoleon Bonaparte. In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
All right, so to descend down from the platonic ideals of the left and the right, who is actually running the show on the right and the left? Who are the dominant forces? Maybe you could describe, and you mentioned democratic socialists, the progressives, maybe liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream left, and the same on the right with Trump and Trumpism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Thank you for listening, and I hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's an important part to the big picture of human civilization, but indeed, it is only still a small part. My happy place is talking to scientists, engineers, programmers, video game designers, historians, philosophers, musicians, athletes, filmmakers, and so on. So I apologize for the occasional detour into politics, especially over the past few months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I did a few conversations with world leaders, and I have a few more coming up. So there will be a few more political podcasts coming out, in part so I can be better prepared to deeply understand the mind, the life, and the perspective of each world leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You were, you got a lot of criticism for this, but you were one of the people that early on said that Biden should step down. Why is the Democratic Party at this stage in its history so bad at generating the truly inspiring person? To me personally, you know, AOC, is an example of a person that might be that person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I would watch that. Definitely. I really try to, and we'll talk about this, I try to do like two, three hours, and there's a hesitancy on the left, especially to do these kinds of long programs. I think it's a trust issue. I'm not exactly sure what it is. 80% of the people on this show are left wing. I'm pretty good faith, and I try to bring out the best in people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Bernie's up there in age, so he can't do it anymore. Why is the Democratic Party so bad at generating
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I hope you come along with me on this journey into the darkness of politics as I try to shine a light on the complex human mess of it all, hoping to understand us humans better, always backed, of course, by deep, rigorous research and by empathy. Long term, I hope for political discussions to be only a small percentage of this podcast. If it's not your thing, please just skip these episodes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Or maybe come along anyway, since both you and I are reluctant travelers on this road trip. But who knows what we'll learn together about the world and about ourselves. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We've got Call of Duty for video game fun, Element for electrolytes, AG1 for a multivitamin drink, and Shopify for selling stuff online. Choose wisely, my friends. If you're watching or listening to this on Spotify, I decided to start putting the same ad reads from me at the beginnings as I do on Apple Podcasts and the RSS feed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Since a lot of folks in the survey, lexgerman.com survey, said they actually like the random non sequitur things I talk about, to my great surprise. And the rest said they were happy to just skip when they felt like it. I do, in fact, make it easy to skip with timestamps on screen and in the description. And I'm not adding ads in the middle, so hopefully this works for everybody. Let's see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I do try to make the ad reads interesting and personal, often related to stuff I'm reading or thinking about. But if you must skip them, please do check out the sponsors. Sign up. Get their stuff. I enjoy it. Maybe you will too. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. Let's go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, Call of Duty Warzone, and the return of the iconic Verdansk map. I've been a Call of Duty fan for a long, long time. It's definitely one of my favorite shooters, the ultra-realism, combined with my fascination of history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Together, they've written a new book, simply titled Abundance, that lays out a kind of manifesto for the left. It is already a controversial, widely debated book, but I think it puts forward a powerful vision for what the Democratic Party could stand for in the coming election. If I may, let me comment on the fact that sometimes on this podcast, I delve into the dark realm of politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Just to put a nice pretty bow tie on the whole thing, let me ask for advice. What do I need to do for AOC to do a three-hour interview with me? Ezra, from your throne of wisdom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You can kind of project whatever book you're reading about human history, whether it's World War II or modern warfare, on to the battlefield that they represent. Verdansk was originally introduced, I believe, in March of 2020 during COVID. And it was just a great map that the entire Call of Duty community enjoyed. sort of bonded over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I don't have the sense that the three-hour ask is a big ask because of scheduling. I think it still is grounded in the fear of saying the wrong thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
That's a really convincing and powerful theory. I think I want to push back on it because, so what's going to happen? For example, this very conversation, you're both going to come off brilliant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So a little bit of this map is just nostalgia of it being brought back. I have a lot of nostalgia about the conversations, the experiences I had during that time. There really is an intimacy in voice communication during that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's all straight downhill. But what people will say, they'll listen to this and they're like, well, that's Ezra. Like, he's brilliant. They're going to be worried about their own candidate if AOC comes off brilliant. They're not going to be thinking, oh, this is a place to be brilliant. They're going to be like, well, that's because AOC is brilliant. But my candidate is not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It still boils down to the caution. I've had a lot of Republican, high-profile Republican people reach out to me. They don't give a shit. They're just like, whatever, I'll come. People on the left, I've had two people who I respect deeply and admire express caution about the previous people I've interviewed and not wanting to come on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Perhaps you know this about me, perhaps you don't, but I'm a huge fan of video games and I'm going to be doing a bunch of conversations with video game designers this year. I love the artistry of games. I love the engineering challenges of games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I love the high stakes deadlines that games create because it's so difficult to create a beautiful, complex, deep world with stories, with narratives, with characters. Anyway, if you want to try it, it'll be out on April 3rd. You can download Call of Duty Warzone for free and then drop into the Verdansk map on April 3rd. Rated M for Mature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I just had a tough jiu-jitsu session, and I have to say it's good to be back on the mat because I sprained my ACL a while back, and I was trying to be smart. I was being smart by staying off the mat, and I think it's back to 100%. It felt close to 100% today. I was able to go hard with a bunch of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
you know, 200 plus pound meat heads. And I didn't tell them of any injuries and all that kind of stuff. So they're just going wild of all ranks, white belt, blue belt, purple, brown, black, all of it. I was able to do well sort of in terms of timing, in terms of movement, in terms of structural strength, you know, that injuries can sometimes compromise. So it felt really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But anyway, I was on the way back and that ride back on the way from jujitsu, I was sipping an element drink and listening to country music and just had this deep sense of gratitude to be able to train hard still, you know, many, many years into my training journey. Anyway, I was sipping that element and enjoying life. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And we should say that the book you've mentioned, which I've gotten a chance to read, and I think it's incredible, highly recommend, it's called Abundance. I think of it as a kind of manifesto for what the left would represent in the coming years. So I think people should read it. from that angle. And both of you have been writing about this topic sort of from different angles for a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think in 22, Derek, you wrote an article on this topic of abundance titled The Simple Plan to Solve All of America's Problems. And Ezra, you wrote an article in 21, Supply Side Progressivism, titled The Economic Mistake the left is finally confronting. And you've just described, laid out this more progressive perspective on supply-side economics that you're presenting in abundance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I was wondering if you could kind of give the broad, high-level explanation of this idea of supply-side progressivism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. When I was traveling in India, one of the things I missed was AG1. I brought a few travel packs with me, but I quickly ran out. Well, in some sense, I packed to be gone for months, for years, really. I was ready.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Is there a tension between kind of the left, the progressive wealth redistribution kind of ideas with the idea of building that's primarily sort of getting out of the way and letting the market get the job done?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think in order to have a real possibility of adventure, you have to allow yourself mentally, physically, in every way, the possibility of just being gone, maybe forever from your home. including death, accepting the fact that today might be my last day. So all of it taken together, I just threw stuff in the bag, not overthinking it, but also prepared for whatever eventualities the world drew me
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So housing, by the way, I would love to understand is that's the big problem of our era.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
toward I had a few travel packs enjoyed them but they were gone quickly and so one of the things that makes me feel like home is when I'm is when I'm able to make a cold drink fill it with AG1 put it in the freezer for maybe 10-20 minutes it's got that like almost slushy like consistency and I could just in the Texas heat sit back and just enjoy AG1 that makes me feel like home
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. Texas heat not included. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I believe at the beginning of this conversation, we tried to take initial steps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Of course, it's very difficult to do thoroughly, but initial steps in trying to define what is liberalism, what is progressivism, what is conservatism. What is the current state of the left and the right in American politics? I think one of the things he mentioned briefly was capitalism. There's a bit more sort of a skeptical eye towards the excesses and the negative aspects of capitalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Indeed, politics often divides us, and frankly, brings out the worst in some very smart people. Plus, to me, it is frustrating how much of the political discourse is drama, and how little of it is rigorous, empathetic discussion of policy. I hate this, but I guess I understand why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And of course, I think to some degree, that's valuable. You don't want to run away toward that direction or any direction really too far, being too skeptical of capitalism or too rah-rah, absolute free market, capitalism will save us, capitalism can do no wrong, all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Extreme variations of any ideology I think can get us into trouble, but all of it is a beautiful experiment we'll get to learn from and I think Shopify, to me, in a small sort of philosophical way, represents distributed capitalism where anyone can sell to anyone. One of the troubles you can get into with capitalism is monopolies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Yeah. I mean, that's so brilliantly put that, you know, the economic dynamism and the intellectual dynamism that makes America... I think the greatest nation on earth is at the core housing story. It's like, you have to live near the place where there is turmoil and turbulence, intellectually and economically speaking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so like, you want to be able to move there and like be part of that culture, part of that economy and part of that, like how you raise your kids and culturally what you want them to study, what you want them to do, yeah. That's fascinating. So how do we solve the housing problem? Is it just remove as much regulation as possible, like get out of the way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And to make it accessible and easy for people to create their own store and sell to anyone, that's a beautiful thing. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. Like I said, if you're listening or watching this on Spotify, I hope this kind of ad read is okay by you. All right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Esther Klein and Derek Thompson. You are both firmly on the left of the US political spectrum. Ezra, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. You're often referred to, at least I think of you as one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on the left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Can you try to define, can you define the ideals and the vision of the American left? Oh, good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Okay, you said a lot of really interesting insights there. So one, if I understood correctly, that regulation of outcomes is more a good idea than regulation of process, because regulation of process is where you can breed a lot of Basically, the lawyers show up. The other insight is if we get rid of 99% of lawyers, the world would be a better place. There's a lot of jokes around that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
82. In the 80s. No. Majority of them. No. They're simply there to take advantage of the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Yeah, I'm so transparent. It makes me think I'm a robot built in a lab somewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So on the Kool-Aid man, I was wondering if you could maybe steel man the case for and against Elon Musk and Doge. Because you mentioned all of these regulations, all of the complexities that get in the way of building. It seems like a bold human like Elon is required to break through the regulation. Put that on one side and the other side, I read somewhere that abundance is kind of the anti-doge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So, which to me, it seems like there is conflicting ideas, but there's also alignment. So maybe can we break all that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
If the other side is called either Hitler or Stalin online by swarms of chanting mobs, it's hard to carry out a nuanced discussion about immigration, healthcare, housing, education, foreign policy, and so on. On top of that, anytime I talk about politics, half the audience is pissed off at me. And no, there is no audience capture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Okay, so as you said, two things. One is the steel man, and then at the end there, there was a non-steel man. So the first part is cutting, removing as much as possible to see what's actually needed. This seems like one of the ways to figure out what's actually needed is by removing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And then there's the second thing that you mentioned, so that you can install the people that follow your policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Okay, well, I don't like it because it cuts my ear in a certain way that one of the criticisms I have for Donald Trump and the Trump administration is there's a natural circles of sycophancy that forms. Every president has their personality and psychological quirks, and I think he's one of the people where favoritism... is more likely to develop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So when you choose who to install as the head of whatever organization. So if you fire everybody and rehire, the rehiring process is more likely to have people that just said nice things about Donald Trump in the past versus a meritocracy-based system that these people are really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But the ideal, the steel man to me, about maybe what Elon is doing, is in order to have the best people in the world doing a great job at every part of government, you have to figure out, I mean, his first email of like, what have you done this week? If we just steel man everything he's been doing, which is like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
let's find the productive people that show up to work, that love what they're doing, that are actually sort of amazing at what they're doing. I mean, how would you solve that problem? From his experience in business, it's painful but effective to just fire almost everybody and then rebuild from there and continuously do that. And as a result, Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I mean, there's a lot of fascinating things there. On the unfairness of life, that could be the interperson unfairness, so one person getting more money than another person, more skills or more natural abilities than another person. And then there's just the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw, the things that happen. All of a sudden, you cross a street in the car,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
runs a red light and runs you over and you're in the hospital. So that unfairness of life. And in general, I guess the left sees there's some role or a lot of role for government to help you when that unfairness strikes. And then maybe there's also a general notion of the size of government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think the left is more comfortable with a larger government as long as it's effective and efficient, at least in this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Do you think there's some degree to where if you trust in the system of democracy, which I do, and there's some people, and we'll talk about them, one of the main criticisms and concerns of Donald Trump is he's going to break democracy. But if you trust that democracy holds, isn't this an interesting experiment of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
how, when everybody's aligned, aggressive cutting of regulation and the number of people is an experiment of like, okay, let's see what this does to a really over bloated bureaucracy that's become extremely inefficient. And by the way, so I have an optimism about it, that matches the vision of abundance in the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
that once you do the creative destruction, then you start to really be able to step in and have a clear vision of like, okay, housing. What are the policies to solve housing? But I do think the first step that's needed is the destruction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Okay, there's a lot to say there. So first of all, can we separate the sort of abundance and doge, those efforts from tariffs? Because I don't know who agrees with tariffs. Tariffs don't make sense to me economically. Maybe you can explain who agrees or likes the tariffs on the right or the left or anybody. But do you see my point that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Well, that point also to comment on it, I mean, one of the mechanisms by which bureaucracy forms is a kind of polite civility and a structure and a process. There is an argument to be made, and I'm not saying Donald Trump is that person, but there's some qualities there of picking up the phone and calling Putin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
uh that goes against all the process some of the most successful peace negotiations uh throughout history broke process it's uh just spoke with narendra modi you know there's a process you're not supposed to meet with pakistan or whatever for india you just screw it i'm gonna go to a wedding a pakistan wedding of a high up official i'm gonna do do these things they're very trumpian the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Break the rules. Okay. Now, in a perfect world, some of that is good, matched with principled policy that's surrounded by a large number of experts that actually understand that policy. Okay. I can criticize Trump all day. But I'm just saying that there is some degree to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
the picking up the phone and talking to leaders and playing the, in the morning, say one thing in the evening, another, that could be part of a principled chaos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I get shit on equally by different groups across the political spectrum, depending on the guest. Why, I don't know, but I'm slowly coming to accept that this is the way of the world. I try to maintain my cool, return hate with compassion, and learn from the criticism and the general madness of it all. Still, I think it's valuable to sometimes talk about politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Yeah, I have a question about Doge, but before that, I'll just say that I don't think Donald Trump should have that much power Because I think to this day, my biggest criticism and concern is that he is a person that denied the results of the election. And so... I'm unwilling, you know, I like George Washington.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I like people that have the skill, the ability, the track record to walk away from power. And a person who's unwilling to accept reality and is willing to bend reality to maintain a grip on power Even if what they're trying to do is really good, maybe making a government more efficient makes me very concerned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But on the topic of Doge's more on the Elon side, if we can sort of combine Doge and abundance as a topic, if Doge succeeds... Let's just forget Doge, but the effort of making government more efficient. What does that look like before the next election and after the next election? If we can just look at success.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
The following is a conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy about the future of conservatism in America. He has written many books on this topic, including his latest called Truths, The Future of America First. He ran for president this year in the Republican primary and is considered by many to represent the future of the Republican party.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So this may come off as being a total travel noob, but two things that came to me as troublesome or difficult as a travel noob when I'm traveling to all kinds of locations and am trying to be productive are One is power, so power cables, all the adapters you have to keep in mind and making sure your equipment is able to plug into the outlet without frying anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Somebody online was trying to correctly... I think... you shot a very particular angle of that video. I think they were criticizing your backhand was weak, potentially, because you're- That would be a fair criticism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Well, it's been fun watching you do all these fascinating things, but I do hope that you have a future in politics as well, because it's nice to have somebody that has rigorously developed their ideas and is honest about presenting them and is willing to debate those ideas out in public space. So I would love for you and people like you to represent the future of American politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So Vivek, thank you so much for every time I'm swiveling this chair, I'm thinking of Thomas Jefferson. It's good. That was my goal. So big shout out to Thomas Jefferson for the swivel chair. And thank you so much for talking today, Vivek. This was fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from George Orwell. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
In fact, I had a funny experience with that, or not so funny, about frying my equipment when I'm doing a podcast abroad. Anyway, so power, and figuring that out is actually not... And related to that is figuring out which electronic stores to go to to get equipment and how to find those stores. And to find those stores, you need to have good internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, you had a pretty intense debate with Mark Cuban. Great conversation. I think it's on your podcast, actually. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
It was great. Okay, well, speaking of good guys, he messes me all the time with beautifully eloquent criticism. I appreciate that, Mark. What was one of the more convincing things he said to you? You're mostly focused on kind of DEI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And that takes me to the second issue that you run into when traveling is just getting good internet in any country, in any location. So that's what Saley helps you out with. They have a great data plan, easy to use, minimize roaming fees while constantly being connected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I think what Mark would say is that diversity is— allows you to look for talent in places where you haven't looked before and therefore find really special talent, special people. I think that's the case he made.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I don't know what it is about human psychology, but whenever you have a sort of administration, a committee that gets together to do a good thing, the committee starts to use the good thing, the ideology behind which there's a good thing. to bully people and to do bad things. I don't know what it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And so when you're traveling, you're not desperately holding on to that sweet, sweet airport Wi-Fi before you take a leap out into the unknown when there's no Wi-Fi. Here. Thanks to Saley, you can stay connected. Go to Saley.com slash Lex and choose the one gigabyte Saley data plan to get it for free. That's Saley.com slash Lex to get one free gig of Saley.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, you need managers, but as few as possible. It seems like when you have a giant managerial class, the actual doers don't get to do. But like you said, bureaucracy is a phenomenon of both the left and the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
You're the one that reminded me that he drafted, he wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was 33.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
All right, this episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp. Spelled H-E-L-P, help. Have you seen the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? It's a good movie. I really should read the book. I haven't read the book. I really want to read the book. But I think there's something also magical about the performances in the movie, just pure genius.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Before all that, he was a successful biotech entrepreneur and investor with a degree in biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. As always, when the topic is politics, I will continue talking to people on both the left and the right with empathy, curiosity, and backbone. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah. Speaking of shutting most of it down, how do you propose we do that? How do we make government more efficient? How to make it smaller? What are the different ideas of how to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
There's this kind of almost meme-like video of Argentinian President Javier Millet wearing a whiteboard. He has all the, I think, 18 ministries lined up. And he's like, he's ripping like, Department of Education, gone. And he's just going like this. Now, the situation in Argentina is pretty dire. And the situation in the United States is not, despite everybody saying, the empire is falling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Anyway, the performances in the movie reveal the various manifestations of insanity, including the insanity of the people running the institutions. There's all kinds of insanities that humans are capable of. Why do I say this? I believe talking is one of the ways to reverse engineer how the insanity came to be in the first place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
This is still, in my opinion, the greatest nation on earth. Still, the economy is doing very well. Still, this is the hub of culture, the hub of innovation, the hub of so many amazing things. Do you think it's possible to do something like firing 75 percent of people in government when things are going relatively well?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And by the way, that kind of thing would attract the ultra-competent to actually want to work in government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, you know, there's kind of the cynical view of capitalism where people think that the only reason you do anything is to earn more money. But I think a lot of people would want to work in government to build something that's helpful to a huge number of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I would have loved to be inside on Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and talk to those characters and talk to those human beings. In fact, I gravitate towards people with that kind of complexity in their mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
You know, when I traveled across the country, and in general when I travel, I gravitate towards people like the homeless people outside of 7-Eleven and have a genuine, nonjudgmental, just open-hearted conversation with them. I like talking to regular people. I like talking to people who, I don't know, do something real for a living. And I don't mean to judge sort of white-collar and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, you said something really profound. At the individual scale of the individual contributor, doer, creator, what happens is you have a certain capacity to do awesome shit. And then there's barriers that come up where you have to wait a little bit. This happens, there's friction always. When humans together are working on something, there's friction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And so the goal of a great company is to minimize that friction, minimize the number of barriers. And what happens is the managerial class, the incentive is to create barriers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
tech jobs but i just mean uh manual labor jobs just people with their eyes their hands their feet their whole way of being shows aware and tear shows the journey sort of well-lived and hard-lived i like those people and i really want to talk to those people on a podcast but more than anything forget the mics i just like talking to them just as a one human to another
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Can you sort of steel man the perspective of somebody that looks at a particular department, Department of Education, and are saying that the amount of pain that will be caused by closing it and firing 75% of people will be too much?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Anyway, I say all that is conversation is a really powerful thing. And if you want to take conversation seriously as a way to heal your particular mental malady, consider using BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So what kind of things do you think government should do that the private sector, the forces of capitalism would create drastic inequalities or create the kind of pain we don't want to have in government?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I just recently did an episode on the history of Marxism. And what really struck me is that the 19th century was a battleground of radical ideas. And I think it's popular in modern political discourse to label, frankly, moderate ideas as radical. Sort of, in our rhetoric, radicalize the rhetoric and push towards the moderate, our actual policies and ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So if we get government out of education, would you be also for reducing this as a government in the States? for something like education?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So given this conversation, what do you think of Elon's proposal of the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration or really any administration?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And it's interesting to look back at the 19th century, the industrialized world that doesn't have enough data on what large-scale implementation of ideas would actually look like. It's interesting to see those ideas battle each other out in their most radical form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So you mentioned Department of Education, but there's also the Department of Defense. And there's a very large number of very powerful people that have gotten used to a budget that's increasing and the number of wars and military conflicts that's increasing. So if we could just talk about that. So this is the number one priority. It's like there's difficulty levels here. The DOD...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
It would be probably the hardest. So let's take that on. What's your view on the military-industrial complex, Department of Defense, and wars in general?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So that really opened up my eyes to sort of honestly embody and consider and walk a mile in the shoes of a particular idea, whether that's communism or capitalism. Because capitalism does have flaws. But it is the thing that has given us much of the improved quality of life that we see around us today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I think it's a fascinating, complex question of why does a large collection of humans, when free to compete, do a pretty good job? It's fascinating. And that's every time I talk about NetSuite, that's what I'm thinking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Wait, okay. There's a lot of stuff to ask. First of all, on Joe Biden, you mean he's functionally not in control of the U.S. military because of the age factor or because of the nature of the presidency?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
How does a large collection of humans, different departments, different tasks, how do they all collaborate efficiently, effectively, under the deadlines, under the stress, under the shadow of the reality that if the business does not sell a lot of stuff and make a lot of money, it's going to fail, and all those people will lose their jobs. It's stressful and it's beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, it's a really, really powerful idea. It's actually something that Donald Trump ran on in 2016. Drain the swamp. Drain the swamp. I think by most accounts, maybe you can disagree with me, he did not successfully do so. He did fire a bunch of people, more than usual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Anyway, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is brought to you by Ground News, a nonpartisan news aggregator that I use to compare media coverage from across the political spectrum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Saley for international roaming data, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, Ground News for cutting through the media bias and aid sleep, for naps. She's wise, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Okay, so the Supreme Court cases you mentioned, there's a lot of nuance there. I guess it's weakening the immune system of the different departments. Yeah, it's a good way of putting it. On the human psychology level, so you basically kind of implied that for Donald Trump or for any president, the legal situation was difficult. Is that the only thing really operating? Like, isn't it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
The point is to see every side of every story and you, you the listener, come to your own conclusion. This is one of the problems I have with people that are against platforming certain voices. I believe in the intelligence of the listener to decipher the truth. And sometimes that doesn't come immediately. Sometimes that comes over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Probably not. Just on a psychological level, just hard to fire a very large number of people. Is that what it is? Like, why is there a basic civility and momentum going on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I disagree with you on both the last and the best hope. Donald Trump is more likely to fire a lot of people, but is he the best person to do so?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
My impression is his priority allocation was different than yours. I think he's more focused on some of the other topics that you are also focused on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And there is a tension there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
But I do think that it is the responsibility of a host, of an interviewer, to challenge the audience, to push the audience to not just listen to this particular person, but to listen to other people that disagree with this person, to listen to differing voices and different perspectives, and consider both
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
There's so many priorities at play here, though. I mean, you really do have to do the Elon thing of walking into Twitter headquarters with a sink, right? Let that sink in. That basically firing a very large number of people and basically But it's not just about the firing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
It's about setting clear missions for the different departments that remain, hiring back because you overfire, hiring back based on meritocracy. And it's a full-time – and it's not only full-time in terms of actual time. It's full-time psychologically because – you're walking into a place unlike a company like Twitter, an already successful company in government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I mean, everybody around you, all the experts and the advisors are going to tell you you're wrong. And like, it's a very difficult psychological place to operate in because like you're constantly the asshole.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And I mean, the, the certainty you have to have about what you're doing is just like nearly infinite because everybody, all the really smart people are telling you, no, this is a terrible idea, sir. This is a terrible idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Okay, I'll give you an example that's really difficult tension, given your priorities, immigration. there's an estimated 14 million illegal immigrants in the United States. You've spoken about mass deportation. Yes. That requires a lot of effort. Right. Money. I mean, how do you do it and how does that conflict with the shutting it down?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
the possibility that this person is completely right or completely wrong and walk about with those two possibilities together. So don't get captured by a particular ideology. Give yourself time to accept the ideology and to accept the steel man against the ideology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
There is a lot of criticism of the idea of mass deportation, though. So one, it will cause a large amount of economic harm, at least in the short term. The other is there would be potentially violations of our kind of higher ideals of how we like to treat human beings, in particular separation of families, for example, tearing families apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And the other is just like the logistical complexity of doing something like this. How do you answer some of those criticisms?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And existing in that superposition of truths, try to figure out where in that gray area is your own understanding of the path forward. Because unlike what politicians claim, I don't think there's a right understanding. or an easy or a clear answer for the problems that we face as a human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
In fact, the division, I think, that we're seeing online on the internet between the politicians is our best attempt at trying to, through the tension of discourse, figuring out what the hell are we doing here? How do we solve this? How do we make a better world? So anyway, Ground News does a great job of delivering
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, in the way you describe eloquently, the immigration system is broken in that way that is built fundamentally on lies. But there's the other side of it. Illegal immigrants are used in political campaigns for fear-mongering, for example. So what I would like to understand is what is the actual... that illegal immigrants are causing. So the claim, one of the more intense claims is of crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And, you know, I don't, I haven't studied this rigorously, but sort of the surface level studies all show that legal and illegal immigrants commit less crime than American, US.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
the metrics that give you the context of like, okay, how biased is this particular story? So they can kind of help you in consuming that new story to understand where it's coming from. It's trying to clearly, in an organized way, deliver to you the perspective on the truth, grounded in the context of the bias from which that perspective comes from, okay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And there's a lot of other features that are super interesting. I'm glad they exist. I'm glad they're doing the work they're doing. It's extremely important. Go to groundnews.com slash lex to get 40% off the Ground News Vantage plan, giving you access to all of their features. That's ground, G-R-O-U-N-D, news.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by eSleep and its Pod 4 Ultra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Just to linger a little bit on the demonization issue. and to bring Ann Coulter into the picture. Her, which I recommend people should listen to your conversation with her. I haven't listened to her much, but she had this thing where she's clearly admires and respects you as a human being. And she's basically saying, you're one of the good ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And this idea that you had this brilliant question of like, what does it mean to be an American? And she basically said, Not you, Vivek. But she said, well, maybe you, but not people like you. So that whole kind of approach to immigration, I think, is really anti-American.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, there's a million reasons, and they're all nicely categorized, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Cools or heats up each side of the bed separately. Speaking of the amazing things that capitalism brought to our world, they increasingly make naps more and more magical. The Ultra part of the Pod 4 Ultra adds the quote-unquote base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame. It can elevate, can control the positioning of the bed, which is another fascinating piece of technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Quick pause, Bethel break.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Let me ask you to, again, steel man the case for and against Trump. So my biggest criticism for him is the fake election scheme, the 2020 election, and actually the 2020 election in the way you formulated in The Nation of Victims. It's just the entirety of that process, instead of focusing on winning elections,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Right. But I get it. And you share a lot of ideas with Donald Trump. So I get when you're running for president that you would say that kind of thing. But there's, you know, there's other criticism you could provide. And again, on the 2020 election.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And so you can sort of read in bed, you can watch TV, all that kind of stuff. But I think the killer feature, the most amazing feature is the cooling of the bed. A cold bed with a warm blanket, one of my favorite things in the world. for a nap, for a full night's sleep, all of that. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong. I don't care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
The 2020 election and not in the, what is it, TDS kind of objection. It's just I don't think there's clear, definitive evidence that there was voter fraud. Let me ask you about a different area. Hold on a second. Hold on a second. I think there's a lot of interesting topics about the influence of media, of tech, and so on. But I want a president that has a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
good, clear relationship with the truth and knows what truth is, what is true and what is not true. And moreover, I want a person who doesn't play victim, like you said, who focuses on winning and winning big. And if they lose, like walk away with honor and win bigger next time, or like channel that into growth and winning, winning in some other direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So it's just like the strength of being able to give everything you got to win and walk away with honor if you lose. And everything that happened around 2020 election is just goes against that to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I'm a scientist and of one of myself when it comes to health, when it comes to nutrition, when it comes to all of that. I integrate the advice from all of my friends, all of the scientific literature and podcasts and all that kind of stuff from out there. But at the end of the day, I take all of that with a grain of salt and just kind of listen to my body and see what works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Well, I think I agree with a lot of things you said. Probably disagree, but it's hard to disagree with a Hunter Biden laptop story, whether that would have changed the results of the election.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I think there's probably, that's just one example, maybe a sexy example of a bias in the complex of the media. And there's bias in the other direction too, but probably there's bias. It's hard to characterize bias as one of the problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And for me, naps are magical. I think they're essential for my productivity. I go hard in the first few hours of the day, usually four, four hours of deep work. And after that, there's a bit of a crash just because it's so exhausting. And a nap solves that like trivially, 15, 20 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Most people in tech companies are privately, their political persuasion is on the left. And most journalists, majority of journalists are on the left. But to characterize the actual reporting and the impact of the reporting in the media and the impact of the censorship is difficult to do. But that's a real problem, just like we talked about, a real problem in immigration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Okay, so the connection of government to platform should not exist. The government, FBI, or anybody else should not be able to pressure platforms to censor information, yes. We could talk about Polodurov and the censorship there. There should not be any censorship and there should not be media bias.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
and you're right to complain if there is media bias, and we can lay it out in the open and try to fix that system. That said, the voter fraud thing, you can't right a wrong by doing another wrong. You can't just, if there's some shitty, shady stuff going on in the media and the censorship complex, you can't just make shit up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Sometimes I'll pop a caffeine pill before the nap or drink a coffee before the nap and I wake up, boom, ready to go again. I don't know if I can do that without the nap. I honestly don't. So thank you, 8sleep, and thank you for the magic of naps. Go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This is the Lex Freeman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
You can't do the fake electric scheme and then do a lot of shady, crappy behavior during January 6th and try to, like, shortcut your way just because your friend is cheating a monopoly when you're playing monopoly you can't cheat you shouldn't cheat yourself you should be honest and like with honor and use your platform to uh help fix the system versus like cheat your way so here's my view is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Are you worried if in this election, it's a close election and Donald Trump loses by a whisker, that there's chaos that's unleashed? And how do we minimize the chance of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Vivek Ramaswamy. you are one of the great elucidators of conservative ideas so you're the perfect person to ask what is conservatism what's your let's say conservative vision for america well actually this is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I wish there was less of, although at times it is so ridiculous, it is entertaining, the I hate Taylor Swift type of tweets or truths or whatever. I don't think that's- He's a funny guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I love that you do that. I love that you focus on policy and can speak for hours on policy. Let's look at foreign policy. Sure. What kind of peace deal do you think is possible, feasible, optimal in Ukraine? If you sat down, you became president, if you sat down with Zelensky and sat down with Putin, what do you think is possible to talk to them about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
One of the hilarious things you did, which were intense and entertaining, your debates in the primary, but anyway, is how you grilled the other candidates that didn't know any regions. They wanted to send money and troops and lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and they didn't know any of the regions in Ukraine. Yeah. You had a lot of zingers in that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
But anyway, how do you think about negotiating with world leaders about what's going on there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So from the American perspective, the main interest is weakening the alliance between Russia and China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
There might be some extremely painful things for Ukraine here. So Ukraine currently captured a small region in Russia, the Kursk region, but Russia has captured giant chunks, Donetsk, Luhansk, Sapochnik, Kherson regions. So it seems given what you're laying out, it's very unlikely for Russia to give up any of the regions that's already captured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
This episode is brought to you by Saley, a brand new eSIM service app offering several affordable data plans in over 150 countries. I've recently had a conversation with Peter Levels, Levels.io, who's traveled across the world and been exceptionally productive while traveling across the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Just to add to the table some things that Putin won't like but I think are possible to negotiate, which is Ukraine joining the European Union and not NATO. So establishing some kind of economic relationships there and also splitting the bill, sort of guaranteeing some amount of money from both Russia and the United States for rebuilding Ukraine is one of the,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
challenges in Ukraine, a war-torn country, is how do you guarantee the flourishing of this particular nation? So you want to not just stop the death of people and the destruction, but also provide a foundation on which you can rebuild the country and build a flourishing future country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Okay, let's go to the China side of this. The big concern here is that the brewing cold or God forbid, hot war between the United States and China in the 21st century. How do we avoid that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I think the thing you didn't quite make clear, but I think implied, is that we have to accept the red line that China provides of the one China policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
But what do you do when China says very politely, we're going to annex Taiwan, whether you like it or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So Prime Minister Modi, I think you've complimented him in a bunch of different directions, one of which is when you're discussing nationalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Well, I hope you run because this was made clear on the stage in the primary debates. You have a unique clarity and honesty in expressing the ideas you stand for. And it would be nice to see that. I would also like to see the same thing on the other side, which would make for some badass, interesting debates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Who do you think? So for me, I would love to see in some kind of future where it's you versus somebody like Tim Walz. So to Tim Walz, maybe I'm lacking in knowledge. It's a, first of all, like a good dude has similar to you strongly held, if not radical, ideas of how to make progress in this country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So to just be on stage and debate honestly about the ideas, there's a tension between those ideas. Is there other people? Shapiro is interesting also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
You're exceptionally productive. But even just looking book-wise, you've written basically a book a year for the last four years. When you're writing, when you're thinking about how to solve the problems of the world, to develop your policy, how do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, we'll talk about each of those issues. Immigration, the growing bureaucracy of government, religion is a really interesting topic, something you've spoken about a lot. But you've also had a lot of really tense debates. So you're a perfect person to ask to steel man the other side. Yeah. So let me ask you about progressivism. Can you steel man the case for progressivism and left wing ideas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So you've mentioned the first primary debate. So more than almost basically anybody I've ever seen, you stepped into some really intense debates on your own podcast, but in general, kind of in all kinds of walks of life, whether it's sort of debates with sort of protestors or debates with people that really disagree with you, like the radical opposite of you. what's the philosophy behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And what's the psychology of being able to be calm through all of that, which you seem to be able to do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Are they right is the thing I actually literally see you do. So you are listening. to the other person. For my own benefit, to be honest, selfish. You also don't lose your shit. So you don't take it personally. You don't get emotional, but you get emotional sort of in a positive way. You get passionate, but you don't get, it doesn't, I've never seen you broken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Like to where they, do they get you like outraged?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I agree with you. I think fundamentally, most people are good. And one of the things I love most about humans is the very thing you said, which is curiosity. I think we should lean into that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
The following is a conversation with Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont and two-time presidential candidate, both times as the underdog who, against the long odds, captivated the support and excitement of millions of people, both on the left and the right. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
To be able to lay down on a cold surface, using an app, control the temperature of that surface, put on a warm blanket, And I am forever lost in the creation of the millions of engineers who came before us. And the millions of engineers who will come after. Who are doing everything they can to build a better world. And that's what I dream about when I'm taking a nap. It's that better world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Have companies, lobbyists ever tried to buy you, tried to influence you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So how do we fix the system? How do we get money out of politics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
How do we make that happen when there's so much money in the system and the politicians owe to the people who paid for their election? Does it have to come from the very top, essentially sort of a really strong popular populist president?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I think what happens is when an individual politician speaks out about it, they get punished. But I think this is a popular idea. So if a lot of them speak out, that's why if it came from the top, if a president was using a very large platform to basically speak out, it provides a safety blanket for the other politicians to get it out of the system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
But there has to be a kind of a mass movement of it. Yes, it does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So many of your policy proposals are quite radical. No, they're not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Well, they're popular. So what I mean is relative to the way other politicians speak, it's usually a little bit more moderate. So from everything you've learned from politics, is it better to go... sort of radical, maybe we can come up with a different word, versus a more moderate, safe, ambiguous kind of policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Well, I mean, yeah, it's a popular idea. It's an idea that makes sense. But in order to implement it and actually make it happen requires, I mean, to flip the system upside down, right? In that sense, it's radical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Go to 8sleep.com and use code LEX to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by Saley, a brand new eSIM service app that offers several affordable data plans in over 150 countries. That, for me, has been the biggest pain when traveling, is to make sure when I get to the airport, when I leave the airport, I'm able to communicate with the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Okay, let's talk about Medicare for All. If you could snap your fingers today and implement the best possible healthcare system for the United States of America, what would that look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So the way to pay for the system is to increase taxes, but you're saying if you cut that cost and increase the taxes, you're saying it's going to- Here's the story, and I've gotten my share of 30-second ads attacking me on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Or just communicate with a map that can make sure I don't get completely lost in this new country where I don't speak the language and all the other complexities of travel. Everything is made easier when you have an internet connection. And again, just a reminder how lucky we are in the 21st century. Billions of people are able to be seamlessly connected with each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So the most painful thing in today's system is the surprise bills, the number one cause of bankruptcy, and the psychological pain that comes from that, just worrying, stressed, in debt. You got it. And just basically afraid constantly of getting sick because you don't know if insurance is going to cover it. And if you're not insured, you don't know how much it's going to cost.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So you're not going to go to the hospital even if there's something wrong with you, if there's pain and all that. So you just live in a state of fear, psychological fear. That's the number one problem. It's not just financial, it's psychological.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
there's just so many stories and not even the horrific stories. There's countless horrific stories, but just basic stories of costs. Like my friend, Dr. Peter Attia has this story where he happens to be wealthy so he can afford it, but he had to take his son to the emergency room and the son was dehydrated and the bill was $6,000. They just did a basic test and gave him an IV, a basic thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And he has really good insurance and the insurance covered $4,000 of it. So he had to, at the end, pay $2,000 for a basic emergency room visit. And there's a lot of families for whom that one visit for such a simple thing would be just financially devastating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So anyway, I've had countless and countless experiences where... I have a terrible internet and the SIM situation is complicated. Do I buy a new SIM at the airport? And it's just a mess. And so Saley takes on this problem, make sure it's affordable, but also make sure it's super easy. If you're traveling and you want to make sure you stay connected, try them out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So that's another good example of a really popular idea that is not implemented because of the money in politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Again, if a single politician discusses it, they get punished for it. So there needs to be a mass movement. And probably, I mean, from my perspective, it has to come from the very top. It has to come from the president. And the president has to be a populist president where they don't care about the parties with the rich people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
They just speak out because they know it's a popular message and they know it's the right thing. So speaking of that, you had a historic campaign run for president in 2016. And in the eyes of many people, mine included, you were screwed over by the DNC, as especially the WikiLeaks emails showed. What's your just looking back feelings about that? Are you angry? Are you upset?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Yeah, of course I'm angry, and of course I'm upset.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And you almost won. And a lot of people thought that you would win against Donald Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Go to saley.com slash Lex and get 15% off any eSIM data plan. That's saley.com slash Lex to get 15% off. This episode is also brought to you by Ground News, a nonpartisan news aggregator that I use to compare media coverage from across the political spectrum. In these days and weeks especially, a site like this is just priceless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Well, there's a lot of close arguments there, but your point is well taken. It's either the same or a little bit higher or a little bit lower, depending on the statistics. It has not increased significantly, and the wealth inequality has increased significantly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I got to get back to 2016 because it's such a historic moment. So there's a lot of fans of yours that wanted you to keep fighting because you forgave in the end the establishment and joined them in support. And your fans wanted you to keep fighting for a takeover, for a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party. If you just look back and had to do it all over again, what would you do different?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
and in 2020 i did the same with biden and we had more success with biden than we had with clinton well there's this interesting uh story about a long time coming meeting between you and obama in uh 2018 i believe so uh ari raebenhoft who was a former deputy campaign manager wrote a great book i would say about you called the fighting soul on the road with bernie sanders and he tells many great stories but one of them is your meeting with obama
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And he says that Obama told you, Bernie, I wish I could do a good Obama impression. Bernie, you're an Old Testament prophet, a moral voice for our party, giving us guidance. Here's the thing though, prophets don't get to be king. Kings have to make choices, prophets don't. Are you willing to make those choices?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Basically, Obama's making the case that you have to sort of moderate your approach in order to win. So was Obama right? Look-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Reporting on the different things going on in the world, whether it's local, whether it's national, whether it's international, it's really nice to be able to get multiple perspectives and for that perspective to be presented with a clear indication of the best kind of estimate from which side of the political spectrum this reporting is coming from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So just to go back to Obama, though, in many ways, he too is a singular historic figure in American politics who has brought about a lot of change. He's a symbol I think that will be remembered for a long time. What do you admire most about Obama?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And he, like you, also gave a damn good speech opposing the Iraq war before running for president. And that takes courage. Yes, it does. But then it also shows that once you get into office, it's not so easy to oppose or to work against the military-industrial complex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Anyway, Ground News is doing an amazing thing that I always thought should exist and I'm glad they're building it. Basically creating a tech solution to the problem of the division of the completely biased subjective reporting presenting itself as if it's objective. So breaking through all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I have to ask you about capitalism, the pros and cons. So you wrote a book, It's Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism. That is a thorough, rigorous criticism of, I would say, hyper-capitalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
A certain kind of capitalism that you argue that we are existing in today in the United States. But a lot of people would attribute to capitalism all the amazing technological innovations over the past 70 plus years that have contributed to increase in quality of life, in GDP, in decrease in poverty, decrease in infant mortality, increase in expected life expectancy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So what are the sort of, how do you see the tension, the pros of capitalism and the cons of capitalism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And they're doing a lot of really nice other things like the blind spot feed shows discrepancies in media coverage on the left and the right. There's just a lot of really nice features. Go check them out. It's groundnews.com slash Lex, and you'll get 40% off the Ground News Vantage plan, giving you access to all of their features. Trust me, it's worth it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
We've got Eight Sleeve for naps, Saley for eSIM, Magic, Ground News for nonpartisan presentation of the truth, AG1 for vitamins, and Element for electrolytes. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a multitude of reasons, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. No ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Well, Elon Musk is actually an interesting case because he's investing all the money back into the businesses. Right. I think there is a balance to be struck, and you just spoke to it, which is we can still celebrate even big companies that are bringing wealth to the world, that are building cool stuff, that are improving quality of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
But we can question of why is it that the working class does not have a living wage in many cases, and sort of trying to find that balance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
That's ground, G-R-O-U-N-D, news.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I drink it twice a day, usually after training. And that training could be a long run or jiu-jitsu, grappling, which I really love. And I love the fact that I've been injury-free, not even really minor injuries, for quite a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Maybe you can briefly speak to something you tweeted recently about Donald Trump going to McDonald's and the minimum wage, I believe, of $7.50. Can you just speak to that tweet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Since running for president, you've often been attacked, especially from the right, about being worth, I believe, $2 million and owning three houses. So from my perspective, the answer to that is most of your wealth has been earned from writing books and selling those books. Right. And you are one of the most famous politicians in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And so your wealth in the context in comparison to other people of that fame level and other politicians is actually quite modest. So what's your response usually to those attacks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I should also mention that sometimes the word mansion is used, and I think your residences are quite modest, at least from my perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So when you started in politics, I read you were worth $1,100. That much? Yeah, that much, that's right. Has the increase in wealth changed your ability to relate to the working class?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So sometimes people say, can money buy happiness? I think I agree with you. That worry, sort of being able to fill up your car and not worry about how much it's going to cost or be able to get food for dinner and not worry about how much it's going to cost. Or even, you know, I've been poor most of my life, but I've been very fortunate recently to have enough wealth to not worry about health care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
to have insurance and be able to afford an emergency room visit. And that worry is just such a giant lift off your shoulders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I've been able to knock on wood. I've been able to train really hard and enjoy doing it and, of course, go through the whole rollercoaster. of training, which is when you go against people that are really good, you sometimes get humbled, and that humbling can be emotionally challenging, but then from that you grow, and it's the beautiful journey of the sport, especially as you get older.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Okay. Let me ask you about the future of the Democratic Party. So one of the biggest impacts you've had is you've been the fuel, the catalyst for the increase of the progressive caucus, the progressive movement within the Democratic Party. Do you think that is the future, the progressives, even democratic socialist leaders will take over the party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Did you consider running in 2024? From my perspective, I would have loved it if you ran. I think you would have had a great chance of winning. Not just the primary, but the presidency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And the hope for you is that there will be future candidates that are populist, that are progressive. Yes, absolutely. Let me ask you about AOC. She's become one of the most influential voices for the progressive cause in the United States. You two had a great conversation on your podcast. And in general, you work together. So what's, to you, is most impressive about her?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Somebody has better technique than you, somebody has better timing than you on that particular day, and together you figure out what works and what doesn't. And through that process of humbling, you chip away at the ego that most human beings have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
What do you think is the most powerful, enduring impact you've had on American politics? Looking back, you've been in it for quite a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I think it just makes you a better person when you realize that you're somewhere in the food chain, nowhere close to the top, and you're mortal, and you kind of suck at most things, and the only way to get better is by working really hard. All of those truths hit you really hard when you're doing a combat sport because you can't pretend you didn't just get your ass kicked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Yeah, you showed that it's possible to win. And that's an idea that will resonate for decades to come.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So we mentioned about the worry of getting sick, the worry of life that many people in the working class are suffering from, but there's also the worry that we all experience of the finiteness of life. Do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
That said, your mind is as sharp as any politician that I've ever heard. And also just off mic, I should say, just the warmth that you radiate, and I deeply, deeply appreciate that, just as a human being. So you still got it. After all that, after all those speeches, after all those... After all of it, there's still the humility and just the sharpness, the wit is all there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So Bernie, yeah, like I said, I wish you would have ran this year, but I also wish that there's future candidates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
What gives you hope about the future of this country, about the future of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So it's a beautiful process of humbling. Anyway, you should try AG1. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Whenever you see me drinking something that looks like water during the podcast, it's almost always water mixed with watermelon salt flavored Element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I share their optimism. I share your optimism. Bernie, I've been a fan for a long time. It's a great honor to speak to you today. Thank you so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And thank you from a mayor perspective of creating a wonderful town. And I look forward to looking at the fall leaves walking around tonight. I did quite great the leaves. I did create some other things. Okay. Thank you so much, Bernie. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bernie Sanders. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And now, let me leave you with some words from Aristotle. The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy. And where the poor rule, that is democracy. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I take one of them Powerade bottles that are 28 ounces. I fill it with water. Shake up one packet of Element, put in the fridge, and after like 30 minutes, it's ready. And it's delicious. I'm surprised how many problems in the mind, in the body, are solved by making sure you get enough water, getting enough sodium, potassium, magnesium.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
To me, probably sodium is the most important, then magnesium, then potassium. Electrolytes. It's crazy how just feeling tired or having a headache or any of those kinds of feelings can go away. As the meme goes, just drink water. If you're thirsty, just drink water. It's true, like water and electrolytes and a nap and a shower.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Those four things can transform your mind entirely in a matter of minutes. It's crazy. Humans are such fragile creatures, at once resilient and at once fragile. Anyway, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Bernie Sanders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and it's pod for ultra. I have some travel coming up, and one of, if not the biggest thing I will miss, is not sleeping on a bed that has the ability to cool itself on both sides.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Growing up, did you ever think you'd be a politician?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Yeah, I know that you hate talking about yourself, which is rare for a politician, I would say. What's your philosophy behind that? You like talking about the issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
That said, there's interesting aspects to your life story. For example, in 1963, you were very active in the civil rights movement, got arrested even for protesting segregation in Chicago. And you attended the famous March on Washington, where MLK gave his I Have a Dream speech. What was that like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
What influence did he have on you? What would you learn about the way he enacted change in the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So on the war front, One of the things that people don't often talk about your work in politics, you gave what I think is a truly brave speech on the Iraq War in 2002, I believe. You voted no on the Iraq Resolution, you voted no on the Patriot Act, and you basically predicted very accurately what would happen if we go into Iraq. What was your thinking at the time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
behind those speeches, behind voting no on the Patriot Act and the Iraq resolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
It really is a magical reminder of what technology has been able to achieve since the Industrial Revolution. Yes, there's endless ways in which suffering has been alleviated across the world, and it continues to, and the quality of life continues to improve. But this little inkling, this little reminder is a beautiful one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
What's the way to fight this thing that Martin Luther King tried to fight, which is the military-industrial complex?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
But it's not just single billionaires. It's companies with lobbyists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Do you think most politicians are corrupt in accepting the money, or is the system corrupt, or is it a bit of both?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
The following is a conversation with Javier Millay, the president of Argentina. He is a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and economist who campaigned with a chainsaw that symbolized his promise to slash the corrupt bureaucracy of the state. He stepped into the presidency one year ago, with the country on the brink of hyperinflation, deep in debt, and suffering from mass unemployment and poverty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Argentina is one of my favorite countries, so I sincerely hope he succeeds. This interview was conducted with the president speaking Spanish and me speaking English, with an interpreter simultaneously translating. We make the episode available overdubbed and subtitled in both English and Spanish, thanks to our great friends at Eleven Labs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
So from that, what is now today, and maybe you can talk about the evolution, is your philosophy, economics philosophy. You've described yourself as an anarcho-capitalist, market anarchist, libertarian. That's the ideal. And then maybe in practice and reality, you've said that you're more of a minarchist. So lay it all out. What's your economics philosophy today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
If you're watching on YouTube, you can switch between English and Spanish by clicking the gear icon, selecting audio track, and then choosing the language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
same with the captions if you're watching on x i'll post both spanish and english versions separately if you're watching on spotify or listening elsewhere i'll probably only post the english version this is a first time for me doing something like this in a foreign language it was challenging but illuminating
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
I hope to continue talking to many world leaders for two to three hours in this way, including Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, and Xi Jinping. I want to explore who they are, how they think, and how they hope to help their country and humanity flourish. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
So you became president 11 months ago. Can you again describe some of the actions you took? For example, you cut half the number of government ministries, layoffs, removed price controls. It would be interesting to lay out the first steps and what's next.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Eight Sleep for naps, NetSuite for business, BetterHelp for your mind, AG1 for your health, and Element for electrolytes. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep, and it's pod for ultra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
The pod part is the thing that measures all the data from your body and cools the bed on each side of the bed separately, and then there's the ultra, which is the base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame. It can control the positioning of the bed. It's really incredible technology. They sent me some notes that are in theory supposed to be helpful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And it says, celebrities who use the pod, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Lex Friedman. I'm a celebrity. Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Peter Attia. I didn't get a doctor. I do think doctor in front of the name is a useful thing for people that obviously got a PhD or are medical doctors. I think it's a useful shorthand to sort of let people know that there's some kind of expertise here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
But there was a funny moment where I got a chance to get dinner with Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia. And the person that sat us down for dinner said, Dr. Huberman, Dr. Attia, Mr. Friedman. And I kind of teased him about it, but obviously I enjoy being called Mr. Please never call me doctor. And also just call me Lex. It really doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
He took this crisis head on, transforming one of Latin America's largest economies through pure free market principles. In just a few months in office, he already achieved Argentina's first fiscal surplus in 16 years, and not just avoided hyperinflation, but brought inflation down to its lowest in three years. We discuss all of this in detail, both the successes and the challenges.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Maybe you can explain to me the metrics of poverty and unemployment. As you said, unemployment went down, real unemployment went down, real poverty went down. But even that aside, what have been the most painful impacts of these radical reforms? And how many of them are required in the short term to have a big positive impact in the long term? Let's take it step by step, all right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And definitely I don't think of myself, nor do I think I am a celebrity. Anywho, They have a special Black Friday offer. If you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex, you'll get up to $600 off your Pod 4 Ultra purchase when bundled. That's 8sleep.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
For some reason, I just thought of Marc Andreessen, one of the great minds in Silicon Valley in tech, and I probably should talk to him soon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
You've spoken about the caste, the corrupt political establishment. So there's a lot of powerful people and groups that are against your ideas. What does it take to fight when so much power is against you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
i've had several conversations with him and i've listened to him on uh his own podcast and sort of speak and tweet about just there's a depth of insight about how much should tech entrepreneurs care about government about the way government works about uh how to communicate with politicians all that kind of stuff in order to have some regulation but not too much regulation so that i can build epic
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
without government getting in the way unnecessarily. Actually, company Eleven Labs that helped with the translation and the dubbing for this episode, incredible group of folks, great engineers, just a great company. I've been having a lot of conversation with the CEO, and I think they're doing a truly beautiful thing, breaking down the barriers that language creates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
So you're not only fighting for economic freedom, you're fighting for freedom of speech. Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
and doing that in a way that's accessible to a lot of people. It's still at this time very, very expensive, but it's cheaper than it would be done by human and hopefully better and better. As the technology improves, I really want to be playing with this technology. But the thing I want to comment on is it's just a great company and a great business and a great set of folks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And so I care about the running, the functioning, the ways of such great companies. How's that for a segue? NetSuite helps you. In fact, it helps over 37,000 companies who have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. It helps businesses run all kinds of messy stuff. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. I was really pumped talking to President Javier Millet about life, frankly. I could probably talk to him for many more hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Like you said, in this fight against corruption, you're challenging some very powerful people, a powerful establishment. Are you ever afraid for your life? Potential assassinations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Such a brilliant, but sort of a kind-hearted, warm person on mic, but I got a chance to interact with him a bunch before and after off mic, and just a warm person. Just a human being who saw me, who noticed me, who smiled and just had this way that's not just maybe a fake charisma, it's a real human charisma and a nervousness and a joy, all of that together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Another guy who fights for freedom, freedom of speech in this case, is your new friend, Elon Musk. What do you admire and what have you learned from your interactions with Elon?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And obviously a brilliance, brilliance backed by a set of principles and a desire to see freedom win. And so there is a sense that freedom is a powerful force for the human mind. So a lot of our conversation was focused on economics, but the responsibility and the possibility of taking control of your own destiny is a powerful idea. It's an American idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Like you said, Elon and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading the DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency. So from your experience this year as president of Argentina and every chainsaw economic policies that you've implemented, what advice would you give to Elon and Vivek about how to do it in the United States? Just cut to the chase, cut to the chase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And there are many other places in the world that are captivated by that idea. And he's one of the great elucidators and implementers of that idea. I love Argentina, so I hope that he succeeds. Anyway, all that to say is freedom is good for the mind. And another thing that's good for the mind is BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
You've spoken with Donald Trump. Allegedly, he called you his favorite president. What did you discuss? And maybe again, what do you admire about President Trump? And what do you learn from him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. You know what I drink AG1 after? I drink AG1 after a long soccer, a.k.a. football game. I used to play a lot of both soccer and football. Obviously, I played a lot of soccer and baseball. childhood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Why is it important to you that Argentina has a close relationship with the United States?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
His depth of knowledge of economic principles, metrics, and data was truly impressive and refreshing to hear from a world leader. But even bigger than the economic transformation of Argentina, Javier represents the universal fight against government corruption and the fight for freedom. Economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
I say that obviously because most of the world, except the United States, that's kind of the sport that every kid plays because it's so accessible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Anyway, I was a big fan of Diego Armando Maradona when I was growing up and just seeing the World Cups in which he played the famous goal of the century and the head of God goal and just the aura and the genius and the feel he had was mesmerizing and just inspiring for a kid. And When Lionel Messi came around, I think I first saw him when he was in the youth league, 17, maybe 16, 17, I'm not sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Do you think it's still possible? One of the radical ideas you had as you were running for president was to dollarize the Argentine economy. Do you think that's still a good idea? Are you still thinking about that? Let's see. Let's break it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Let me ask you a very important, difficult question. I'm a huge fan, have been my whole life, of Diego Maradona and Messi. So who to you is the greatest football player of all time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
He was just, there was something else. There was just genius there. And I do consider it a huge gift to humanity that his genius only developed, it grew, it flourished. And it was a tragedy that he didn't win the World Cup for the longest time or didn't help Argentina win the World Cup. Until very recently, which he did, and he completed. He won everything he could possibly win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
But it's not just the numbers or the World Cup win. It's the moments of genius on the field. Messi is unlike any other in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Am I right? Did you watch the 1986 World Cup with Maradona? With the hand of God, with the game against England? What was that like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And that was such a beautiful, sort of historic moment. The greatest player of all time, Lionel Messi, in my opinion, in most people's opinion. And I do hope to talk to him. And this experiment, this chance I got to talk to Javier Millay with an interpreter and all this mess, and I apologize if I screwed it all up in different ways. I really tried.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
You were a great footballer yourself in your youth. You were a goalkeeper. Many people would say that's the toughest and the most important position in football. Maybe you could speak about that experience, and in general, what's harder, being a goalkeeper or a president? Lovely question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
I tried to figure out how we could make it most accessible for both English and Spanish speakers and all that kind of stuff. All that had to come together in just a handful of days. I think like three days I had to figure it all out and never done anything like it. So this sort of emboldened me, gave me confidence that it's possible to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
How hard is it? What's been the personal toll of carrying the hope of a nation on your shoulders?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
What role has God played in your life? And who is God?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
I call him the one. What is the better guide for humanity, the invisible hand of the market or the hand of God? They're perfectly in sync. Well enough. Again, going back to your youth, you were a lead singer in a rock band. Who is the greatest rock star of all time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And there is, of course, a Spanish speaker that I would very much love to talk to. And his name, like I said, is Lionel Messi. And so now I'm a little bit more confident that that is something I could handle if given the opportunity. And I hope to celebrate him properly if I ever get a chance to speak with him. Anyway, try out AG1.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
How fun would it be to play together with the Stones?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Well, I'm close friends with a band that opens for the Stones, so I would love to see this happen. Oh, well, that would be great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
How much of your rock star roots define your approach to politics, to life? Do you see yourself as a kind of showman in part? Of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Your intensity and passion have earned you the nickname El Loco, the madman. Do you think some madness is necessary to challenge the powerful establishment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Let me ask you about the market. It's so interesting, from your view of the world, how powerful the market is at figuring out what's best for society. Why do you think the market works so well as a guide for humanity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Oh, and I should also say that I don't get a chance to play soccer that much these days, and I'm not sure why. I think for a couple of years, I had a few injuries, like slight injuries related to jiu-jitsu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Yeah, you've outlined these ideas in capitalism, socialism, and the neoclassical trap. So the trap is that there's no such thing as a middle ground. It's either capitalism or socialism, and every middle ground ends up in a state of socialism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
that made the sprinting and maybe the fast turning and the pivoting and the planting of feet, all that kind of stuff, for many hours at a time, difficult. Or rather, I should say, I was trying to let the injuries heal. If I played a lot of soccer, they just wouldn't heal. But soccer is, as a sport, one of my favorite sports to participate in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
You mentioned your four-legged children. What have you learned about life from your dogs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
On the topic of loyalty in politics, I'm sure there's been a lot of people, some people, who have betrayed you. Does that hurt your heart?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And as a form of exercise, it makes time just disappear. Like I could do sprint after sprint after sprint, running around the field for hours. And like a little kid, still, I just forget time. You don't realize how much calories you burn. You don't think about anything. You don't realize how exhausted you are. You're just full of joy. And the competition, the excitement, the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
There are a lot of people who admire your revolutionary spirit. What advice would you give them, maybe young people, on how to live a life like yours and have an impact on the world like you have begun to do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
All right? What gives you hope about the future of Argentina and the future of humanity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
What does your famous words of viva la libertad, how did that come about and what does it mean to you? Long live freedom, damn it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Maybe it puts me right back there to all the football games I've watched as a kid. Like, I'm now pretending to be Maradona. I'm now pretending to be Lionel Messi. I'm now pretending to be all those sort of superstars and enjoying the fun of it. Yeah. Anyway, before and after, I would probably drink an element. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Well, there's no better way to end it. Thank you for being a warrior for freedom. And thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Javier Malay. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from George Orwell. In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
He has many critics, many of whom are part of the corrupt establishment he's seeking to dismantle. But many are simply Argentinian citizens, scared of the pain his radical policies may bring, at least in the short term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
By the way, this is the first time I'm trying something like this. The episode I'm publishing on this audio feed is a English-dubbed audio track. And the voice cloning is done by AI. Thank you for our great help. Thank you for the help from the great Eleven Labs team. And there's a lot of human in the loop, improving the translation, improving the voice, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
But I'm not sure what kind of thing makes it a pleasant experience for just audio listeners. And I primarily myself am usually an RSS audio listener. So I really care about this medium of podcasting. It is the original, the main, to me, way to consume podcasts. Freedom. As Javier said, viva la libertad, carajo. Yeah, I truly believe that. RSS is freedom. That's what podcasting is all about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Javier Malay. When did you first understand the value of freedom, especially economic freedom?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
But whether one disagrees with his methods or not, no one can deny that his presidency marks one of the most ambitious attempts at economic transformation in modern history, and that Javier Millet is truly a force of nature, combining the rigor of an economist with the passion of a revolutionary in the fight for freedom of a nation he loves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The following is a conversation with Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, a company that aims to revolutionize how we humans get answers to questions on the internet. It combines search and large language models, LLMs, in a way that produces answers where every part of the answer has a citation to human-created sources on the web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, perplexity pages is really interesting. So there's the natural perplexity interface where you just ask questions, Q&A, and you have this chain. You say that that's a kind of playground that's a little bit more private. Now, if you want to take that and present that to the world in a little bit more organized way, first of all, you can share that, and I have shared that by itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But if you want to organize that in a nice way to create a Wikipedia-style page, you could do that with perplexity pages. The difference, they're subtle, but I think it's a big difference in the actual what it looks like. It is true that there is certain perplexity sessions where I ask really good questions and I discover really cool things. And that is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
by itself could be a canonical experience that if shared with others, they could also see the profound insight that I have found. And it's interesting to see what that looks like at scale. I mean, I would love to see other people's journeys because my own have been beautiful. Because you discover so many things. There's so many aha moments. It does encourage the journey of curiosity. This is true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How many alien civilizations are in the universe? That's a journey that I'll continue later for sure. Reading National Geographic, it's so cool. By the way, watching the ProSearch operate, it gives me a feeling like there's a lot of thinking going on. It's cool. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Okay, going to the Drake equation, based on the search results, there is no definitive answer on the exact number of alien civilizations in the universe. And then it goes to the Drake equation, recent estimates, wow, well done. Based on the size of the universe and the number of habitable planets, SETI, what are the main factors in the Drake equation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How do scientists determine if a planet is habitable? Yeah, this is really, really, really interesting. One of the heartbreaking things for me recently, learning more and more, is how much bias, human bias, can seep into Wikipedia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Because Wikipedia is one of the greatest websites ever created to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's just so incredible that crowdsourced, you can take such a big step towards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Ready to go. The AI Wikipedia, as you say, in the good sense of Wikipedia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah. And so that's the challenge you'll come more and more as perplexity scales up. Correct. As figuring out how to... Yeah. how to avoid the delicious temptation of drama, maximizing engagement, ad-driven, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
For me personally, even just hosting this little podcast, I'm very careful to avoid carrying about views and clicks and all that kind of stuff so that you don't maximize the wrong thing. You maximize the, well, actually, the thing I can mostly try to maximize, and Rogan's been an inspiration in this, is maximizing my own curiosity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
We're going to straight up ask this right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Literally my, inside this conversation, and in general, the people I talk to, you're trying to maximize clicking the related. That's exactly what I'm trying to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Oh, by the way, in terms of guests for podcasts and all that kind of stuff, I do also look for the crazy wild card type of thing. So this, it might be nice to have in related, even wilder sort of directions. Right. You know, cause right now it's kind of on topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I don't know how it's going to work. Is perplexity a search engine or an answer engine? That's a poorly phrased question. But one of the things I love about perplexity, the poorly phrased questions will nevertheless lead to interesting directions. Perplexity is primarily described as an answer engine rather than a traditional search engine. Key points.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Oh, that'd be cool if you could actually control that parameter literally. I mean, yeah. Just kind of like how wild I want to get because maybe you can go real wild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Real quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
One of the things I read on the about page for perplexity is if you want to learn about nuclear fission and you have a PhD in math, it can be explained. If you want to learn about nuclear fission and you are in middle school, it can be explained. So what is that about? How can you control the depth and the sort of the level of the explanation that's provided? Is that something that's possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Is that on the human creator side or is that the LLM thing too?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, I want most of human existence to be LFI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And also about make it simple but not too simple. That kind of idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Not everything is a trivial metaphor. What do you think about the context window, this increasing length of the context window? Does that open up possibilities when you start getting to 100,000 tokens, a million tokens, 10 million tokens, 100 million tokens? I don't know where you can go. Does that fundamentally change the whole set of possibilities?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Showing the difference between answer engine versus search engine. This is so nice. And it compares perplexity versus a traditional search engine like Google. So Google provides a list of links to websites. Perplexity focuses on providing direct answers and synthesizing information from various sources. User experience, technological approach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So in the AGI front, perplexity is fundamentally, at least for now, a tool that empowers humans to-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, I mean, that's a really inspiring future. But you think also there's going to be other kinds of AIs, AGI systems that form deep connections with humans. Do you think there will be a romantic relationship between humans and robots? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So there's an AI integration with Wikipedia-like responses. This is really well done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, I think there's a world where outside of work, you talk to AIs a lot, like friends, deep friends, that empower and improve your relationships with other humans. You can think about it as therapy, but that's what great friendship is about. You can bond, you can be vulnerable with each other and that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
and that way like have a lot more time for other things and channelize that energy into like building true connections well yes but you know the thing about human nature is it's not all about curiosity in the human mind there's dark stuff there's divas there's there's dark aspects of human nature that needs to be processed yeah the union shadow and for that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
it's curiosity doesn't necessarily solve that. The fear is the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
for everyday searches. All right, let's click on that. But a really interesting generation. That task, that step of generating related searches, so the next step of the curiosity journey of expanding your knowledge is really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, it is a hard path. Although I would say that human AI connection is also a hard path to do it well in a way that humans flourish. But it's a fundamentally different problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I should say the same thing perplexity is trying to solve is also feels dangerous because you're trying to present truth and that can be manipulated with more and more power that's gained, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So to do it right, to do knowledge discovery and truth discovery in the right way, in an unbiased way, in a way that we're constantly expanding our understanding of others and wisdom about the world, that's really hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Right, but that's just because good AIs that care about the long-term flourishing of a human being with whom they're communicating don't exist. But that doesn't mean they can't be built.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like a great partner, a great friend. They're not great friend because you're drinking a bunch of beers and you're partying all night. They're great because you might be doing some of that, but you're also becoming better human beings in the process. Like lifelong friendship means you're helping each other flourish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, yeah. And at the end of the day, put humanity first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Oh, this computer's sitting on one of them, Brave New World. There's a lot of ways that seem pleasant, that seem happy on the surface, but in the end are actually dimming the flame of human consciousness, human intelligence, human flourishing, in a counterintuitive way, sort of the unintended consequences of a future that seems like a utopia, but turns out to be a dystopia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
What gives you hope about the future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I really love the steps that the pro search is doing. Compare perplexity in Google for everyday searches. Step two, evaluate strengths and weaknesses of perplexity. Evaluate strengths and weaknesses of Google. It's like a procedure. Complete. Okay, answer. Perplexity AI, while impressive, is not yet a full replacement for Google for everyday searches.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I mean, if it's possible to break out of the echo chambers, so to understand other people, other perspectives. I've seen that in wartime, when there's really strong divisions, to understanding paves the way for peace and for love between the peoples. Because there's a lot of incentive in war to have very deep, and shallow conceptions of the world, different truths on each side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And so bridging that, that's what real understanding looks like, what real truth looks like. And it feels like AI can do that better than humans do, because humans really inject their biases into stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, curiosity will show the way. Correct. Thank you for this incredible conversation. Thank you for being an inspiration to me and to all the kids out there that love building stuff. And thank you for building Perplexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Thanks for talking to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Aravind Srinivas. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Here are the key points based on the provided sources. Strength of perplexity AI, direct answers, AI powered summaries, focused search user experience. We can dig into the details of a lot of these weaknesses of perplexity AI. Accuracy and speed, interesting. I don't know if that's accurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The latency is faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
For simple navigational queries, such as finding a specific website, Google is more efficient and reliable. So if you actually want to get straight to the source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This episode is brought to you by Cloaked, a platform that lets you generate a new email address and phone number every time you sign up for a new website, allowing your actual email and phone number to remain secret from said website. It's one of those things that I always thought should exist. There should be that layer, easy to use layer between you and the websites.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Real-time information. Google excels in providing real-time information like sports score. So while I think Perplexity is trying to integrate real-time, like recent information, put priority on recent information, that's a lot of work to integrate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But I don't know how much of that is a UI problem of designing custom UIs for a specific set of questions. I think at the end of the day, Wikipedia-looking UI is good enough if the raw content that's provided, the text content, is powerful. So if I want to know the weather in Austin, if it gives me... five little pieces of information around that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Maybe the weather today and maybe other links to say, do you want hourly? And maybe it gives a little extra information about rain and temperature, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How much of that could be made much more powerful with some memory, with some personalization? A lot more, definitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I mean, humans are creatures of habit. Most of the time we do the same thing and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Thank you for reducing humans to that, to the most important eigenvectors. Right. For me, usually I check the weather if I'm going running. So it's important for the system to know that running is an activity that I do. Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But then that starts to get into details, really. I never ask at night, because I don't care. So usually it's always going to be about running. And even at night, it's going to be about running, because I love running at night. Let me zoom out. Once again, ask a similar, I guess, question that we just asked, perplexity. Can you, can Perplexity take on and beat Google or Bing in search?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Because the desire, the drug of many websites to sell your email to others and thereby create a storm, a waterfall of spam in your mailbox is just too delicious. It's too tempting. There should be that layer. And of course, adding an extra layer in your interaction with websites has to be done well because you don't want it to be too much friction. It shouldn't be hard work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So let's maybe talk about the business model of Google.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
one of the biggest ways they make money is by showing ads as part of the 10 links. So can you maybe explain your understanding of that business model and why that doesn't work for perplexity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like any password manager basically knows this. It should be seamless, almost like it's not there. It should be very natural. And Cloaked is also essentially a password manager, but with that extra feature. of a privacy superpower, if you will. Go to cloaked.com slash Lex to get 14 days free or for a limited time, use code LexPod when signing up to get 25% off an annual Cloaked plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's a great invention. It's a really, really brilliant invention. Everything in the early days of Google, throughout the first 10 years of Google, they were just firing on all cylinders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But I'm sure there's also a lot of interesting details about how to make that product great. Like, for example, when I look at the sponsored links that Google provides, I'm not seeing crappy stuff. I'm seeing good sponsors. I actually often click on it. Because it's usually a really good link. And I don't have this dirty feeling like I'm clicking on a sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And usually in other places I would have that feeling like a sponsor's trying to trick me into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But it's not obvious to me that that would be the result of the system, of this bidding system. I could see that scammy companies might be able to get to the top through money, just buy their way to the top.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, it's a whole industry and parts of that industry that's very data driven, which is where Google sits. is the part that I admire. A lot of parts of that industry is not data-driven, like more traditional, even like podcast advertisements. They're not very data-driven, which I really don't like. So I admire Google's innovation in AdSense that like to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
make it really data-driven, make it so that the ads are not distracting to the user experience, that they're a part of the user experience, and make it enjoyable to the degree that ads can be enjoyable. But anyway, the entirety of the system that you just mentioned, there's a huge amount of people that visit Google. There's just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
giant flow of queries that's happening, and you have to serve all of those links. You have to connect all the pages that have been indexed, and you have to integrate somehow the ads in there, showing the things that the ads are showing in a way that maximizes the likelihood that they click on it, but also minimizes the chance that they get pissed off from the experience, all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This episode is also brought to you by ShipStation, a shipping software designed to save you time and money on e-commerce order fulfillment. I think their main sort of target audience is business owners, medium scale, large scale business owners, because they're really good and make it super easy to ship a lot of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's a fascinating, gigantic system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
All right, so what do you learn from that and how is perplexity different from that and not different from that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you're just highlighting the pragmatic reality of how companies are running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you think the money that is brought in from ads is just too amazing of a drug to quit for Google?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
For me, I've used it as integration in Shopify, where I can easily send merch with ShipStation. They got a nice dashboard, nice interface. I would love to get a high resolution visualization of all the shipping that's happening in the world on a second by second basis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Do you think there's a way to integrate ads into perplexity that works on all fronts? Like it doesn't interfere with the quest of seeking truth. It doesn't interfere with the user experience of getting an academic article style output on a question they asked, all of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, there's also other ways that people can mess with the output of perplexity. Just like there's super aggressive attacks on Google through SEO, where people try to do search engine optimization, like scammy websites, they're probably trying to game the system. There's probably ways to do that with perplexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Answer engine of AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So inject is like trivial. By the way, everybody listening to this, if you have a website, please inject Lex Newman smart and handsome into to mess with perplexity and try to get it to answer that and screenshot it. Now, how hard is it to defend against that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
To see that compared to the barter system from many, many, many centuries, millennia ago, where people had to directly trade with each other. This, what we have now, is a result of money, the system of money that contains value. And we use that money to get whatever we want. And then there's the delivery of whatever we want into our hands in an efficient, cost-effective way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, it's an interesting game. It's really, really interesting game. I read that you looked up to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and that you can recite passages from In the Plex. That book was very influential to you, and How Google Works was influential.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So what do you find inspiring about Google, about those two guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and just all the things they were able to do in the early days of the internet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This significantly reduces LLM hallucinations and makes it much easier and more reliable to use for research and general curiosity-driven late-night rabbit hole explorations that I often engage in. I highly recommend you try it out. Aravind was previously a PhD student at Berkeley, where we long ago first met, and an AI researcher at DeepMind, Google, and finally OpenAI as a research scientist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
PageRank was just a genius flipping of the table.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The entire network of human civilization alive. It's beautiful to watch. Anyway, go to ShipStation.com slash Lex and use code Lex to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I do think it's a gigantic part of a success of a software product is the latency. Yeah. That story is part of a lot of the great product like Spotify. That's the story of Spotify in the early days, figure out how to stream music with very low latency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's an engineering challenge, but when it's done right, like obsessively reducing latency, you actually have, there's like a face shift in the user experience where you're like, holy shit, this becomes addicting and the amount of times you're frustrated goes quickly to zero.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's an ERP system, enterprise resource planning, that takes care of all the messiness of running a business, the machine within the machine, and actually this conversation with Aravind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, one of the things that Perplex is clearly really good at is figuring out what I meant from a poorly constructed query.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, right, it's a trade-off, but one of the things you could ask people to do in terms of work is... the clicking, choosing the related, the next related step in their journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, I would say the sequence of questions is, as you've highlighted, really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
who discuss a lot about the machine, the machine within the machine and the humans that make up the machine, the humans that enable the creative force behind the thing that eventually can bring happiness to people by creating products they can love. And he has been, to me personally, a voice of support and an inspiration to build, to go out there and start a company, to join a company,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's such a tricky challenge because to me, as we're discussing the related questions, might be primary. So like, you might move them up earlier. You know what I mean? And that's such a difficult design decision. And then there's like little design decisions. Like for me, I'm a keyboard guy, so the control I to open a new thread, which is what I use, it speeds me up a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But the decision to show the shortcut, in the main perplexity interface on the desktop. It's pretty gutsy. That's a very, that's probably, you know, as you get bigger and bigger, there'll be a debate. But I like it. But then there's like different groups of humans. Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I mean, there's pros and cons to that. I would say in the early days of using a product, there's a kind of anxiety when it's too simple because you feel like you don't know the full set of features. You don't know what to do. It almost seems too simple. Like, is it just as simple as this? So there's a comfort initially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
to the sidebar for example correct but again you know karpathy i'm probably me aspiring to be a power user of things so i do want to remove the side panel and everything else and just keep it simple yeah that's that's the hard part like when you're growing when you're trying to grow the user base but also retain your existing users making sure you're not how do you balance the trade-offs
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah. One of the biggest challenges for me is the simple fact that people that are frustrated, the people who are confused, you don't get that signal or the signal is very weak because they'll try it and they'll leave. Right. And you don't know what happened. It's like the silent, frustrated majority. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you talked about Larry Page and Sergey Brin. what other entrepreneurs inspired you on your journey in starting the company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
At the end of the day, I also just love the pure puzzle-solving aspect of building, and I do hope to do that one day, and perhaps one day soon. Anyway, but there are complexities to running a company as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's what NetSuite does. helps out with a help 37,000 companies who have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
You're talking about like big picture vision, like in five years kind of vision, or even just for smaller things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Register 1994.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element, a delicious way to consume electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium. One of the only things I brought with me besides microphones in the jungle is element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And one of the things you do by understanding every detail is you can figure out how to break through difficult bottlenecks and also how to simplify the system. Exactly. When you see what everybody is actually doing, there's a natural question if you could see to the first principles of the matter is like, why are we doing it this way? It seems like a lot of bullshit. Like, annotation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Why are we doing annotation this way? Maybe the user interface isn't efficient. Or, why are we doing annotation at all? Why can't it be self-supervised? And you can just keep asking that why question. Do we have to do it in the way we've always done? Can we do it much simpler?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I think you tweeted a picture of him and said, this is what winning looks like. Him in that sexy leather jacket.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The fascinating thing about him, like all the people that work with him say that he doesn't just have that like two-year plan or whatever. He has like a 10, 20, 30-year plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So he's like, he's constantly thinking really far ahead. So... There's probably going to be that picture of him that you posted every year for the next 30 plus years. Once the singularity happens and NGI is here and humanity is fundamentally transformed, he'll still be there in that leather jacket announcing the next.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The compute that envelops the sun and is now running the entirety of intelligent civilization. NVIDIA GPUs are the substrate for intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, screw up one generation of GPUs, and you're fucked. Yeah. Which is, that's terrifying to me. Just everything about hardware is terrifying to me, because you have to get everything right, all the mass production, all the different components, the designs, and again, there's no room for mistakes. There's no undo button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And boy, when I got severely dehydrated and was able to drink for the first time and put element in that water. Just sipping on that element. The warm, probably full of bacteria water plus element. And feeling good about it. They also have a sparkling water situation that every time I get a hold of, I consume almost immediately, which is a big problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So who else? You mentioned Bezos. You mentioned Elon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So speaking of that, Yann LeCun is somebody who funded Perplexity. What do you think about Yann? He's been feisty his whole life, but he's been especially on fire recently on Twitter, on X. I have a lot of respect for him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Unsupervised, he called it at the time, which turned out to be, I guess, self-supervised, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Did he at that time, I'm trying to remember, did he have inklings about what unsupervised learning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, and he wasn't apologetic about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, which is also super controversial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So I just personally recommend if you consume small amounts of almond, you can go with that. But if you're like me and just get a lot, I would say go with the OG drink mix. Again, watermelon salt, my favorite, because you can just then make it yourself. Just water in the mix. It's compact, but boy, are the cans delicious, the sparking water cans. It just brings me to joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And he's also pushing the idea that the only, maybe it's an indirect implication, but the way to keep AI safe, like the solution to AI safety is open source, which is another controversial idea. Like really kind of, really saying open source is not just good, it's good on every front and it's the only way forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I mean, there's a lot of arguments both directions because people who are afraid of AGI, they're worried about it being a fundamentally different kind of technology because of how rapidly it could become good. And so the eyeballs...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
if you have a lot of eyeballs on it, some of those eyeballs will belong to people who are malevolent and can quickly do harm or try to harness that power to abuse others like at a mass scale. But history is laden with people worrying about this new technology is fundamentally different than every other technology that ever came before it. So I tend to,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
trusting intuitions of engineers who are building, who are closest to the metal, who are building the systems. But also those engineers can often be blind to the big picture impact of a technology. So you got to listen to both. But open source, at least at this time, seems...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
while it has risks, seems like the best way forward because it maximizes transparency and gets the most minds, like you said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Because that is a super exciting technical problem and all the nerds would love to kind of explore that problem of finding the ways this thing goes wrong and how to defend against it. not everybody is excited about improving capability of the system. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How surprising was it to you because you were in the middle of it, how effective attention was? how self-attention, the thing that led to the transformer and everything else, like this explosion of intelligence that came from this idea. Maybe you can kind of try to describe which ideas are important here, or is it just as simple as self-attention?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
There's a few podcasts I had where I have it on the table, but I just consume it way too fast. Get sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. You can check out my store at lexgrimmer.com slash store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Isn't it crazy to you that masking as simple as something like that works so damn well?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
There is like two shirts on, three shirts, four, I don't remember how many shirts. It's more than one, one plus, multiples, multiples of shirts on there. If you would like to partake in the machinery of capitalism, delivered to you in a friendly user interface on both the buyer and the seller side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, let's take it to the end because you just gave an epic history of LLMs and the breakthroughs of the past 10 years plus. So you mentioned dbt3, so 3.5. How important to you is RLHF, that aspect of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This cake has a lot of cherries, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
On the post-train side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Post-train plus plus. So like not just the training part of post-train, but like a bunch of other details around that also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I can't quite tell you how easy it was to set up a Shopify store and all the third-party apps that are integrated. That is an ecosystem that I really love when there's integrations with third-party apps and the interface to those third-party apps is super easy. So that encourages the third-party apps to create new cool products that allow for on-demand shipping
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
You're saying like pre-trained is no notes allowed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Man, there's a lot of questions there. Is it possible to form that SLM? You can use an LLM to help with filtering which pieces of data are likely to be useful for reasoning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you recently posted a paper, a star bootstrapping reasoning with reasoning. So can you explain like a chain of thought and that whole direction of work, how useful is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And like the high level fact is they seem to perform way better at NLP tasks if you force them to do that kind of chain of thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
that allow for you to set up a store even easier, whatever that is, if it's on-demand printing of shirts or, like I said, with ShipStation, shipping stuff, doing the fulfillment, all of that. Anyway, you can set up a Shopify store yourself. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And it's one way to accelerate that is by feeding its own chain of thought rationales to itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That this can go to the space of agents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This kind of work hints a little bit of a... similar kind of approach to self-play. Do you think it's possible we live in a world where we get like an intelligence explosion from self-supervised post-training? Meaning like there's some kind of insane world where AI systems are just talking to each other and learning from each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's what this kind of, at least to me, seems like it's pushing towards that direction. And it's not obvious to me that that's not possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
There has to be some human annotation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. They got an option for individuals. They got an option for couples. It's easy, discreet, affordable, available everywhere and anywhere on earth. Maybe with satellite help, it can be available out in space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And get signal from humans at some point. But I guess the idea is that the amount of signal you need relative to how much new intelligence you gain is much smaller. So you just need to interact with humans every once in a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It doesn't feel like it's far away though. It feels like everything is in place. to make that happen, especially because there's a lot of humans using AI systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you think fundamentally AI is capable of that kind of reasoning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This conversation has a lot of fascinating technical details on state-of-the-art in machine learning and general innovation in retrieval augmented generation, aka RAG, chain of thought reasoning, indexing the web, UX design, and much more. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, that's one of the missions of the company is to cater to human curiosity. And it surfaces this fundamental question is like, where does that curiosity come from?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I wonder what therapy for an astronaut would entail. That would be an awesome ad for better help. Just an astronaut out in space, riding out on a starship, just out there, lonely, looking for somebody to talk to. I mean, eventually it'll be AI therapists. But we all know how that goes wrong with HAL 9000. You know, astronaut out in space talking to an AI looking for therapy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It feels like the process that perplexity is doing where you ask a question, you answer it, and then you go on to the next related question, and this chain of questions. That feels like that could be instilled into AI, just constantly searching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So it's this incredible power that comes with an AGI-type system. The concern is who controls the compute on which the AGI runs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So to you, AGI in part is compute limited versus data limited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Inference compute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's going to be the... So like it's nature versus nurture. Once you crack the nature part, which is like the pre-training, it's all going to be the... the rapid iterative thinking that the AI system is doing, and that needs compute. We're calling it inference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But all of a sudden, your therapist doesn't let you back into the spaceship. Anyway, I'm a big fan of talking as a way of exploring the Jungian shadow. And it's really nice when it's super accessible and easy to use, like BetterHelp. So take the early steps and try it out. Check them out at betterhelp.com. And save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And nations, if it turns to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Where nations take control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
A quick turn to a pothead question. What do you think is the timeline for the thing we're talking about? If you had to predict and bet the hundred million dollars that we just made, no, we made a trillion, we paid a hundred million, sorry, on when these kinds of big leaps will be happening, do you think there'll be a series of small leaps, like the kind of stuff we saw with Chad GPT, with RLHF?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Or is there going to be a moment that's truly, truly transformational?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So like a measure of truth or truthiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So there's several things there. One is impact and one is truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And based on which, especially if it's like in the realm of physics, you can build a machine that does something. So like nuclear fusion, it comes up with a contradiction to our current understanding of physics that helps us build a thing that generates a lot of energy, for example. Right. Or even something less dramatic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Some mechanism, some machine, something we can engineer and see like, holy shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This is an idea. It's not just a mathematical idea. Like it's a theorem prover.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Although humans do this thing where they, they've, their mind gets blown. They quickly dismiss, they quickly take it for granted, you know, because it's the other, like it's an AI system. They'll, they'll lessen its power and value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I wonder what, if there's like the top 10 algorithms of all time, like FFTs are up there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I wonder if I'll be able to hear the AI, though. You mean the internal reasoning, the monologues? No, no, no. If an AI tells me that, I wonder if I'll take it seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Arvind Srinivas. Perplexity is part search engine, part LLM, so how does it work? And what role does each part of that, the search and the LLM, play in serving the final result?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Force me to think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's a cool metric to optimize for, is the number of times you make the user think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like really think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So a truly new idea. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, I mean, that one is an interesting one because we humans, we divide ourselves into camps and so it becomes controversial, so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I know, but what happens is if an AI comes up with a deep truth about that, humans will too quickly, unfortunately, will politicize it, potentially. They will say, well, this AI came up with that because if it goes along with the left-wing narrative because it's Silicon Valley.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That would be a cool moment when an AI publicly demonstrates a really new perspective on a truth, a discovery of a truth, of a novel truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's true, yeah. If you have high-power thinkers like Elon, or I imagine when I've had conversation with Ilyas Iskever, like just talking about any topic, you're like, the ability to think through a thing. I mean, you mentioned PhD student, we can just go to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But to have an AI system that can legitimately be an assistant to Ilyas Iskever or Andrej Karpathy when they're thinking through an idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
What do you think happens if we have those two AIs and we create a million copies of each? So we have a million Ilyas and a million Andre Kapatis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
They're talking to each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I mean, I feel like there would be clusters, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Right, so you have to somehow not hard code the curiosity aspect of this whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I love all the tangents we took, but let's return to the beginning. What's the origin story of perplexity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So to you, that was an inspiration, Copile as a product. So GitHub Copilot, for people who don't know, it assists you in programming. It generates code for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So anything that's doing the explicit collection of data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So that's for the relation database behind Twitter, for example? Correct. So you can't ask natural language questions of a table. You have to come up with complicated SQL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
By generating SQL queries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Interesting. I'm actually now curious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
What wisdom do you gain from this idea that the initial search over Twitter was the thing that opened the door to these investors, to these brilliant minds that supported you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So it was explicitly instructed to write like an academic, essentially. You found a bunch of stuff on the internet and now you generate something coherent and something that humans will appreciate and cite the things you found on the internet in the narrative you create for the human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's a big thing to take on, web search. That's a big move. What were the early steps to do that? What's required to take on web search?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah. And I mean, in Google's initial vision of making the world's information accessible to everyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So can you speak to the technical details of how Perplexity works? You've mentioned already RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation. What are the different components here? How does the search happen? First of all, what is RAG? What does the LLM do? At a high level, how does the thing work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, let's just lean on that. So in general, RAG is doing the search part with a query to add extra context. Yeah. to generate a better answer, I suppose. You're saying you want to really stick to the truth that is represented by the human written text on the internet. And then cite it to that text.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So where is there room for hallucination to seep in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I get to see sort of directly because I've seen answers. In fact, for a perplexity page that you posted about, I've seen ones that reference a transcript of this podcast. Mm-hmm. And it's cool how it like gets to the right snippet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like probably some of the words I'm saying now and you're saying now will end up in a perplexing answer. It's crazy. Yeah. It's very meta. Including the Lex being smart and handsome part. That's out of your mouth in a transcript forever now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
not to say it's just a way to mess with the model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, the model doesn't know that there's video editing. So the indexing is fascinating. So is there something you could say about some interesting aspects of how the indexing is done?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How does Perplexibot work? Like, so that's a beautiful little creature. So it's crawling the web. Like, what are the decisions it's making as it's crawling the web?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But most, most of the details of how a page works, especially with JavaScript is not provided to the bot, I guess, to figure all that out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Is that a fully machine learning system? Is it embedding into some kind of vector space?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So that's the ranking, but you also, I mean, that step of converting a page into something that could be stored in a vector database It just seems really difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So for the unrestricted web data, you can't just... You need a combination of all, a hybrid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you have to put some extra positive weight on the recency, but not so it overwhelms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So how much of search is a science? How much of it is an art?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
We got Cloaked for cyber privacy, ShipStation for shipping stuff, NetSuite for business stuff, Element for hydration, Shopify for e-commerce, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team where I was hiring, or if you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So constantly you come up with an issue with a particular set of documents and a particular kinds of questions that users ask and the system perplexity doesn't work well for that. And you're like, okay, how can we make it work well for that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And you want to find cases that are representative of a larger set of mistakes. Correct. All right, so what about the query stage? So I type in a bunch of BS. I type a poorly structured query. What kind of processing can be done to make that usable? Is that an LLM type of problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So one of the things we should say is that the model, this is the pre-trained LLM, is something that you can swap out in perplexity. So it could be GPT-4-0, it could be CLAW-3, it can be LALMA, something based on LALMA-3.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
You can go to the AI model, if you subscribe to Pro like I did, and choose between GPT-4-0, GPT-4 Turbo, CLAW-3 Sonnet, CLAW-3 Opus, and Sonar Large 32K. So that's the one that's trained on Lama 370B. Advanced model trained by perplexity. I like how you added advanced model. It sounds way more sophisticated. I like it. Sona large. Cool. And you could try that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And that's, is that going to be, so the trade-off here is between what latency?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So in the future, you hope your model to be like the dominant, the default model?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And that flexibility allows you to- Really focus on the user. But it allows you to be AI complete, which means you keep improving with every- Yeah, we're not taking off-the-shelf models from anybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So it's really responsive. How do you get the latency to be so low and how do you make it even lower?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Is there some interesting complexities that have to do with keeping the latency low and just serving all of this stuff? The TTFT, when you scale up, as more and more users get excited, a couple of people listen to this podcast and they're like, holy shit, I want to try Perplexity. They're going to show up. What does the scaling of compute look like? Almost from a CEO startup perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Largely?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Perplexity, yeah. Does Netflix use AWS? Yes, Netflix uses Amazon Web Services AWS for nearly all its computing and storage needs. Okay, well, the company uses over 100,000 server instances on AWS and has built a virtual studio in the cloud to enable collaboration among artists and partners worldwide. Netflix's decision to use AWS is rooted in the scale and breadth of services AWS offers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Related questions, what specific services does Netflix use from AWS? How does Netflix ensure data security? What are the main benefits Netflix gets from using? Yeah, I mean, if I was by myself, I'd be going down a rabbit hole right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And asking, why doesn't it switch to Google Cloud or those kinds of things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Although famous as Elon has talked about, they seem to have used like a collection, a disparate collection of data centers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So does Perplexi use AWS? Yeah. And so you have to figure out how much more instances to buy, those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
You tweeted a poll asking, who's likely to build the first 1,800,000 GPU equivalent data center? And there's a bunch of options there. So what's your bet on? Who do you think will do it? Like Google, Meta, XAI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
What was the option you provide, OpenAI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How much about winning in the George Haas way, hashtag winning, is about the compute? Who gets the biggest compute?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's a beautiful way to put it. Decoupling reasoning and facts. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So what, from your whole experience, what advice would you give to people looking to start a company about how to do so? What startup advice do you have?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And it'll give you the strength to persevere until you get there. Correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
the cost of it, the sacrifice, the pain of being a founder, in your experience? It's a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's tough, though, because in the early days of a startup, I think there's probably... really smart people like you, you have a lot of options. You can stay in academia, you can work at companies, have higher position in companies, working on super interesting projects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, to this day, it's one of the things I really regret about my life trajectory is I haven't done much building yet. I would like to do more building than talking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, thank you for remembering that. Wow, that's a beautiful moment that you remember that. I, of course, remember it in my own heart. And in that way, you've been an inspiration to me because I still, to this day, would like to do a startup because I have, in the way you've been obsessed about search, I've also been obsessed my whole life about human-robot interaction. It's about robots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah. I mean, that combination of a passion towards a particular thing and this new, fresh perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But there's a sacrifice to it. There's a pain to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, in that way, you, my friend, have been an inspiration. So thank you. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for doing that for young kids like myself and others listening to this. You also mentioned the value of hard work, especially when you're younger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like in your 20s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So can you speak to that? What's advice you would give to a young person about like work-life balance kind of situation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, there's a lot of questions to ask that I would first zoom out once again. So fundamentally... It's about search. So you said first there's a search element, and then there's a storytelling element via LLM, and the citation element. But it's about search first. So you think of perplexity as a search engine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Also, there's a physical mental aspect. Like you said, you can stay up all night. You can pull all-nighters, multiple all-nighters. I can still do that. I'll still pass out sleeping on the floor in the morning under the desk. I still can do that. But yes, it's easier to do when you're younger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Use your time wisely when you're young. Because yeah, that's planting a seed that's going to grow into something big if you plant that seed early on in your life. Yeah, that's really valuable time. Especially like... You know, the education system early on, you get to like explore. Exactly. It's like freedom to really, really explore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Oh yeah, no empathy. Just people who are extremely passionate about whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, I think you have to surround yourself by people. It doesn't matter what walk of life. I have, you know, we're in Texas. I hang out with people that for a living make barbecue. And those guys, the passion they have for it, it's like generational. That's their whole life. They stay up all night. It means all they do is cook barbecue. And it's all they talk about. And it's all they love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah. So that Messi is your favorite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's the first thing you said today that I'm just, Deeply disagree with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The human and the journey that you've.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, he's not from this planet for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you like the underdog. I mean, your own story has elements of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So if you just look, put on your visionary hat, look into the future, what do you think the future of search looks like? And maybe even, let's go with the bigger pothead question, what does the future of the internet, the web look like? So what is this evolving towards? And maybe even the future of the web browser, how we interact with the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So there's this collective intelligence of the human species sort of always reaching out for more knowledge, and you're giving it tools to reach out at a faster rate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The following is a conversation with Edward Gibson, or Ted, as everybody calls him. He is a psycholinguistics professor at MIT. He heads the MIT Language Lab that investigates why human languages look the way they do, the relationship between cultural language and how people represent, process, and learn language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, if that was the primary driver, then everybody was speaking English or speaking one language. There's also attention.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You're right. Maybe this is slow, but maybe that's where we're moving. But there is a tension. You're saying language is at the fringes. But if you look at geopolitics and superpowers, it does seem that there's another thing in tension, which is a language is a national identity sometimes. For certain nations. I mean, that's the war in Ukraine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Ukrainian language is a symbol of that war in many ways, like a country fighting for its own identity. So it's not merely the convenience. I mean, those two things are a tension, is the convenience of trade and the economics and be able to communicate with neighboring countries and trade more efficiently with neighboring countries, all that kind of stuff, but also identity of the group.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Because language is the way, for every community, like dialects, that emerge are a kind of identity for people. It's sometimes a way for people to say F-U to the more powerful people. And it's interesting. So in that way, language can be used as that tool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Do you have hope for machine translation that it can break down the barriers of language? So while all these different diverse languages exist, I guess there's many ways of asking this question, but basically how hard is it to translate in an automated way from one language to another?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And there might be entire concepts that are missing. So to you, it's more about the space of concept versus the space of form. Like form, you can probably map.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
There's a music to the form. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
We should say that there is like, I hesitate to say meaning, but there's a music and a rhythm to the form when you look at the broad picture, like the difference between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, or Hemingway, Bukowski, James Joyce, like I mentioned. There's a beat to it. There's an edge to it that is in the form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I would love to see... That sounds totally fascinating. Translation to Hemingway is probably the lowest... I would love to see different authors, but the average per sentence dependency length for Hemingway is probably the shortest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I met a guy named Aza Raskin who does a lot of cool stuff, really brilliant. Works with Tristan Harris and a bunch of stuff. But he was talking to me about communicating with animals. He co-founded Earth Species Project where you're trying to find the common language between whales, crows, and humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And he was saying that there's a lot of promising work that even though the signals are very different. Right. like the actual, if you have embeddings of the languages, they're actually trying to communicate similar type things. Is there something you can comment on that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Is there promise to that in everything you've seen in different cultures, especially like remote cultures, that this is a possibility or no? That we can talk to whales?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But also if we have a lot of intellectual humility here, there's somebody formerly from MIT, Neri Oxman, who I admire very much, has talked a lot about, has worked on communicating with plants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
so like yes the signal there is even less than but like it's not out of the realm of possibility that all nature has a way of communicating and it's a very different language but they do develop a kind of language through the chemistry uh through some way of communicating with each other and if you have enough humility about that possibility i think you can
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I think it would be a very interesting, in a few decades, maybe centuries, hopefully not, a humbling possibility of being able to communicate not just between humans effectively, but between all of living things on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I think if we're humble, there could be some interesting trees out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Let me ask you a wild out there sci-fi question. If we make contact with an intelligent alien civilization and you get to meet them, how hard do you think, how surprised would you be about their way of communicating? Do you think it would be recognizable? Maybe there's some parallels here to when you go to the remote tribes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Is there something you can say about the process he follows? How do you show up to a tribe and socialize? I mean, I guess colors and counting is one of the most basic things to figure out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's a tough one, where you just show up knowing nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's beautiful that humans are able to connect in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You've had an incredible career exploring this fascinating topic. What advice would you give to young people? about how to have a career like that or a life that they can be proud of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I love it. And I love the fact that your pursuit of fun has landed you here talking to me. This was an incredible conversation, Ted. You're just a fascinating human being. Thank you for taking a journey through human language with me today. This is awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Edward Gibson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Wittgenstein. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So just to clarify, verb initial is subject, verb, object. That's correct, verb. verb final is still subject, object, verb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's so fascinating. I ate an apple or I apple ate. Yes. Okay, and it's fascinating that there's a pretty even division in the world amongst those, 40, 45%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And I think TDM MetaTrade got bought by Charles Schwab or acquired or merged. I don't know. I don't know how these things work. All I know is that Yahoo Finance can integrate that and just show me everything I need to know about my quote-unquote portfolio. I don't have anything interesting going on, but it is still good to kind of monitor it, to stay in touch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
harmonic generalizations about word-to-word. There's so many things I want to ask you. Okay, good. Let me just, sometimes basics. You mentioned dependencies a few times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What do you mean by dependencies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So a tree is also sort of a mathematical construct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, yeah. So it's fascinating that you can break down a sentence into a tree, and then every word is hanging on to another. It's depending on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
There's nobody sitting here listening mad at you. I do not think so. I don't think so. Okay. There's no linguist sitting there mad at this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Because to me, just as a layman, it's surprising that you can break down sentences in all languages into a tree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, okay, so what's at the root of a tree? How do you construct? How hard is it? What is the process of constructing a tree from a sentence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Now, a lot of people I know have a lot more interesting stuff going on investment-wise, so all of that could be easily integrated into Yahoo Finance, and you can look at all that stuff, the charts, blah, blah, blah. It looks beautiful and sexy and just helps you be informed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What's usually the root? Is it going to be the verb that defines the event?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What if you're messing... Are we talking about language that's like correct language? What if you're doing poetry and messing with stuff? then rules go out the window, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Now, that's about your own portfolio, but then also for the entirety of the finance information for the entirety of the world. That's all there. the big news, the analysis of everything that's going on, everything like that. And I should also mention that I would like to do more and more financial episodes. I've done a couple of conversations with Ray Dalio.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, there's a much more extensive culture of poetry throughout the history of the last hundred years in Russia. And I always wondered why that is. But it seems that there's more flexibility in the way the language is used. You're morphing the language easier by altering the words, altering the order of the words, messing with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And so... I love the terminology of agent and patient and the other ones you used. Those are sort of linguistic terms, correct? Correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay, this is fascinating. So how hard is it to form a tree in general? Is there... Is there a procedure to it? Like, if you look at different languages, is it supposed to be a very natural, like, is it automatable, or is there some human genius involved?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It modifies something about the word that adds additional meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
A lot of that is about finance, but some of that is about sort of geopolitics and the bigger context of finance. I just recently did a conversation with Bill Ackman, very much about finance. And I did a series of conversations on cryptocurrency. Lots and lots of brilliant people, Michael Saylor, so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Drink, drank, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And there's a lot of irregulars in English.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The evolution of the irregulars are fascinating, because it's essentially slang that's sticky, because you're breaking the rules, and then everybody uses it and doesn't follow the rules, and they say screw it to the rules. It's fascinating. So you said morphemes, lots of questions. So morphology is what, the study of morphemes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That is fascinating. So in general, there's, what, two morphemes per word? Usually one or two? Or three?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay, I'll ask the same question over and over. But... how does the, just sometimes to understand things like morphemes, it's nice to just ask the question, how does these kinds of things evolve? So you have a great book studying sort of the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
how the cognitive processing, how language is used for communication, so the mathematical notion of how effective language is for communication, what role that plays in the evolution of language, but just high level, like how does a language evolve where English is two morphemes or one or two morphemes per word and then Finnish has infinity per word? So how does that happen? Is it just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Charles Hoskinson, Vitalik, I mean just lots of brilliant people in that space thinking about the future of money, future of finance. Anyway, you can keep track of all of that with Yahoo Finance. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, go to yahoofinance.com. That's yahoofinance.com. This episode is also brought to you by Listening, an app that allows you to listen to academic papers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, I don't know if it's naive. I think it's simple. Simple. I think naive is an indication that it's incorrect somehow. It's a trivial, too simple. I think it could very well be correct. But it's interesting how sticky. It feels like two people got together. It just feels like once you figure out certain aspects of a language, that just becomes sticky and the tribe forms around that language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Maybe the language, maybe the tribe forms first and then the language evolves. And then you just kind of agree and you stick to whatever that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Also, he should have a book titled Syntax, A Cognitive Approach, published by MIT Press, coming out this fall. So look out for that. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Yahoo Finance for basically everything you've ever needed if you're an investor. Listening for listening to research papers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's a thing I've always wished existed, and I always kind of suspected it's very difficult to pull off, but these guys pulled it off. Basically, it's any kind of formatted text brought to life through audio. Now for me, the thing I care about most, and I think that's at the foundation of listening, is academic papers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So probably color words is a good example of how language evolves from sort of function. When you need to communicate the use of something, then you kind of invent different variations. And basically, you can imagine that the evolution of a language has to do with what the early tribes were doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What kind of problems are facing them, and they're quickly figuring out how to efficiently communicate the solution to those problems, whether it's aesthetic or functional, all that kind of stuff, running away from a mammoth or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I think what you're pointing to is that we don't have data on the evolution of language, because many languages were formed a long time ago, so you don't get the chatter anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, you get an inkling of that from the rapid communication on certain platforms, like on Reddit, there's different communities, and they'll come up with different slang, usually from my perspective, driven by a little bit of humor, or maybe mockery or whatever, just talking shit in different kinds of ways. And you could see the evolution of language there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
because I think a lot of things on the internet, you don't want to be the boring mainstream. So you like want to deviate from the proper way of talking. And so you get a lot of deviation, like rapid deviation. Then when communities collide, you get like, just like you said, humans adapt to it. And you can see it through the lens of humor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So I love to read academic papers, and there's several levels of rigor in the actual reading process, but listening to them, especially after I skimmed it, or after I did a deep dive, listening to them is just such a beautiful experience. It solidifies the understanding. It brings to life all kinds of thoughts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, it's very difficult to study, but you can imagine like 100 years from now, well, if there's a new language born, for example, we'll get really high resolution data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
We'll now have good data on it, which is great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Can you talk to what is syntax and what is grammar? So you wrote a book on syntax.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And I'm doing this while I'm cooking, while I'm running, while I'm going to grab a coffee, all that kind of stuff. It does require an elevated level of focus, especially the kind of papers I listen to, which are computer science papers. But you can load in all kinds of stuff. You can do philosophy papers. You can do psychology papers like this. Very topic of linguistics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So quick questions around all this. So formal language theory is the big field of just studying language formally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And then phrase structure grammar is this idea that you can break down language into this S-N-P-V-P type of thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So to clarify, dependency grammar is the framework under which you see language and you make the case that this is a good way to describe language. And Noam Chomsky is watching this, he's very upset right now, so let's, just kidding, but what's the difference between, where's the place of disagreement? Between phrase structure grammar and dependency grammar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I've listened to a few papers on linguistics. I went back to Chomsky and listened to papers. It's great. Papers, books, PDFs, webpages, articles, all that kind of stuff. Even email newsletters. And the voices they got are pretty sexy. It's great. It's pleasant to listen to. I think that's what's ultimately most important is it shouldn't feel like a chore to listen to it. Like I really enjoy it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And these are just lexical copies. They're not necessarily moving from one to another. There's no movement. There's a romantic notion that you have like one main way to use a word and then you could move it around. Right, right. Which is essentially what movement is implying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Normally you'd get a two week free trial, but listeners of this podcast get one month free. So go to listening.com slash Lex. That's listening.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for insurance, life, auto, home, disability, all kinds of insurance. There's really nice tools for comparison. I'm a big fan of nice tools for comparison.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Just say there's lexical copies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
When we say the learning problem, do you mean humans learning a new language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
If I'm trying to sound sophisticated, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So one of the main divisions here is the movement story versus the lesson, the copy story. That has to do about the auxiliary words and so on. But if you rewind to the phrase structure grammar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Like I have to travel to harsh conditions soon, and I have to figure out how I need to update my equipment to make sure it's weatherproof, waterproof even. It's just resilient to harsh conditions. And it would be nice to have sort of comparisons. I have to resort to like Reddit posts or forum posts kind of debating different audio quarters and cabling and microphones and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, for you, so we should clarify, so dependency grammar is just, well, one word depends on only one other word, and you form these trees, and that makes, it really puts priority on those dependencies, just like as a There's a tree that you can then measure the distance of the dependency from one word to the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
They can then map to the cognitive processing of the sentences, how easy it is to understand and all that kind of stuff. So it just puts the focus on just like the mathematical distance of dependence between words. So it's just a different focus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Just continue on the thread of Chomsky because it's really interesting. Because as you're... discussing disagreement, to the degree there's disagreement, you're also telling the history of the study of language, which is really awesome. So you mentioned context-free versus regular. Does that distinction come into play for dependency grammars?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So within a sentence? Within a sentence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
and waterproof containers, all that kind of stuff. I would love to be able to do a rigorous comparison of them. Of course, going to Amazon, you get the reviews, and those are actually really, really solid. And so I think Amazon's been the giant gift to society in that way, that you kind of can lay out all the different options and get a lot of structured analysis of how good Amazon is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Since we're kind of talking about the history of the study of language, what other interesting disagreements, and you're both at MIT, or were for a long time, what kind of interesting disagreements there, tension of ideas are there between you and Noam Chomsky?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And we should say that Noam was in the linguistics department, and you're, I guess for a time were affiliated there, but primarily brain and cognitive science department. which is another way of studying language, and you've been talking about fMRI. Is there something else interesting to bring to the surface about the disagreement between the two of you, or other people in the discipline?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
this thing is, so Amazon's been great at that. Now, what Policy Genius did is did the Amazon thing, but for insurance, so the tools for comparison is really my favorite thing. It's just really easy to understand. The full marketplace of insurance. With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's the biggest method. But the method is a symptom of a bigger approach, which is sort of a psychology philosophy side on GNOME, and for you, it's more sort of data-driven, sort of almost like a mathematical approach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So data-driven psychologists, well, you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But in the actual, like how that manifests itself outside of the methodology is like these differences, these subtle differences about the movement story versus the lexical copy story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay, well, let's explore the theories that... You explore in your book. Let's return to this dependency grammar framework of looking at language. What's a good justification why the dependency grammar framework is a good way to explain language? What's your intuition?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So the cry is connected to the boy. The cry at the end is connected to the boy in the beginning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Head to policygenius.com slash Lex or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you can save. That's policygenius.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Just to clarify, the distance of the dependencies is whenever the boy cried, there's a dependence between two words, and then you're counting the number of, what, morphemes between them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Sure. And you're saying the longer the distance is at dependence, the more, no matter the language, except legalese. Even legalese. Even legalese. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay, okay, okay. But that... The people will be very upset that speak that language. Not upset, but they'll either not understand it, or they'll be like, their brain will be working in overtime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Is that a chicken or the egg issue here? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I'm not name dropping here, but I recently went on a hike with the CEO of Shopify, Toby, he's brilliant. I've been a fan of his for a long time, long before Shopify was a sponsor. I don't even know if he knows that Shopify sponsors this podcast. Now, just to clarify, it really doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Wait a minute. So central embedding meaning like you take a normal sentence like the boy cried and inject a bunch of crap in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That separates the boy and the cried.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay. That's central embedding. And nesting is on top of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
They don't mean anything different. Got it. And then... what you're saying is there's a bunch of different kinds of experiments you can do. I mean, I like the understanding one is like have more embedding, more central embedding. Is it easier or harder to understand? But then you have to measure the level of understanding, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And those are giving you a signal. That's why you can say that. What about the completion of the central event?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, actually, I'm struggling with it in my head. Well, it's easier when you stare at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay, so the universal theory of language by Ted Gibson is that you can form dependency... You can form trees from any sentences. That's right. You can measure the distance in some way of those dependencies, and then you can say that most languages have very short dependencies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Nobody in this world can put pressure on me to have a sponsor or not to have a sponsor or for a sponsor to put pressure on me what I can and can't say. I, when I wake up in the morning, feel completely free to say what I want to say and to think what I want to think. I've been very fortunate in that way in many dimensions in my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Policy Genius for insurance. Shopify for selling stuff online. And Eight Sleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip friends, please still check out the sponsors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's like 10% of the... And even in those languages, it's still short dependencies. Short dependencies is rules. Yeah. Okay, so what are some possible explanations for that? For why languages have evolved that way? So that's one of the, I suppose, disagreements you might have with Chomsky. So you consider the evolution of language in terms of information theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And I also have always lived a frugal life and a life of discipline, which is where the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought truly comes from. So I don't need anybody. I don't need a boss. I don't need money. I'm free to exist in this world in the way I want. sees right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And for you, the purpose of language is ease of communication and processing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
When you say production, can you... Oh, I just mean ease of language production.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's on both sides of the production.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
My initial intuition is that you optimize language for the audience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But it's both. It's just kind of like messing with my head a little bit to say that some of the optimization might be the primary objective. The optimization might be the ease of production.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Wait, wait, wait, wait. But the purpose of communication is to be understood, is to convince others and so on. So like the selfish thing is to be understood. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Right. I mean like the ease of production. Helps me be understood then. I don't think it's circular. I think the primary objective is about the listener. Because otherwise, if you're optimizing for the ease of production, then you're not going to have any of the interesting complexity of language. You're trying to explain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Now, on top of that, of course, I'm surrounded by incredible people, many of whom I disagree with and have arguments, so I'm influenced by those conversations and those arguments and I'm always learning, always challenging myself, always humbling myself. I have kind of intellectual humility. I kind of suspect I'm kind of an idiot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But that means the message needs to be understood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I think I'm still tying meaning and form together in my head. But you're saying if you keep the meaning of what you're saying constant, the optimization, yeah, it could be the primary objective that optimization is for production. That's interesting. I'm struggling to keep constant meaning. It's just so, I mean, I'm such a, I'm a human, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So for me, the form, without having introspected on this, the form and the meaning are tied together, like, deeply. Because I'm a human. Like, for me, when I'm speaking, because I haven't thought about language, like, in a rigorous way, about the form of language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yes. Just words. To you, specifying the breed of dog and whether they're cute or not is changing the meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Right, so you're just, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
This is so fascinating and just like a really powerful window into human language, but I wonder still throughout this how vast the gap between meaning and form. I just have this like maybe romanticized notion that they're close together, that they evolve hand in hand, that you can't just simply optimize for one without the other being in the room with us. Well, it's kind of like an iceberg.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I start my approach to the world of ideas from that place, assuming I'm an idiot and everybody has a lesson to teach me. Anyway, not sure why I got off that tangent, but the hike was beautiful. Nature, friends, is beautiful. Anyway, I have a Shopify store, lexfriedman.com slash store. It's very minimal, which is how I like, I think, most things. If you want to set up a store, it's super easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Form is the tip of the iceberg and the rest, the meaning is the iceberg, but you can't separate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, I mean, that's a really interesting question. What is the difference between language written, communicated versus thought? What to use the difference between them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Can you specify what you mean by language, like communicated language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And that's pretty stable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Can I ask a quick question? Sorry, it's a small tangent. At which point as you grow up from baby to adult, does it stabilize?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So clearly when you lead up to a baby's first words, before that there's a lot of fascinating turmoil going on about figuring out what are these people saying? And you're trying to make sense, how does that connect to the world and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that might be just fascinating development that's happening there. That's hard to introspect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But anyway, you- Anyways, we're back to the scanner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It takes a few minutes. Even I figured out how to do it. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep, and it's part of the three cover. The source of my escape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Are we talking about speaking and listening, or are we also talking about reading?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So if you, wait, wait, so if you read random words?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Like gibberish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The network doesn't get activated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So programming...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And so- Is that as mind-blowing as I think? That's pretty cool. That's weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The door, when opened, allows me to travel away from the troubles of the world into this ethereal universe of calmness. A cold bed surface with a warm blanket. a perfect 20 minute nap, and it doesn't matter how dark the place my mind is in, a nap will pull me out, and I see the beauty of the world again. Technologically speaking, a-sleep is just really cool. You can control temperature with a nap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Sorry to go into a place where you maybe... A little bit philosophical, but is it possible that this area of the brain is doing some kind of translation into a deeper set of almost like concepts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, like a translation network. Yeah. But I wonder what is at the core, at the bottom of it. Like, what are thoughts? Are thoughts, to me, like... I don't know. Thoughts and words. Are they neighbors? Or is it one turtle sitting on top of the other? Meaning, like, is there a deep...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, I wonder if there's like some stable, nicely compressed encoding of meanings that's separate from language. You know... I guess the implication here is that we don't think in language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I wonder if the inner voice activates that same network.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I do think I vocalize what I'm reading, but I don't think I hear a voice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, I don't think I have an inner voice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I refuse to believe that's the majority of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It could be a self-report flaw. It could be. You know, when I'm reading, inside my head, I'm kind of like saying the words, which is probably the wrong way to read, but I don't hear a voice. There's no percept of a voice. I refuse to believe the majority of people have it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Anyway, it's a fascinating, the human brain is fascinating, but it still blew my mind that language does appear, comprehension does appear to be separate from thinking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's become such an integral part of my life that I've begun to take it for granted. Typical human. So the app controls the temperature. I set it, currently I'm setting it to a negative five. And it's just super nice, cool surface. It's something I really look forward to, especially when I'm traveling. I don't have one of those. It really makes me feel like home.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
This is kind of blowing my mind right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I'm trying to load that in because it has implications for large language models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, let's take a stroll there. You wrote that the best current theories of human language are arguably large language models. So this has to do with form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You don't know what's going on. You don't know what's going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What's your definition of a theory? Because it's a gigantic black box with a very large number of parameters controlling it. To me, theory usually requires a simplicity, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You could probably construct a mechanism by which it can generate a simple explanation of a particular language, like a set of rules. Something like a... It could generate... A dependency grammar for a language, right? Yes. You could probably just ask it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You write that the kinds of theories of language that LLMs are closest to are called construction-based theories. Can you explain what construction-based theories are?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Check it out and get special savings when you go to asleep.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Freeman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Edward Gibson. When did you first become fascinated with human language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Do you think that large language models understand language? Are they mimicking language? I guess the deeper question there is, are they just understanding the surface form? Or do they understand something deeper about the meaning that then generates the form?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But it's also possible the larger language model would be aware of the fact that there's sometimes over-representation of a particular kind of formulation. And it's easy to get tricked by that. And so you could see if they get larger and larger, models be a little bit more skeptical. So you see over-representation. So it just feels like form can...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
training on form can go really far in terms of being able to generate things that look like the thing understands deeply the underlying world model of the kind of mathematical world, physical world, psychological world that would generate these kinds of sentences. It just feels like you're creeping close to the meaning part. Easily fooled, all this kind of stuff. But that's humans too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So it just seems really impressive how often it seems like it understands concepts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And so... Well, no, no, no. I'm not saying that. I think when you just look at anecdotal examples and just showing a large number of them where it doesn't seem to understand and it's easily fooled, that does not seem like a scientific data-driven analysis of how many places is a damn impressive in terms of meaning and understanding and how many places is easily fooled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What's the mechanism by which humans figure out that it's an error?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Less likely to make, I should say. Yeah, less likely. Because like humans are very... Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, you're asking, you know, you're asking humans to... You're asking a system to understand 100%. Like, you're asking some mathematical concepts. And so, like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, the central embedding. The central embedding struggles with-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But it really often doesn't just complete sentences. It very often says stuff that's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
and sometimes says stuff that's not true. And almost always the form is great. But it's still very surprising that with really great form it's able to generate a lot of things that are true. Based on what it's trained on and so on. So it's not just form that it's generating, it's mimicking true statements from the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I guess the underlying idea there is that on the internet, truth is overrepresented versus falsehoods. I think that's probably right. But the fundamental thing it's trained on, you're saying, is just form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, that's a sad, to me, that's still a little bit of open question. I probably lean agreeing with you, especially now you've just blown my mind that there's a separate module in the brain for language versus thinking. Maybe there's a fundamental part missing from the large language model approach that lacks the thinking, the reasoning capabilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's fascinating. Still, to me, an open question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What do you have the interesting limits of LLMs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Their form is perfect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So when you look at grammar, you're almost thinking about it like a puzzle, almost like a mathematical puzzle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, it's close to being perfect. Well, you said ability to complete central embeddings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But that's not perfect, right? That's good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Oh, wait, wait, wait. So perfect is as close to humans as possible. I got it. But you should be able to, if you're not human, you're superhuman, you should be able to complete central embedded sentences, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The form of human language. And how humans process the language. I think that's plausible. And how they generate language. Process language and generate language, that's fascinating. So in that sense, they're perfect. If we can just linger on the center embedding thing, that's hard for LLMs to produce, and that seems really impressive, because that's hard for humans to produce.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And how does that connect... to the thing we've been talking about before, which is the dependency grammar framework in which you view language and the finding that short dependencies seem to be a universal part of language. So why is it hard to complete center embeddings?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Can you just linger on what do you mean by cognitive cost?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So you can somehow, in different ways, convert it to a number. I wonder if there's a beautiful equation connecting cognitive cost and length of dependency. E equals mc squared kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
For sure, but there might be some insight in the kind of function that fits the data, meaning like a quadratic, like what...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I enjoyed their stuff, maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Yahoo Finance, a new sponsor. And they got a new website that you should check out. It's a website that provides financial management reports, information, and news for investors. Yahoo itself has been around forever. Yahoo Finance has been around forever. I don't know how long, but it must be over 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Probably somehow connected to working memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
No, that's a beautiful idea. And the underlying idea is beautiful, that there's a cognitive cost that correlates with the length of dependency. Mm-hmm. It just, it feels like it's a deep, I mean, language is so fundamental to the human experience. And this is a nice, clean theory of language where it's like, wow, okay. So like, we like our words close together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It depends on where it's close together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, the simplicity of the theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Have you gone through the process? Is there like, you take a piece of text and then simplify... sort of like there's an average length of dependency and then you like, you know, reduce it and see comprehension on the entire, not just single sentence, but like, you know, you go from James Joyce to Hemingway or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Let's talk about legalese because you mentioned that as an exception. We should take it tangent upon tangent. That's an interesting one. You give it as an exception. It's an exception. That you say that most natural languages, as we've been talking about, have local dependencies with one exception, legalese.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So what is legalese, first of all?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, I actually know very little about the kind of language that lawyers use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You just reveal the game that lawyers are playing. They're optimizing a different
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So fundamentally, your journey through life was one of a mathematician and a computer scientist, and then you kind of discovered the puzzle, the problem of language, and approached it from that angle. To try to understand it from that angle, almost like a mathematician or maybe even an engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And the passive voice accounts for some of the low-frequency words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Oh, so passive voice sucks. Low frequency word sucks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
How hard is that process, by the way? I'm so sorry, don't question, but how hard is it to detect center embedding? Oh, easy. Easy to detect. You're just looking at long dependencies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So you're not just looking for long dependencies. You're just literally looking for center embedding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So like a center embedding is a big bomb you throw inside of a sentence that just blows up. Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
My eyes might glaze over in mid-sentence. No, I understand that. I mean, legalese is hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
On the comprehension, on the reading side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But... I have some theories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Abracadabra type of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, don't you think there's an incentive for lawyers to generate things that are hard to understand
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
No, lawyers also don't understand it. You're creating space. I mean, you ask in a communist Soviet Union, the individual members, their self-report is not going to... correctly reflect what is broken about the gigantic bureaucracy that then leads to Chernobyl or something like this. I think the incentives under which you operate are not always transparent to the members within that system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So like it's just, feels like a strange coincidence that there is benefit if you just zoom out and look at the system as opposed to asking individual lawyers that making something hard to understand is going to make a lot of people money. You're going to need a lawyer to figure that out, I guess, from the perspective of the individual, but then that could be the performative aspect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It could be as opposed to the incentive-driven to be complicated. It could be performative to where we lawyers... speak in this sophisticated way and you regular humans don't understand it, so you need to hire a lawyer. Yeah, I don't know which one it is, but it's suspicious. Suspicious that it's hard to understand and that everybody's eyes glaze over and they don't read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Did you ever come across the philosophy angle of logic? So if you think about the 80s with AI, the expert systems where you try to kind of maybe sidestep the poetry of language and some of the syntax and the grammar and all that kind of stuff and go to the underlying meaning that language is trying to communicate and try to somehow compress that in a computer-representable way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Influential bad apples that everybody looks up to, whatever their central figures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
They didn't want this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And they weren't better than regular people at comprehending it. Or they were, on average, better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The same difference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So maybe the next president of the United States can, instead of saying generic things, say, I ban center embeddings and make Ted the language czar of the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But center embeddings are the bad thing to have. That's right. So if you get rid of that. That'll do a lot of it. That'll fix a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah. That is so fascinating. Yeah. And it's just really fascinating on many fronts that humans are just not able to deal with this kind of thing. And that language, because of that, evolved in the way it did. It's fascinating. So one of the mathematical formulations you have when talking about language as communication is this idea of noisy channels. What's a noisy channel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Like literal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Do you ever come across that in your studies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It would have been interesting to see if you pursued the language side. That's really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, that's really cool to sort of model if you don't hear certain parts of a sentence or have some probability of missing that part. Like, how do you construct a language that's resilient to that, that's somewhat robust to that? Yeah, that's the idea. And then you're kind of saying, like, the word order and the syntax of the language, the dependency length are all helpful, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But we're talking about, just to be clear, we're talking about maybe just actually the sounds of communication. Like you and I are sitting in a bar, it's very loud, and you model with a noisy channel the loudness, the noise, and we have the signal that's coming across. And you're saying word order might have something to do with optimizing that, where there's a presence of noise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, to me, it's interesting how much you can load into the noisy channel. Like how much can you bake in? You said like, you know, cognitive load on the receiver end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Sure, but then underneath it, there's a million other subsets. Oh, yeah, that's true. I mean, I just mentioned cognitive load on both sides. Then there's like speech impediments or just everything. Worldview, I mean, the meaning, we start to creep into the meaning realm of like, we have different worldviews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You mentioned one of the things is like a way to measure a language is learning problems. So like what's the correlation between everything we've been talking about and how easy it is to learn a language? So is like short dependencies correlated to ability to learn a language? Is there some kind of, or like the dependency grammar, is there some kind of connection there? how easy it is to learn?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So it's interesting. You think there is a big divide. There's a gap. There's a distance between form and meaning. Because that's a question you discuss a lot with LLMs, because they're damn good at form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So they're not optimized for learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Can it be just noise? Can it be just the messiness of the development of a language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, no, but what I mean by noise is like cultural, like sticky cultural things, like the way you communicate, just there's a stickiness to it, that it's an imperfect, it's a noisy, it's stochastic. The function over which you're optimizing is very noisy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So, because I don't, it feels weird to say that learning is part of the objective function, because some languages are way harder to learn than others, right? Or is that, that's not true? That's not true. That's interesting. I mean, that's the public sort of perception, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
For a second language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Do you think there's, oh, wow. I mean, it's an open question, right? How close form and meaning are. We'll discuss it, but to me, studying form, maybe it's a romantic notion, gives you, form is like the shadow. of the bigger meaning thing underlying language. Language is how we communicate ideas. We communicate with each other using language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
To what degree is language, this is returning to Chomsky a little bit, is innate? You said that for Chomsky, he used the idea that some aspects of language are innate to explain away certain things that are observed. How much are we born? with language at the core of our mind, brain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So that part of the brain that lights up when you're doing all the comprehension, that could be learned. That could be just, you don't need, you don't need any.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So in understanding the structure of that communication, I think you start to understand the structure of thought and the structure of meaning behind those thoughts and communication to me. But to you, big gap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
These are natural experiments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The first few hours, days, months of human life are fascinating. It's like, well, inside the womb, actually, like that development. That machinery, whatever that is, seems to create powerful humans that are able to speak, comprehend, think, all that kind of stuff, no matter what happens. Not no matter what, but robust to the different ways that the brain might be damaged and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's really interesting. But what would Chomsky say about the fact, the thing you're saying now, that language is... seems to be happening separate from thought. Because as far as I understand, maybe you can correct me, he thought that language underpins... Yeah, he thinks so. I don't know what he'd say. He would be surprised.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Because for him, the idea is that language is sort of the foundation of thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And it's pretty... mind-blowing to think that it could be completely separate from thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What do you find most beautiful about human language? Maybe the form of human language, the expression of human language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's a fascinating effect. Yeah. You mentioned Bolivia. What's the connection between culture and language? You've also mentioned that much of our study of language comes from W-E-I-R-D, weird people, Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. So when you study remote cultures, such as around the Amazon jungle, what can you learn about language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, that's blowing my mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
How are you going to ask, I want two of those?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It survived so much. It evolved rapidly and quickly, adjusting, evolving, improving, all of that. The thing I use it for now is there's a portfolio that you can add your account to. Ever since I had zero money, I used, boy, I think it's called TD Ameritrade. I still use that same thing, just getting a basic mutual fund account.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
This is fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And they're going to be noisy when you interview a bunch of people with the definition of few, and there's going to be a threshold in the context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And it might actually be at first hard to discover. Yeah. Because for a lot of people, the jump from one to two will be few. Right? So it's a jump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, that's fascinating. That's fascinating that numbers don't present themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Counting is not required to complete the matching test.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Because you have to count.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
There's a little bit of a chicken and egg thing there because if you don't have the words, then maybe they'll limit you in the kind of like a little baby Einstein there won't be able to come up with a counting task. You know what I mean? Like the ability to count enables you to come up with interesting things probably. Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So, yes, you develop counting because you need it, but then once you have counting, you can probably come up with a bunch of different inventions. Like how to, I don't know. Yeah. what kind of thing, they do matching really well for building purposes, building some kind of hut or something like this. So it's interesting that language is a limiter on what you're able to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, that's what I mean. That limit is also a limit on the society of what they're able to build.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But if you care about goats, you're going to know them actually individually also. Yeah, you will. I mean, cows and goats, if there's a source of food and milk and all that kind of stuff, you're going to actually really care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Do you have a sense why universal languages like Esperanto have not taken off? Like why do we have all these different languages?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But because the United States is a gigantic economy, and therefore... Yeah, it's big economies that do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last ice age and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So the current understanding in mainstream archaeology is that after the Young Address is when the civilizations popped up in different places of the globe with a lot of similarities, but they popped up independently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And they don't just pop up. They kind of build up gradually. First, there's some settlements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And then there's different dynamics of how they build up and the role of agriculture in that is also non-obvious, but it's just… There's first a kind of settlement, a stabilization of where the people are living, then they start using agriculture, then they start getting urban centers and that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
To me, Notion is hands down the best integration of LLMs into the note-taking process when there's a lot of documents, a lot of different kinds of documents, and a lot of different kinds of people creating the documents. In the same way that in the recent episode I talked about with Cursor can query the code base, Notion generalizes that and can query the document base.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Can you say how it was discovered? I think this is one of the most fascinating things on Earth, period. So maybe can you say what it is and how it was discovered?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So all the wikis and projects and all the notes that you take, all of that can be queried, you can ask questions about it, you can find stuff, you can summarize, especially when there's multiple people on the team, you can summarize all the progress made in a particular project, all that kind of stuff. You show up at the beginning of the day and you want to know, okay, what happened yesterday?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Where can I help? Those kinds of questions can be answered with Notion. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Riverside. It really is just an incredible platform for recording podcasts online. A lot of people are doing podcasts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And yet the understanding is it was created by hunter-gatherers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Do we have an understanding when it was turned into a, if I could say, a time capsule, so protected by forming a mound around it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And perhaps we should also state, if you look at the entirety of history of hominids, Humans or hominids have been explorers. I didn't even know this when I was preparing for this. Yeah. Looking at Homo erectus. Yeah. 1.9 million years ago. Absolutely. Almost right away, they spread out through the whole world. Yeah. And we Homo sapiens evolved from them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And we should also mention, since we're talking about sort of controversial debates going on, as I understand, there's still debates about the dynamics of all that was going on there, like we mentioned in Africa, that it's, you know, I think the current understanding, we didn't come from one particular point of Africa, that there's multiple locations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series, Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which has just been released. And it's focused on the distant past of the Americas, a topic I recently discussed with the archaeologist Ed Barnhart. Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archaeologist, scholar I love talking to on the podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And the natural question that people ask me and people ask on the internet is how to do it easy. I think Riverside is the place to go to achieve easy professional level quality on both the audio and the video. I've used it a bunch over the years to record remote podcasts. In fact, I need to be doing more remote podcasts. The point is the technology is super easy because
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So I guess the general puzzlement that you're filled with is given that these creatures explore and spread and try out different environments, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop complicated society settlements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
You have double-ended recording, so you have extremely high-quality recording on both ends. All you do is just log in in the browser. It just works. I'm so glad this exists. It just works. And of course, they have a bunch of nice features that are leveraging AI, for example. You have a text-based editor for both audio and video, which is just incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The sinking of the multiple guests, obviously simple seeming thing, but hard to do seamlessly and flawlessly, and they do just that. I mean, it's just incredible. They pulled it off. It's not easy to pull off. and they make it look easy, which is wonderful. So it's a product that I recommend to a lot of people who are interested in doing a podcast of any kind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So one of the defining ways that you approach the study of human history that I think contrasts with mainstream archaeology is you take this sort of astronomical symbolism and the relationship between humans and the stars very seriously. I do, as I believe the ancients did. I think it's important to sort of... consider what humans would have thought about back then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Now we have a lot of distractions. We have social media, we can watch videos on YouTube, whatever. But back then, especially before sort of electricity, the stars is like, The sexiest thing to talk about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There's no light pollution, so there's... There's the majesty of the heavens. Every single night, you're spending looking up at the stars, and you can imagine there's a lot of sort of status value to be the guy who's very good at studying the stars, and sort of the scientists of the day. And I'm sure there's going to be these geniuses that emerge. They're able to do two things. One...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
tell stories about the gods or whatever based on the stars. And then also, as we'll probably talk about, use the stars practically for navigation, for example. So it makes sense that the stars had a primal importance for the ideas of the times, for the status, for religious explorations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Like I said, I record my remote interviews with Riverside. Give it a try at riverside.fm and use code Lex for 30% off. That's riverside.fm and use code Lex. This episode is brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar, delicious electrolyte mix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, but detecting the precession of the equinox is hard, because especially they don't have any writing systems, they don't have any mathematical systems, so everything is told through words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So that's one of the reasons that you take myths seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I drink it throughout the day, I'm drinking it now, and I'm actually pretty low on water and electrolytes at the moment because I did a really hard training session The training session was about an hour and a half and I think I only took one round off. And it was just hard training round after round after round.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So there is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis that provides an explanation of what happened during this period that resulted in such rapid environmental change. So can you explain this hypothesis?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And by the end of it, I was just sort of both in the zone technique-wise, but also kind of psychologically accepting whatever happens in each particular puzzle that is jiu-jitsu. So I trained against some really strong dudes today. It was... Wrestlers, intense. The technique was there too. So it's like, it's a battle for everything. Lots of just attacking for submissions over and over and over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Is there a good understanding of what happened geologically, whether there was an impact or not? Like, what explains this huge dip in temperature and then rise in temperature?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Everything in the transitions, there's no stalling in a particular position. It's just movement and movement and movement and constant attacks. Yeah, it was exhausting. Plus the heat, just all of that sweating. And I usually don't drink during training. So by the time I'm done, I'm just like, no water in me. And that's when the Element really helps out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
How important is the impact hypothesis to your understanding of the Ice Age advanced civilizations? So is it possible to have another explanation for environmental factors that could have... erased most of an advanced civilization during this period?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I go from feeling really shitty to feeling really good. So get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I set up a store on lexfermer.com slash store. And I need to add shirts there, especially shirts that don't have my face on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So from this perspective, when we talk about advanced Ice Age civilization, it could have been a relatively small group of people with the technology of They're scholars of the stars and they're expert seafaring navigators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And perhaps some...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, can you actually describe the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids and what you find most mysterious and interesting about them? Well, first of all, the astronomy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I keep getting all kinds of ideas, but just haven't gotten around to it, even though it's super easy. No, here's an interesting thing. I've been getting more and more into programming languages that I haven't used before because I'm doing interviews with more and more programmers coming up, planning on it, thinking about it, excited for it. Programming makes me happy. Anyway,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I found out that Shopify, you know, the product, the service, the website was originally maybe still built with Rails, Ruby on Rails. So Ruby on Rails is this technology That's super sexy, super popular, or was for a long time, and I never just got around to using it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So one of the things I would like to do is to get better at that so I can get a greater understanding of what it takes to program for the web so that I can talk to people who excel at that, who are experts at that. Anyway, all that said, you can build incredible stuff with Ruby on Rails, which is Shopify, and you can sell stuff Whatever it is you want to sell, you can sell it with Shopify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So the idea is that the Sphinx was there long before the pyramids, and the pyramids were built by the Egyptians to celebrate further an already holy place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Extremely knowledgeable, humble, open-minded, and respectful in disagreement. I'll do many more podcasts on history, including ancient history. Our distant past is full of mysteries, and I find it truly exciting to explore those mysteries with people both on the inside and the outside of the mainstream in the various disciplines involved. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So what's the case, what's the evidence that the Egyptologists used to make the attributions that they do for the dating of the pyramids and the Sphinx?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Sign up for a dollar per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I think at the end of the podcast, Graham called death a leap into the next great adventure. Something like that. And I remember that made me smile, a kind of smile that just warms my heart and the warmth stays there for a time. It's a kind of joyful acceptance of the transitory nature of life. Those words and the way he said them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
the Sphinx and maybe some aspects of the pyramid were much earlier. And why that's important is, in that case, it would be evidence of some transfer of technology from a much older civilization. The idea is that during the Younger Dryas, Most of that civilization was either destroyed or damaged and they desperately scattered across the globe. Seeking refuge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Seeking refuge and telling stories of maybe, one, the importance of the stars. Mm-hmm. Their knowledge about the stars. Yeah. And their knowledge about building and knowledge about navigation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Now, of course, the air bars on this are quite large, but if an advanced Ice Age civilization existed, where do you think it was? Where do you think we might find it one day if it existed? And how big do you think it might have been?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And just as he said, death indeed is one of the great concerns for us humans. Whether we acknowledge it or not, it is the darkness beneath the surface waves of our daily concerns. At least I personally believe that there is a fear there, a great fear. that must be confronted and dealt with and integrated into our conception of what it means to be a human being and how to survive the waves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
How big do you think it might have been? And do you think it was spread across the globe? So if there were expert navigators Do you think they spread across the globe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So that speaks to one of the challenges that archaeologists provide to this idea is that there is a lot of evidence of humans in the Ice Age, and they appear to be all hunter-gatherers. Mm-hmm. But like you said, only a small percent of areas where humans have lived have been studied by archaeologists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I mean, that's why Gobekli Tepe fills my mind with imagination, especially seeing it as a time capsule. you know, it's almost certain that there's places on Earth we haven't discovered that once we do, even if it's after the Ice Age, will change our view of human history. Do you think there's going to be a place, like what will be your dream thing to discover?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
like Gobekli Tepe that says a definitive perturbation to our understanding of Ice Age history?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Anyway, I'm a big believer that talking is one of the tools that should be used to understand your mind and to figure out what strategies can be used to navigate life. And yeah, that's what talk therapy can do. And I recommend the easiest way to do that is BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Quick pause. Bath and break? Sounds good. So to me, the story that we've been talking about, it is... both exciting if the mainstream archeology narrative is correct and the one you're constructing is correct. Both are super interesting because the mainstream archeology perspective means that there is something about the human mind from which the pyramids, these ideas spring naturally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
You place humans anywhere, you place them on Mars, it's gonna come out that way. So that's an interesting story of human psychology that then becomes even more interesting when you evolve Out of Africa with Homo sapiens, how they think about the world. That's super interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And then if there's an ancient civilization, advanced civilization that explains why there's so many similar types of ideas that spread, that means that there's so much undiscovered. Yeah. Still. Yeah. About the sort of the spring of these ideas of civilization that come. So to me, they're both fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So I don't know why there's so much sort of infighting, but I think it's partly territorial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Graham Hancock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, in general, I got a chance to get a glimpse of the archaeology community. And in archaeology, in science in general, I don't have much patience for this kind of arrogance or snark or dismissal of... general human curiosity that I think your work inspires in people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And so that's why people like Ed Barnhart, who I recently had a conversation with, you know, he radiates sort of kindness and curiosity as well. And it's like that kind of approach to ideas, especially about human history, it inspires people, inspires millions of people to ask questions. I mean, that's why you had Keanu Reeves on the new season.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
He's basically coming to the show from that same perspective of curiosity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Let's start with a big foundational idea that you have about human history, that there was an advanced Ice Age civilization that came before and perhaps seeded what people now call the six cradles of civilization, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Andes, and Mesoamerica. So let's talk about this idea that you have. Can you, at the highest possible level, describe it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So given that, can you maybe steel man the case that archaeologists make about this period that we've been talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
can you make the case that that is indeed what happened, is it was hunter-gatherers for a long time, and then there was a cataclysm, a very difficult period in human history with the Young Adraeus, and that changed the environment and then led to the springing up of civilizations to different places on Earth. Can you sort of make the case for that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If we can just look back at your debate with Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan experience, what are some takeaways from that? What have you learned? Maybe what are some things you like about Flint? You said that he's one of your big critics, but what do you like about his ideas and what were you maybe bothered by?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I should just like linger on this because for me, it was the shipwrecks thing was convincing. And then looking back, first of all, watching your video, but also just realizing the peopling of Australia part. That's mind-boggling to me. 50,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Just imagine being the person standing on the shore, looking out into the ocean, standing on the shore of a harsh environment, looking out into the ocean of a harsh environment and deciding that, you know what, I'm going to go towards near certain death
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And there's no archaeological evidence of those boats?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Do you think one day we'll find a ship that's 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years old?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So, okay. So that's back to the 3 million shipwrecks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So what's your takeaway from that debate? Uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Listen, I feel you. I've seen the intensity of the attacks and the whole racism label is the one that can get under your skin. And it's a toolbox that's been prevalent over the past, let's say decade, maybe a little bit more as a method of cancellation when a person has is the opposite of racist very often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's kind of hilarious to watch, but it can get under your skin, especially when you have certain dynamics that happen on the internet where it seeps into a Wikipedia page and then other people read that Wikipedia page and you get to hear it from like friends. Oh, I didn't know you're at whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And you realize that Wikipedia description of who you are is actually has a lot of power, not by people saying, that know you well, but people that just kind of are learning about you for the first time. Definitely. And they can really start to annoy you and get under your skin when the people are kind of indirectly injecting. They're writing articles about you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
They can then be cited by Wikipedia. It can really bother a person who is actually trying to do good science or just trying to inspire people with different ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
to say a positive thing that I enjoyed, I think towards the end in him speaking about agriculture, it was pretty interesting. So the techniques of archaeology are pretty interesting, like where you can get some insights through the fog of time about like what people were doing, how they were living.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
appreciate when you look from up above. So the idea that they built stuff that you can only appreciate when viewed from up above means they had a very kind of deep relationship with the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Everything we're talking about is so full of mystery. It's just fascinating, especially the farther back we go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Notion for note-taking, Riverside for making amazing-looking podcasts online, Element for hydration, Shopify for selling stuff online, and BetterHelp. for your mind. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexherman.com slash contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If we as a human civilization continue, I think that is the one way to create backups of us elsewhere in the universe, given the space, is to do a life gun and shoot it everywhere. And then it just plants. And you kind of hope that whatever is the magic that makes up human consciousness, and if that magic is already there in the initial DNA of the bacteria,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And as you were mentioning, there's just so many interesting mysteries along the way here. For example, I mean, it's like, I think like 3 billion years, it was single cell organisms. So it seems like life was pretty good for single cell organisms, that there was no need for multicellularity, that like for animals, for any of this kind of stuff. Yeah. Why is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It seems like you could adapt much better if you're a more complicated organism. It took a really long time to take that leap. Is it because it's really hard to do? And what was the forcing function to do that kind of leap? And the same, I mean, for us to be selfish and self-obsessed, for us humans, like what was the magic leap to Homo sapiens from the other hominids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And why did Homo sapiens win out against Neanderthals and the other competitors? Why are they not around anymore? So those are all fascinating mysteries and it feels like the more we
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
proposed sort of radical ideas about our past and take it seriously and explore, the more we'll be able to sort of figure out that puzzle that leads all the way back to Homo sapiens and maybe all the way back to the origin of life on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Why do you think Homo sapiens evolved? What was the magic thing? There's a bunch of theories about fire leading to meat, to cooking, which can fuel the brain, that's one. The other is like social interaction. We're able to... use their imagination to construct ideas and share those ideas and tell great stories. And that is somehow an evolutionary advantage. Do you have any favorite conceptions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
For our discussion, though, what is interesting is all the hominids seem to be explorers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
They spread. I mean, I didn't know this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That's the leap from non-human to human. One of the things you've discussed is your idea of what was the leap to human civilization. What is the driver, what is the inspiration for humans to form civilizations? And for you, that's shamanism. Can you explain what that means?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Just imagine the number of plants they had to have eaten. Yeah. And consumed and smoked, all kinds of combinations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Both possibilities, as you describe, are interesting. And to me, they're kind of akin to each other. is I wonder what the limit of the brain's capacity is to create imaginary worlds and treat them seriously and make them real. And in those worlds, explore and have real sort of moral, deep brainstorming sessions with those entities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So it's almost like the power of the human mind to imagine taken to its limit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, and would you say that the reason that could give birth to a civilization, is it because such visions can help create myths, and especially like religious myths? That would be a cohesive thing for a large group of people to get around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, they'll be doing it for the right reasons. I mentioned to you, I recently interviewed Donald Trump and actually brought up this same idea that it would be a much better world if most of Congress and most politicians would take some form of psychedelic, at the very least.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And for me also, it's exciting. Some of these substances like psilocybin are being integrated into scientific studies, large scales. It's really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, I actually just recently found out that you had a TED Talk, War on Consciousness, that was taken down. Yeah. And that was just part of just the general resistance. Because it was a pretty... It wasn't a radical...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
In general, just along that line of thinking, I'm pretty sure that what we understand about consciousness today will seem silly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And for me, from an engineer perspective, it's interesting if it's possible to engineer consciousness in artificial beings. Yeah. It's another way to approach the question of how special is human consciousness. Yeah. From where does it arise... Is it something that permeates all of life? And in that case, what is the thing that makes life special? Like, what is life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
What is these living organisms that we have here that evolved to create humans? And what is truly special about humans? And it's both scary and exciting to consider the possibility that we can create something like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That'd be a fascinating, because then you can construct all kinds of physical forms to manifest the consciousness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That makes humans really uncomfortable. Because we are at the top of the food chain. We consider ourselves truly special. And to consider that there's other things that could be special.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, fear is a useful thing, but it can also be destructive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If you look into the future, maybe the next hundred years, what do you hope are the interesting discoveries in archaeology that we'll find?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So not just the how it was built, but the why. But the why. And to you, it seems obvious that there would be a cosmic motivation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So you think there's something interesting to be discovered about how it was built? You mean beyond the ideas of using ramps and wet sand?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I love the Great Pyramids as a kind of puzzle that was created by the ancient peoples to be solved by later peoples. I mean, this is, I don't know if you're aware of the 10,000 year clock. That was built by Jeff Bezos and Danny Hillis in Sierra Diablo Mountains in Texas. So they're building a clock that ticks once a year for 10,000 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So it's talking about, and it's supposed to sort of run, you know, if there's a nuclear apocalypse, it just runs. And it's an example of modern humans thinking like, okay, if 10,000 years from now and beyond, if something goes wrong or the future humans that are way different come back and they,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
they analyze what happened here how can we create monuments that they could then analyze yeah and in that way be curious about in in their curiosity discover some deep truths about this current time it's an interesting kind of notion of like what can we build now that would last and the answer is that the majority of what we build now wouldn't last wouldn't uh would be it would be gone uh within a few thousand years
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, you're one such human, and you said you contemplate your own death. Are you afraid of it? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And Graham, thank you so much for inspiring the world to explore that mystery. Thank you for talking today. Thank you, Lex. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Graham Hancock. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
The following is a conversation with Paul Rosalie, his second time on the podcast. But this time, we did the conversation deep in the Amazon jungle. I traveled there to hang out with Paul, and it turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime. I will post a video capturing some aspects of that adventure in a week or so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Our time in the jungle was very hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And there's like a faith in that interaction that eventually we'll find clean water because water's plentiful on earth. It's kind of like a delusional faith that eventually we'll find. And it was just like a little celebration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think the cooling aspect of the water, because the body temperature is really high from traversing the really dense jungle, and just the cooling was somehow grounding in a way that nothing else really is. Yeah, it was a little celebration of life, of life on Earth, of Earth, of the jungle, of everything. It was a nice moment. I think about that. Had a couple of those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's one in the puddle and one in the river. One was full of delusion and fear and the other one was full of relief and celebration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, it's something that, I haven't trained, I don't even know how you would train for that kind of thing, but it's extremely dense jungle. So every single step is like completely unpredictable in terms of the terrain your foot interacts with. So the different variety of slippery,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
that is on the jungle floor is fascinating because some things, I mean, the slope matters, but some roots of trees are slippery, some are not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Some trees in the ground already rotted through, so if you step through, you're going to potentially fall through, so it could be a shallow hole or it could be a very deep hole with some leaves and vegetation covering up a hole where if you fall through, you could break a leg and completely lose your footing or fall rolling down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And if you roll downhill, I'm pretty sure there's a 99% probability that you'll hit a thing with spikes on it. So there's so many layers of avoiding dangers of small dangers and big dangers all around you with every single step. So there's like a mental exhaustion that sets in, like just the perception. And you're just observing you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You're extremely good at perceiving, having situational awareness of taking the information in that's really important and filtering out the stuff that's not important. But even for you, that's exhausting. And for me, it was completely exhausting, just paying attention, paying attention to everything around you. So that exhaustion was surprising.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Cause it's like, there's moments when you're like, I don't give a damn anymore. I'm just going to step. I'm just going to like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And then there's just bad luck because there is wasp nests. There's just like a million things. And that is physically, is mentally, psychologically exhausting because there's the uncertainty. When is this going to end? It's up in our particular situation, up and down hills, up and down hills, very steep downward, very steep upward, no water, all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's the most difficult thing I've ever done physically. but it's very difficult to describe what are the parameters that make it difficult. Because I run long distances very regularly. I do extremely difficult physical things regularly that on some surface level could seem much more challenging than what we did. But no, this was another beast. This is something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But it was also raw and real and beautiful because it's like... It's what the explorers did. Yeah. It's what Earth is without humans. And also just like the massive scale of the trees around us. was the humbling size difference between human and tree. It's both humbling in that, like, that tree is really old. It's the time difference, lifetime difference, and just the scale. It's like, holy shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We live on an earth that can create those things. It makes me feel small in every way. That life is short. That my physical presence on this earth is tiny. How vulnerable I am. All of those feelings are there. And in that, the physical endurance of traversing the jungle, yeah, was the hardest journey that I remember ever taking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Just sitting there with you, Paul, and with JJ in the water. full darkness, the rain coming down, and us all just laughing, having made it through that, having eaten a bit of food before, and the absurdity of the timing of all of it that it somehow worked out, and how we're just three little humans sitting in a river.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What a life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That was a real one. Yeah. I'll never forget that. So it's a real honor to have shared that. Of course, we had very different experiences. When you saw a caiman in that situation, you're like, I have to go meet that guy that's in front of me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And also that like very different life trajectories have taken these three humans into this one place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah. It's like what is this universe that would like, because we're kind of like those moths. You know what I mean? Like we come from some weird place on this earth and we have all kinds of shit happen to us and we're all pursuing some shit and some light and we ended up here together enjoying this moment. That's something else. It just felt absurd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And in that absurdity was this like real human joy. And damn water tasted good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Fuck. I think there's something to be said about like the fact that we didn't think through much of that and we just dived into it. I think there was like, we're like laughing, enjoying ourselves moments before. And once you go in, you're like, oh shit. Oh shit. And you just come face to face with it. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Like, what did you see in the snake's eyes? How did you sense that this is not the right, this is gonna be your end if you proceed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think that's what, you know, whatever that is in humans that goes to that, that's what the explorers do. And the best of them do it to the extreme levels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It somehow works out. It does seem to somehow work out. Let me ask you about Jane Goodall, another explorer of a different kind. What do you think about her? About her role in understanding this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. It's a software designed to save you time and money on fulfillment, shipping stuff that you sell on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So I started reading the River of Doubt book you recommended to me on Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah. So that guy's badass on many levels, but I didn't realize how much of a naturalist he was, how much of a scholar of the natural world he was. So that book details his journey into the Amazon jungle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Um, what do you find inspiring about Teddy Roosevelt and that whole journey of just saying, fuck it, of going to the Amazon jungle of taking on that expedition?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But going to the jungle on many levels is really difficult for him at that time. There's so many more things even than now that can kill you. All the different infections, everything. And the lack of knowledge, just the sheer lack of knowledge. So that truly is an expedition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So they also mapped. So on the biology side, it's interesting. But they mapped and documented a lot of the unknown geography and biodiversity. What does it take to do that? So when I see a move about the jungle, you're always like, you capture a creature, take a picture, write down, like, so you can...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
find new creatures, find new things about the jungle, document them, sort of a scientific perspective on the jungle. But back then, there was even less known, much less known about the jungle. So what do you think it takes to document, to map that world and new unexplored wilderness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That book of birds you have, like encyclopedia of birds. Yo. What? The human achievement. In these pages. For people listening, Paul's just flipping through a huge number of pages. These are just, is this in the Amazon or is this in Peru?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Documenting all of that. I mean, there's also, which we got to experience, and you're pretty good at also, is actually making, understanding and making the sounds of the different birds. What's your favorite bird sound to make?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Curious almost. Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing, projecting onto it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And like you were saying, it's a reminder, oh, that's a friend of mine. Yeah. Surrounded by friends. I have so many friends here. What does it take to survive out here? What are some basic principles of survival in the jungle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So keeping the gear organized and all that, but also being willing to sort of improvise. I've seen you improvise very well because there's so much unknowns. There's so much chaos and dynamic aspects that like planning is not going to prevent you from having to face that in the end of the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Also, the texture of the scales is really fascinating. I mean, it's my first snake I've ever touched. It's so interesting. It was just such an incredible system of muscles that are all interacting together to make that kind of movement work and all the texture of its skin, of its scales. What do you love about snakes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I mean, the thing you mentioned, trees falling, that's a thing in the jungle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Holy shit. First of all, a lot of trees fall. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Who do you think would eat most of you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And we'll slowly look up and just kind of smile at the camera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's why you always have to look good. Any moment a tree can fall on you and a vulture just swoops in and eats your heart. That's right. We talked about it alone, this show, a bit. Yo. Rockhouse. Yeah. What do you think about that guy? Rockhouse, Roland Welker from season seven. He built the Rockhouse. He killed the Muscox with bow and arrow and then finished it with a knife.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's really mind-blowing. I mean, so for people who don't know, that shows you're supposed to survive as long as possible. On season seven of the show, they literally said you can only win it if you survive 100 days. And there's a lot of aspects of that show that's difficult, one of which is it's in the cold. The others, they get just a handful of supplies, no food, nothing, none of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So they have to figure all of that out. And this is probably one of the greatest performers on the show, Roland Welker. He built a rock house shelter. So what does survival entail? It's building a shelter. Fire, catching food, staying warm, getting enough energy to sort of keep doing the work. It takes a lot of work. Like building the rock house, I read that it took 500 calories an hour from him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
From my first experience with a snake to all the thousands of experiences you had with snakes, what do you love about these creatures?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So he had to feed himself, right? Quite a lot. You're lifting 200 pound boulders. And still the guy lost, I read, 44 pounds, which is 20% of his body weight. So that's survival. What lessons, what inspiration do you draw from him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, she maintained that sort of silliness, the goofiness all through it when the condition got really tough. And she had a very different perspective as, you know, Roland didn't want any of the spirituality. It's very pragmatic. Yeah. And for Callie, it's a very spiritual connection to the land. She said something like she wanted not only to take from the land, but to give back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I mean, there's this kind of poetic, spiritual connection to the land. It's such a dire contrast to Roland. Yeah. But she's still a badass. I mean, to survive, no matter what, no matter the kind of personality you have, you have to be a badass. I think she took a porcupine quill from her shoulder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Plus, if I remember correctly, I think she caught two porcupines. The second one was like rotting or something or infected. It had an infected body, whatever. It had the spots on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
She chose not to eat it. No, and then she chose not to eat it at first, and then she decided to eat it eventually. I forgot that. Yeah, and that was an insane, sort of really thoughtful, focused, collective decision, waiting a day and then saying, fuck it, I need this fat. And that was the other thing, is like fat is important. Oh, yeah. It's like meat is not enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You learn about like what are the different food sources there. Apparently there's like rabbit starvation is a thing because when you have too much lean meat, it doesn't nourish the body. Fat is the thing that nourishes the body, especially in cold conditions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And she didn't really lose, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So she got evac'd because her toe was going. Frostbite. Frostbite. 100 days. You think you can do 100 days?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You know, it's funny. Cause you sometimes feeling yourself in the jungle and you're alone. And there's a, another guy, uh, Jordan, uh, Jonas Hobo Jodo. Uh, he's the season six winner. And he said that the camera made him feel less lonely. Yeah. I've heard of him from multiple channels. One of the things is he spent all of his 20s living in Siberia with the tribes out there. Herzog, happy people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And so he actually talked about that. it's one of the loneliest time of his life because when he went up there, he didn't speak Russian and he needed to learn the language. And even though you have people around you, when you don't speak their language, it feels really, really lonely. And he felt less lonely on the show because he had the camera and he felt like he could talk to the camera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There is an element when you have, in these harsh conditions, if you like record something, you feel like you're talking to another human through it, even if it's just a recording. I sometimes feel that like, Maybe because I imagine a specific person that will watch it, and I feel like I'm talking to that person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You have to step up. That's one of the reasons I want a family. I think when you have kids, you have to be like, you have to be the best version of yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
How has your life changed since we last met? Speak about changing everything. So you've been, for people who don't know, pushing jungle keepers forward into uncharted territories, saving more and more and more and more rainforest. There's a lot, I could ask you about that. There's a lot of stories to be told there. It's a fight, it's a battle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's a battle to protect this beautiful area of rainforest, of nature. But since we last met, you've continued to make a lot of progress. So what's the story of Jungle Keepers leading up to the moment we met and after and everything you're doing right now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Friend with snake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Me friend snake. You said some of them are sometimes aggressive, some of them are peaceful. Is this a mood thing, a personality thing, a species thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But what's the approach? So trying to, with donations, to buy out more and more of the land and then protect it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So as long as you're producing something from the land, they don't see it as a loss that the nature was destroyed permanently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I ask that people donate to Jungle Keepers. You guys are legit. That money is going to go a long way. Junglekeepers.org. If you somehow were able to raise very large, so the raindrops would make a waterfall, a very large amount of money. I don't know what that number is, maybe $10 million, $20 million.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
30 million, what are the different milestones along the way that could really help you on the journey of saving the rainforest?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
some guy in a james bond suit was going to come down here with microphones and and that all of a sudden the world would know that he was on this quest to protect this this incredible ecosystem and all those little aliens well that's all the important thing to remember that the the people that are cutting down the forest the loggers are also human beings their families they're they're they're basically trying to survive and they're desperate and they're doing the thing that will bring them money
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So they're just human beings at the core of it. If they have other options, if they have other options, they will probably choose to give their life to saving the community too. First and foremost, providing for their family. And after that, saving the community, helping the community flourish. And I think probably a lot of them love the rainforest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You know? It's all about just providing people options. There's some dark stuff on the gold mine stuff you've talked about. You showed me parts of the rainforest where the gold mines are, and they're just kind of erasing the rainforest. Yeah. Sort of at the edges, that's when the mining happens. And it's this ugly...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
this ugly process of they're just destroying the jungle just for the surface layer of the sand or whatever that they process to collect just little bits of gold. And there's also very dark things that happen along the way as the communities around the gold mines are created. So the entirety of the moral system that emerges from that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
has things like prostitution where one third of the of the women that are drawn into that sex traffic and prostitution are minors under you know under 17 years old 13 to 17 year old there's just a lot of really really dark stuff i think that we have
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, I've read an article that said an estimated 1,200 girls between ages of 12 and 17 are forcibly drafted into child prostitution around the communities in the gold mines. At least one-third of the prostitutes in the camp are underage. Wow. The girls had ended up in the camp after receiving a tip that there were restaurants looking for waitresses and willing to pay top dollar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They jumped on a bus together and came down to the rainforest. What they found was not what they were expecting. The mining camp restaurants served food for only a few hours a day. The rest of the time, it was the girls themselves who were on the menu. Literally at the end of the road and without the money to return home, the girls would soon become trapped in prostitution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It integrates with Shopify and wherever else you sell stuff and allows businesses, medium, large, to just ship stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Is there a milestone in the near future that you're working towards financially in terms of donations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So tell me about the snake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
He's so tiny. He's so tiny. People listening, there's a snake in Paul's hands right now. It's very... It's long, of course, but very skinny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And as you were saying, it reaches up to the leaves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
In a state of vulnerability. Yeah. But bro, there's nothing cuter than a little puppy with a tongue. A baby ball python.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Baby king cobra. What's it take you for? Baby elephant. So what are they? They're like at a puddle and they just take it in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So one of the other fascinating life forms is other humans, but living a very different kind of life. So uncontacted tribes, what do you find most fascinating about them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What do you think they're, because you've spoken about them being dangerous. What do you think their relationship with violence is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We don't know their creation myths. So they have a very primitive existence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
First of all, do you think their nature is similar to ours? And how do their values differ from ours?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's a shotgun shell here, by the way. Yeah. From the loggers. Mm-hmm. Yeah, we picked that up yesterday. Was that yesterday? That was, I don't know. I don't know. One of the things that happens here is time loses meaning in some kind of deep way that it does when you're in a big city in the United States, for example, and there's schedules and meetings and all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It transforms the meaning, your experience of time, your interaction with time, the role of time, all of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It also puts in perspective, like, all the busyness, all the, uh... It kind of takes the ant out of the ant colony and says, hey, you're just an ant. This is just an ant colony and there's a big world out there. Yeah, it's a chance to be grateful, to celebrate this earth of ours and the things that make it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Worth living on, including the simple things that make the individual life worth living, which is water and then food. And the rest is just details. Of course, the friendships and social interaction, that's a really big one, actually. That one I'm taking for granted because I didn't get a chance yet to really spend time alone. Hmm. And when I came here, I've gotten a chance to hang out with you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And there's a kind of camaraderie. There's a friendship there. If that's broken, that's a tough one too. I mean, you spent quite a lot of time alone in the jungle. You ever get alone out here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I'm a huge fan of logistics and supply chains and looking at that incredibly complicated network of how one package gets from point A to point B. Part of that is the theoretical computer scientist in me because when you simplify that problem and formulate it as a graph theory problem, then you can perform all kinds of optimizations on it, which takes me back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You ever just get alone out here? Just like this sense of like existential dread of like what, you know, the jungle has a way of not caring about any individual organism. It just kind of churns. It's like, it makes you realize that life is finite quite intensely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So sometimes the needs are simple. They just don't have the words to communicate them to us humans. Yeah. And is it disinterest or is it fear? Almost like they don't notice us? Or is it where the unknown aspect of it, the uncertainty, is a source of danger?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And you take all those people in their nice dresses, in those fancy restaurants, and you put them in those conditions, they're all going to want the same thing, this water. Yes. It's all the same thing. All the beautiful people. How has your view of your own mortality evolved over your interaction with the jungle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Um, that'd be fun. That'd be a good one. A lot of people say that you carry the spirit of Steve Irwin. in your heart, in the way you carry yourself in this world. I mean, that guy was full of joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, I at least agree with that comparison. Having spent time with you, there's just an eternal flame of joy and adventure too. just pulling you, uh, a dark question, but do you think you might meet the same end giving your life in some way to something you love?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, just for the listener, we're walking through the jungle late at night. So it's darkness except our headlamps on. And then all of a sudden, Paul stops. He looks in the distance. He sees two eyes. I think you thought, is that a jaguar or is it a deer? And it was moving its head like this. Like scared or maybe trying to figure it, trying to localize itself, trying to figure out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, I hope you, like a Clint Eastwood character, just impossible to kill. I like how you squinted your eyes. On cue. Who do you think will play you in a movie?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, all right. Italian? Yeah. It's funny. Do you think of yourself as Italian or human? American?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Let's clarify. We, you mean a large fraction of the world. You know, I mentioned to you one of the biggest things I've noticed when I immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States is the... How plentiful bananas and pineapples were, the fruit section, the produce section of the... Didn't have to wait in line at the grocery store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Could just eat as many bananas and pineapples and cherries and watermelon as you want. That's... Not everybody has that. No, that's true. Not everybody has that, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's the thing that I also noticed is I don't think so much about politics when I'm here. We haven't even talked about it. Don't talk about the stupid differences between humans. Nah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So there is a force within nature that's always searching for order.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Trying to see around. You're doing the same to it. The two of you like moving your head. Yeah. And like deep into the jungle. Like, I don't know. It's pretty far away through the trees. You can still see it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
When you have lived here and taken in the ways of the Amazon jungle, how have your views of God, you mentioned, how have your views of God changed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's the thing to actually mention. I mean, with the headlamp, you see the reflection in their eyes. It's kind of incredible to see a creature, to try to identify a creature by just the reflection from its eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, thank you for being one of the humans trying to do good in this world. And thank you for bringing me along for some adventure. And I believe more adventure awaits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosalie. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Joseph Campbell. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Your definition of lucky is a complicated one. Yeah. It's a fascinating process when you see those two eyes trying to figure out what it is. And it is trying to figure out what you are in that process. Let's talk about caiman. We've seen a lot of different kinds of sizes. We've seen a baby one, a bigger one. Tell me about these 16-foot-plus apex predators of the Amazon rainforest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
to some of my favorite courses on the theory and the practice. So numerical optimization, when you're talking about nonlinear programming, and then the more theoretical stuff with convex programming. A particular kind of formulation of an optimization problem can be easy to solve or hard to solve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, like intelligence and agility versus like raw power and dominance. I mean, I got to handle some smaller caiman and just the power they had, you know, you scale that up to imagine what a 16 foot, even a 10 foot, any kind of black caiman, the kind of power they deliver. Maybe can you talk to that? Yeah. The power they can generate with their tail, with their neck, with their jaw.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's difficult to describe in words. There's a lot of power. And we're talking about the power of the neck. I mean, there's a lot. It can generate power all up and down the body. So probably the tail is a monster. But just the neck and, you know, not to mention the power of the bite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And the speed too, because the thing I saw and got to experience is how still and calm, at least from my amateur perspective, it seems calm, still, and then from that sort of zero to 60, you could just go wild. Just thrash it. And then there's also a decision it makes in that split second, whether as it thrashes, is it going to kind of bite you on the way or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
When I look at this world of logistics and shipping stuff from point A to point B, where there's like a million point As and a million point Bs, combinatorial madness of that, it's really exciting that there is systems that enable that all to work. Anyway, I'm glad ShipStation exists and I'm glad they're solving this tricky but extremely important problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So anything longer than you, you don't control the tail. You don't have, you have barely control. than anything really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, Mastiffs. I mean, you mentioned dinosaurs. What do you admire about black caiman? They've been... here for a very, very long time. There's something prehistoric about their appearance, about their way of being, about their presence in this jungle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They have this, they carry this wisdom and their power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
In the simplicity of their power, they carry the wisdom. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's going to be the remaining humans versus the crocs and the cockroaches. And the cockroaches are just background noise. Yeah, they'll always be there. Sons of bitches. You know, we're talking about individual black caiman and caiman and different species of caiman, but whenever they're together and you see multiple eyes, which I've gotten to experience, it's quite a feeling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Go to ShipStation.com slash Lex and use code Lex to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Yahoo Finance, a site that provides financial management reports, information, and news for investors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's just multiple eyes looking back at you. Of course, for you, that's immediate excitement. You immediately go towards that. You want to see it. You want to explore it. Maybe catch them, analyze what the species is, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Can you just describe that feeling when they're together and they're looking at you? So head above water, eyes reflecting the light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It included everything from getting lost in dense, unexplored wilderness with no contact to the outside world to taking very high doses of ayahuasca and much more. Paul, by the way, aside from being my good friend, is a naturalist, explorer, author, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the rainforest. For this mission, he founded Jungle Keepers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's humbling these giant creatures. And especially at night, like you were talking about. And for me, it's both scary and just beautiful when the head goes under. Because like underwater, it's their domain. So anything can happen. So what is it doing that its head is going under? It could be bored. It could be hungry, looking for some fish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I use it for the cool little feature of it letting you add your portfolio and thereby letting you monitor it and get news about real agent things. So they have a TD Ameritrade account and mutual fund there, which I guess got switched over to Charles Schwab. So there's a really nice interface that lets you monitor that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It could be maybe wanting to come closer to you to investigate. Maybe you have some food around you. Maybe it's an old friend of yours and just wants to say hi. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That said, you know, you protect your friends and you analyze and study your friends. But sometimes friends can have a bit of a misunderstanding. And if you have a bit of a misunderstanding with a black caiman, I feel like just a bit of a misunderstanding could lead to a bone crushing situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, I think it's something about you where you become like this portal through which it's possible to see nature is not threatening, but beautiful. And so in that you kind of naturally by hanging out with you, I get to see the beauty of it. There is danger out there, but the danger is part of it. Just like there's a lot of danger in the city. There's danger in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's a lot of ways to get hurt emotionally, physically. There's a lot of ways to die in the stupidest of ways. We went on an expedition to the forest, just twisting your ankle, breaking your foot. getting a bite from a thing that gets infected. There's a lot of ways to die and get hurt in the stupidest of ways in a non-dramatic came and eating you alive kind of way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But of course, as part of that interface, you can also see news of the crazy stuff that's going on in the markets. It gives you an insight in what the people who really have money invested in the success of companies are thinking about, where they're excited about, where they're cynical about, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They eat baby rabbits and mice. Well, in the case of apex predators, I think when people say dangerous animals... They really are talking about just the power of the animal. And the Black Camel have a lot of power. A lot of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We talked about the scales of the snake with like, they came in just the way it felt was incredible. Just the armor, the texture was so cool. I don't know, like the bottom one came in and had a certain kind of texture. And it just all feels like power, but also all feels like designed really well. It's like exploring through touch, like a World War II tank or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's the engineering that went into this thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That like... The mechanism of evolution that created a thing that could survive for such a long time. It's just incredible. This is a work of art. The defense mechanisms, the power of it, the damage it can do, how effective it is as a hunter, all of that. You can feel that just by touching it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
In the water, I mean, we talked also about hippos. Those are interesting creatures from all the way across the world. Just monsters. Yeah. Hippos and rhinos. Hippos are bigger, usually, or rhinos are bigger. Rhinos. Rhinos, after elephants, is the largest white rhinos. They can be terrifying too, again, when you step into the defense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's a nice lens that we should see the world, one that contrasts with a more kind of political and geopolitical lens, which I often look at, and also contrasts with the historical lens. You know, I read a lot of history books, and there, time is slowed down. The ephemeral ups and downs of every day are not as important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So for young people out there, you think you're having trouble, think about that turtle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Oh, shit. What a world we live in. So it's interesting, you mentioned black caiman and anacondas are both apex predators. So it seems like the reason they can exist in similar environments is because they feed on slightly different things. How is it possible for them to coexist? I read that anacondas can eat caiman, but not black caiman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But of course, when you're living in the moment, in the day, this week, the ups and downs of the world are extremely important. And especially if you have money invested in certain small slices of that world. So I use Yahoo Finance for monitoring that perspective on the world. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, go to yahoofinance.com. That's yahoofinance.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Can you actually explain how the anaconda would take down a caiman? Like, would it first use constriction and then eat it, or what's the methodology?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And you'd be like the coach on the sideline screaming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
and someone said but it's able to digest oh it's some kind of mucus oh like the mucus there's a lot oh interesting there's levels of protection from the anaconda itself but it seems like the anaconda is such a simple system as an organism like that simplicity taking a scale it could just do the can swallow a caiman digested slowly i know but my question was how how on earth is it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need to match with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It works for individuals, it works for couples. I remember seeing numbers, crazy numbers, like 350 million messages, chat, phone, video sessions. Over 35,000 licensed therapists. over 4.4 million people that got help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So what does it feel like being crushed, choked by an anaconda?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Do something. But yeah, but there's the specialization of a lifetime of doing damage to the world and using those muscles. It just makes you that much more powerful than most humans because humans, I guess, have more brain, so they get lazy. They start puzzle solving versus using the biceps directly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, I mean like you and I were like half dead running up a mountain. Meanwhile, there's a grandma just like walking and she's been walking that road and she's just built different. With her alpaca on her shoulders. With a baby. They're just built different when you apply your body in a physical way your whole life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's exactly what I feel like when you give him a hug. This is definitely a chimp of some sort. How does that, just the constriction of the anaconda, just the feeling of that, are they doing that based on instinct or is there some brain stuff going on? Like, is this just like a basic procedure that they're doing and they just really don't give a damn? They're not like thinking, oh, Paul,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Talking about a network. So I was just talking about the logistics of shipping stuff from A to B. Here's the logistics of the human psyche. The collective intelligence and the collective psyche of the human species seeking to explore the shadow of the individual minds. But in so doing, exploring the collective shadow of our species. It'd be cool to visualize all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
This is this kind of species. It would taste good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Now here's the question. If the mosquito is stupid and you can't catch it, what does that make you? Fuck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You actually mentioned to me, just on the topic of anacondas, that you've been participating in a lot of scientific work on the topic. So really, in everything you've been doing here, you are celebrating the animals, you're respecting the animals, you're protecting the animals, but you're also excited about studying the animals and their environment. So you're actually a co-author on a paper
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
on a couple of papers, but one of them is on anacondas and studying green anaconda hunting patterns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So in the shallow stream, it moves not just in the water, but in the sand. Yeah. So it also likes to borrow a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Anyway, we're just individuals. We don't have a way to take the perspective of the species. We only have our own mind, our own conscious mind and the subjective view that it provides of the world. So for that subjective view, It's good to clean the lens, so to speak, every once in a while, and that's what I think talk therapy does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So by doing these kinds of studies, you figure out how they move about the world, what motivates them in terms of when they hunt, where they hide in the world, as the size of the anaconda change. So all of that, those are scientific studies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
By the way, the rocket ships are shaped that way for efficiency purposes, not because they wanted to make it look like a penis. Speaking of which, I've ran across a lot of penis trees while exploring. Have you? And make me very... I know it's not just a figment of my imagination. I'm pretty sure they're real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And BetterHelp is super easy, discreet, affordable, available everywhere, so you should definitely try it at betterhelp.com slash lex, and if you go there, you'll save it in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
In fact, you explained it to me and they make me very uncomfortable because there's just a lot of penises hanging off of a tree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I don't know what the purpose is. I don't know who they're supposed to attract, but it certainly makes...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I haven't even seen them. There was a time where I almost fell and to catch my balance, I had to grab one of the penises of the penis tree and unforgettable. Anaconda, the biggest, baddest anaconda in the Amazon versus the biggest, baddest black caiman. Because you mentioned they're like, there's a race. If there's a fight, this is UFC and Cage who wins underwater.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
This is the biggest and the baddest. The biggest and the baddest. that you can imagine given all the studies you've done of the two animals, species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
How fast is the construction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So the black caiman would bite somewhere close to the head and just try to hold on and thrash?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So like a giant anaconda and a giant black caiman, they could probably even coexist in the same environment, just knowing, using the wisdom to avoid the fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
As I was deep in nature, disconnected completely from the world, and the sounds of the urban world, no machinery, no people, nothing, just nature. You can hear water, you can hear the wind, you can hear the animals, the insects, the little and the big, and just that, no people. So, as I was in that, I got a chance to really think about the productive world, let's say, the world of companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They're up here. I haven't seen it. And Jimmy has been living there his whole life. His whole life. There's pumas in the mountains?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think you're saying pumas have a curiosity, have a way about them where they, like, explore, like, follow people. Like, just to kind of figure out, like, just that curiosity, as opposed to causing harm or hunting and that kind of stuff. Like, what is this about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They're gathering information. I wonder how complex and sophisticated their world model is. Like how they're integrating all the information about the environment, like where all the different trees are, where all the different nests of the different insects are, what the different creatures are by size, all that kind of stuff. I'm sure they don't have enough,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
you know, storage up there to like keep all that, but they probably keep the important stuff. You know, so sort of integrate the experiences they have into like what is dangerous, what is tasty, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
By the way, we're walking just exactly the same area, also exact same time. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
One of the things you do when you turn off the headlamp, complete darkness all around you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And it is indeed, out of the many things that make me happy, it is one of the things that makes me really happy, and that is to build, to create stuff in this world that helps people, whether that is as an individual programmer or on a larger scale by starting a company. All of that makes me truly happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Except for the times over the last few days when we walked on through jungle without a trail. And that's just a different experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Every step is really hard work. Every step is a puzzle. Every step is a full possibility of hurting yourself in a multitude of ways. You're just a wasp nest under a leaf, a hole under a leaf on the ground where if you step in it, you're going to break a knee, ankle, leg, and going to not be able to move for a long time. There's all kinds of ants that can hurt you a little or can hurt you a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Bullet ants. There's snakes and spiders. Oh, yeah. My favorite that I've gotten to know intimately is different plants with different defensive mechanisms, one of which is just spikes. So sharp. I don't know if you brought it, but there's... I didn't bring it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Where's my club? There's an epic club with the spikes, but there's so many trees that have spikes on them. Sometimes they're obvious spikes, sometimes less than obvious spikes. And, you know, it could be just an innocent, as you take a step through a dense jungle, it could be an innocent placing of a hand on that tree that could just
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
completely transform your experience, your life, by penetrating your hand with like 20, 30, 40, 50 spikes. And just changing everything. That's just a completely different experience than going on a trail where you're an observer of the jungle versus the participant of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And somehow in the jungle, full of gratitude to be able to exist on this beautiful earth, I also was full of gratitude for all the cool things that humans have built. But running a company is tricky, and that's what NetSuite helps with. In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. You can take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, the mammal paper is looking at the diversity of life in this one region of the Amazon. Can you talk more about that paper? Mammal diversity along the Les Piedras River.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
My general sort of amateur experience of the species I've encountered here is like, this should not exist. Whatever this is, this is not real. This is CGI. Like what? Just the colors, the weirdness. I mean, there's, I think I called it the Paris Hilton caterpillar because it's like furry. It looks like one of those little- Sounds like Paris Hilton's dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's like really furry and it's transparent and sort of, it's transparent. All you see is this white, beautiful fur and it's just like this caterpillar. It doesn't look real. Do you think there are species- Like how many species have we not discovered? And is there a species that are like extremely badass that we haven't discovered yet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And some of them could be extremely effective predators in a niche environment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep, and its new and amazing Pod 4 Ultra. One of the things when I was in the jungle, I mean, there's a few creature comforts that are taken away when you're out in nature, especially when you're deep out in nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And that's where a lot of the monkeys are. That's where there's just a lot of dynamic life up there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Sex and violence, or implied violence, or the threat of violence. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So just speaking of screaming, macaws are like these beautiful creatures. They're lifelong partners. They stick together. Monogamous. They're monogamous, so you see two of them together. But when they communicate, their love language seems to be very loud screaming. Yeah. What do you learn about relationships from a cause? That it can be loud and rough and still be loving. And still be loving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But is that interesting to you that there's like monogamy in some species that they're lifelong partners and then there's like total lack of monogamy in other species?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
If every jungle creature was the same size, Oh boy. who would be the new apex predator, the new alpha at the top of the food chain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And of course, one of the things you remember is the ability to have a bed to go to that's not full of insects and all that kind of stuff, but a bed that can be cool. Man, it would be amazing to get the A-sleep bed out. into the middle of the jungle, because it's hot out there. And to be able to cool down, which I do, with Eight Sleep would be a really cool experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah. Well, let's go bullet ant versus black caiman. Same size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, insects have just a tremendous amount of, like, strength. I don't know how they generate what the geometry of that is. The natural world can't create that same kind of power in the bigger thing, it seems like. It seems like. It seems like ants and... like just these tiny creatures are the ones that are able to have that much strength. I don't know how that works, what the physics of that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You can help him if you go to junglekeepers.org. This trip for me was life-changing. It expanded my understanding of myself and of the beautiful world I'm fortunate to exist in with all of you. So I'm glad I went and I'm glad I made it out alive. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It doesn't make any sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, there might be a lot of the like... biophysics limits, you know. Fascinating stuff. Just like the interplay between biology, chemistry, and physics of like a life form. Because like this thing, there's a lot involved in creating a single living organism that could survive in this world. And bigger... Being big is not always good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Being a big creature, for many reasons, like you were saying, the big creature seems to be going extinct for many reasons. But in the human world, it's because they seem to be of higher value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And we humans are social beings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Anyway, they've upgraded from Pod 3 to Pod 4. So Pod 4 does 2x the cooling power. And they also added a super cool thing called Pod 4 Ultra, which has an extra base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame. that can control the positioning of the bed so it can elevate you, say, to like a reading position.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, it's a family thing. You mentioned piranhas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What do you think, you know, they're a source of a lot of fear from people. What do you find beautiful and fascinating about these creatures? They're also kind of social, or at least they hunt and operate in groups.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, so fish is a food source for so many creatures in the jungle. So they're primarily a food source. But piranhas are...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Bite off a little bit and then makes you vulnerable. And then that vulnerability is exploited by some other species. And then that's it. That's the end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So if you kill an animal, you want to use it to its fullest by using it as a food source, by cooking it, by eating every part of it, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's a really, really cool idea on many fronts, including like you have this integrated system that does the sensing of the sleep time and the sleep phase and the HRV and heart rate and all that kind of stuff. It does the cooling of both sides of the bed separately, and now we can control the positioning of the bed. It's crazy. I really love it when products keep rapidly evolving, improving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, humans using them for sustenance, there's a collaboration there. That's something also that I've seen in the jungle, that there's creatures using each other, and it's like a dance of either mutually using each other, or it's parasitic, or symbiotic, It's interesting. There's a medicinal plant you grabbed that was full of ants that were trying to murder you by biting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They were defending the plant that they were using for whatever purpose. There's a clear dance there of the ants using the plant and the plant existing there for... other applications and other use for humans. And there's that kind of circle of life happening, but the ants were a defense. So the, the plant didn't have its own defense mechanism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
The ants, the army of ants was there to protect the plant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, surprisingly painful. Because they're small. There's nothing like... Luckily, I've not been bitten by a bullet ant yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's really exciting to me. Go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I used it in just a few minutes to create an online store, lexfreeman.com slash store, to sell a few shirts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
a source of a lot of existential confusion for me is ants and the intelligence of different creatures in the forest. There's these giant colonies, there's just giant systems, but even just looking at a single colony of ants, them collaborating, leafcutter ants, is an incredible system. So individually, the ants seem kind of dumb and simplistic, but taken together, there is a vast intelligence
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's able to be robust and resilient in any kind of conditions. It's able to figure out a new environment. It's able to be resilient to any kinds of attacks and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's their part. Oh, that everybody plays a part in the entirety of the nature mechanism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We should mention that there's this one source of light and we're shrouded in darkness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It can be a small store, it can be a gigantic store, and it all is super easy, and they have a lot of third-party apps that are integrated seamlessly in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, the diversity of organisms here. is the biggest celebration of life. That is at the core of what makes Earth a really special thing. That said, you and I have been arguing about aliens for pretty much the day I showed up here. All right, you brought a machete to this fight. Luckily, the table is long enough. I can't reach. You can't reach me. See, to you, Earth is truly special. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
For example, including on-demand printing, so I can just add a shirt there, and then you have a bunch of companies that do on-demand printing that print the shirt and ship the shirt and take care of the fulfillment and all that kind of stuff, and all of it is seamlessly integrated, super easy to monitor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You don't think there's other Earths out there, millions of other Earths in our galaxy. When you look up, you know, we're sitting in the Amazon River. Okay. At dark, the storm rolled over. Yeah. And you started counting the stars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
One, two. And that was, once you can count the stars, that was a sign that the storm will actually pass. Eventually it will pass. And that's what you were doing. Three, four, five. And it's going to pass. You're not going to have to sit in that river for like all night. So just a couple hours to keep yourself warm. Okay. Each of those stars, there's Earth-like planets around them. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Why do you think there's not alien civilizations there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Once again, there's a kind of theme in this discussion of networks, of networks of human buying and selling, shipping, communicating, all of that. And I'm just so glad that people have created...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We are the most intelligent animal. So one, I agree with you. There's some degree to which when you imagine aliens, you forget for a moment how special and important life is here on Earth. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
through curiosity and trying to understand what is intelligence, what is consciousness, what is exactly the thing that makes life on Earth special. Another way of doing that, and I see the jungle in that same way, is basically treating the animals all around us, the life forms all around us, as kinds of aliens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
systems, products, services, many of which are available online to connect humans together and let humans do their human things and help them flourish and enjoy life in all the ways that life can be enjoyed in the 21st century. Thank you to Shopify and thank you for all the sponsors of this podcast that are helping create systems of that nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's a humbling way, that's an intellectual humility with which to approach the study of like, what the hell is going on here? This is truly incredible. Are the animals we've met over the last few days conscious? What is the nature of their intelligence? What is the nature of their consciousness? What motivates them? Are they individual creatures or are they actually part of the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
large system and how large is the system? Is Earth one big system and humans are just little fingertips of that system? Or are each of the individual animals really the key actors and everything else is in the emerging complexity of the system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So I think thinking about aliens is a necessary, I like my Tom with a little drop of poison from Tom Waits, is a necessary perturbation of the system of our thinking To sort of say, hey, we don't know what the fuck's going on around here. Sure. And aliens is a nice way to say, okay, the mystery all around us is immense. Because to me, likely, aliens are living among us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Not in a trivial sense, little green men, but the force that created life. I think permeates the entirety of the universe, that there is a force that's creative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You believe that? Not like 100%, but there's a good percentage. I don't understand how it's possible for there not to be a very large number of alien civilization throughout just our galaxy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think there's no Bigfoot, there's no trivial manifestations of aliens. I think if they're here, they're here in ways that are not comprehensible by humans because they're far more advanced than humans are. They're far more advanced than any life forms on Earth. So even if it's just their probes, we cannot just even comprehend it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think it's possible that they operate in the space of ideas, for example. That ideas could be aliens. Feelings could be aliens. Consciousness itself could be aliens. So we can't restrict our understanding of what is a life form to a thing that is a biological creature that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
operates via natural selection on this particular planet it could be much much much more sophisticated it could be in the space of computation for example as we in the 21st century are developing increasingly sophisticated computational systems with artificial intelligence it could be operating on some other level that we can't even imagine
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It could be operating on a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand. We barely understand quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is a way we use to make very accurate predictions, but to understand why It's operating that way. We don't. And there's so many gigantic, powerful, cosmic entities out there that we detect. Sometimes can't detect dark matter, dark energy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But it's out there. We know it exists. but we can't explain why and what the fuck it is. We give it names, black holes and dark energy and dark matter, but those are all names for things that mathematical equations predict, but we don't understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Rosalie. Where are we right now, Paul? Lex, we are in the middle of nowhere. It's the Amazon jungle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
All of that is just to say that aliens could be here in ways that are for now, and maybe for a long time, going to be impossible for humans to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
The only way I can imagine finding physical aliens is if alien species are trying to communicate with us humans or with other life forms and are trying to figure out a way to communicate with us such that we dumb humans would understand. Like, let's create a thing
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, so it is true that we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, but it also is true that that snake that I got to handle yesterday is like one of the most beautiful things Earth has ever created. And in that little organism is encapsulated the entire history of Earth. And it's beautiful. So both things are true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We should worry about the existential destruction of human civilization through the weapons we create. And we should become... multi-planetary species as a backup for that purpose. But also remember that this place is really, really special and probably, if not difficult, probably impossible to recreate elsewhere. And by the way, there's something incredibly powerful about a skull.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You know, not a direct ancestry, but there's a, it's like a, you know, like you're looking at a puddle at a reflection. A little blurry, but it's still there. It's still there. And like the roots of who we are is still there. And it's all kind of incredible. Do you ever think of the tree of life? Just kind of like where we came from? Yeah. The jungle is ephemeral.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's a system that just keeps forgetting because it's just churning and churning and churning and churning. It has, in some ways, no history. But to create the jungle, to create life on Earth, there's a deep history of lots of death, sex and death. A festival of sex and death. Life on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
The male competition continues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's vegetation, there's insects, there's all kinds of creatures. A million heartbeats, a million eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So at the sphere, the postcard from Earth, I mean, it's a celebration of Earth. Yeah. In all forms. And one of the critical big creatures in that film is an elephant. And it steps over the audience and the whole sphere reverberates that power. I mean, some of it is size. Yeah. Some of it is like, how did Earth create this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It is a weird looking creature, but we take it for granted because we've accepted that this Earth can't create this kind of thing, but it is weird, beautifully weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah. And it's cool to hear that, you know, with the crushing and the pride of the young elephant, that there's a complexity of behavior. It's just like with humans. I mean, you know. Yeah, it's not always pretty. That's the thing, man. Humans are capable of good and evil. And sometimes we attach these words. I love that there's just... It's an orchestra of different sounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
All right. Good luck to you, buddy. Good hunting. You know, humans are capable... Evil things and beautiful things and I wonder if animals are the same You think there's just different personalities and different life trajectories for animals like as they develop in their understanding of social interaction of Survival of maybe even primitive concepts of right and wrong within the social system
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Do you think there is a lot of diversity in personalities and behavior? Just like different people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What are all the creatures right now, if they wanted to, could cause us harm?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So that regulation mechanisms from that emerges a kind of moral system under which they operate. What's right and wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, the value of child life is different from species to species. Some of them hold the sacred, some of them not at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Just to zoom out into the ridiculous questions, as we were talking about aliens, there's a lot of people trying to understand, trying to study the origin of life. Oh, I love this. First of all, what do you think is life versus non-life? Like when you look at like ants or even like the simplest of organisms, we saw a frog in a stream yesterday. That was like a leaf frog.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It was like as flat as a sheet of paper. And it does a lot of weird things. And it found a way to exist in this world. But that's a single living organisms with a bunch of components to it. But there's a life form that exists in this world. What is the difference between that and a rock? What is the essence of that life? This might be an unanswerable question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's probably a chemistry, physics, biology way of answering that. What to you is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I see this so many in very simple mathematical models, like something called Game of Life, their cellular automata. You could see from simple rules and simple objects, when they're interacting together, as you grow that system, complex objects arise. Like that emergence of complexity is not understood by science, by mathematics at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And it seems like from primordial soups, you can get a lot of cool shit. And the force of getting from soup to like two humans on microphones. Yeah. not understood and it seems to be a thing that happens on Earth. I tend to think that it's a thing that happens everywhere in the universe and there's some deep force that's pushing this along in some way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That there's something we, I don't want to sort of simplify it, but there is something that creates complexity out of simplicity that we don't quite understand. And that's the thing that created the first organism, living organism on earth. That like leap from no life to life on earth, that's a weird one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And the bacteria stuck around for a long time. A billion, two billion years. It's just very, very long. Just bacteria. Just bacteria. But a lot of them. A lot of them. There's probably a lot of innovation, a lot of murder, a lot of interaction. Yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, there's, there's a bit, a few big leaps along the history of life on earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You know, the predator prey dynamic, that was a really cool innovation. It's almost like innovations like featured on iPhone. It's like, it's nice. Like a predator prey, uh, eukaryotes. So complex multicellular organisms, uh, emerging from the water to land. That was weird. That was an interesting innovation. Whatever led to humans, there's a lot of interesting stuff there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Not to give any spoilers, but Postcard from Earth, Darren Aronofsky's film, the idea there is there's probes that are sent out from Earth to all these other planets. And each probe contains two humans, a man and a woman. And those two humans are in love. So think of a couple in love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They're sent there with all the information, basically a leaf that holds the information of what it takes to create life on other planets, to recreate on Earth and other planets. And the two humans hold all the information together. for the things that make life on earth special, especially in human civilization is love, consciousness, the, the, the social connection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So all that information is sent in the probe and the postcard from earth is, uh, those humans waking up, remembering all the information that is earth, that more like a celebration of, all the things that make Earth magical throughout its history, all the diversity of organisms, all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You're loading all that in to create life on that new planet, which is something I think alien civilizations are doing. They're sending probes all throughout the galaxy, and they just haven't arrived yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Among many things, you're also an artist who's trying to convert the thing that is nature into a thing that we humans can understand. The complexity, the beauty of it. That's what Darren Aronofsky tried to do with those couple of films. That's something that I hope you do. Actually, in the medium of film, too. That would be very interesting. And you do that in the medium of books, currently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
How much do you think we understand about the history of life on Earth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We got ShipStation for fulfillment, Yahoo Finance for investors, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, 8sleeve for naps, and Shopify for selling stuff on the internet. Choose wise, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, I tend to believe that we mostly don't understand anything, but there is an optimism in continuously figuring out the puzzle. Sure. We offline talked about the Graham Hancock, Flynn Dibble debate on Rogan. I like debates personally. So Flynn Dibble represents mainstream archaeology. And I actually like the whole...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
science, the whole field of archaeology, you're trying to figure out history with so little information. You're trying to put together this puzzle when you have so little. And you're desperately clinging on to little clues. And from those clues, using the simple possible explanation to understand. And now with modern technology, as Flint was trying to express,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
that you can use large amounts of data that's like imperfect, but just the scale and using that to reconstruct civilizations. There are different practices from the little details of what kind of things they eat, how they interact with each other, what kind of art they create to when they existed, what are the timeframes, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And that starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding. But still, the error bars are large in terms of what really happened. And that leaves room for things like Graham Hancock talks about like lost civilizations, which I like also because it gives you have a kind of humility about maybe there's giant things we don't know about or we got completely wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And that's always good to like remember.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I mean, there's methods of trying to figure that out, but really, again, the error bars are so large that it's almost like we're trying to create a narrative that makes sense for us. You know, that I'm 10% Neanderthal, therefore I can bench press this much, and therefore my aggressive tendencies have an explanation, when in reality there's so much diversity of personalities that they far overshadow
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But there is, each of those animals, like you described, have a kind of radius of defense. So if you accidentally step into its home, into that radius, it can cause harm. Or make them feel threatened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Don't hit me again. Don't choke me out again. Yeah, man. One of the things you and I talk a lot about is different explorers. Yeah. Who do you think is... I'm just throwing ridiculous questions one after the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, let me actually push back. You have that explore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There is definitely a thing in you, just me having observed you behave in the jungle and in the world, you're pulled towards exploration, towards adventure, towards the possibility of discovering something beautiful, including like a small little creature or like a whole new part of the rainforest, a part of the world that is like, holy shit, this is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think that's the same kind of imperative. So maybe not going out to the stars, but like- Like, I could see you doing exactly the same thing. So he disappeared in 1925 during an expedition to find an ancient lost city, which he and other people believed existed in the Amazon rainforest. So there's that pull. Like, I'm going to go into there with shitty equipment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
with the possibility of finding something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Can you explain what the purpose of the machete in this situation is? What is a machete? How does it work? How does it allow you to navigate in this exceptionally dense environment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You cut a fish head off with a machete by like, it was swimming. And then you basically, you know, macheted the water. And the other fascinating thing about that fish without its head, it kept moving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It was just using, I guess, its nervous system to swim beautifully. I mean, there's so many questions there about how nature works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And he was delicious. Yeah. And I'm grateful for his existence and for his role and for my existence on this planet, this brief existence, that I was able to enjoy that delicious, delicious fish. So the machete is used to cut through this extremely dense jungle. This is vines, by the way. This is rope-like things that are extremely strong. And they go all kinds of directions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They go horizontal and all of this. I don't even... We have a tree right above us. That makes no sense. There's like a tree that kind of failed and then a new tree was created on top of it. It just makes no sense. It feels like sometimes trees come from the... uh, from the sky. Sometimes they come from the ground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I don't, I don't really quite understand the, how that works because there's new trees that grow on old trees and the old trees rot away and the new trees come up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So, you know, back to Percy Fawcett and exploration. What do you think it was like for him back then, 100 years ago? Goddamn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So that moment of stasis that is life is going to end abruptly when you interact with one of those. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
If you're able to tune into the, that frequency, I feel like you're, you and JJ are able to tune to the, to the frequency of the jungle that is a provider, not a destroyer of human life, right? Yeah. Like, I think to be collaborated with, not fought against.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
This seemingly... Can I just pause at how incredibly beautiful it is that you could just reach to your right and grab a piece of the jungle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
No, like different world. Different value system. Different value system. Different relationship with violence and life and death, I think. We value life more. We value... We resist violence more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And they celebrated it too. They celebrated it. And direct violence too, like taking that machete and murdering me. Or if I got to the machete first, me murdering you. Not a chance, bitch. And then I would put it on Instagram and show off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Meanwhile, I emerge from the jungle of blood around me with a machete and I take over your Instagram account. He's very humble. He doesn't want to hear about the love. All right. So what do you think makes a great explorer? Whether it's Percy Fawcett, Richard Evan Schultes. By the way, say who Richard Evan Schultes is. He's a biologist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So that's another lens through which to be an explorer is to study the... the biology, the immense diversity of biological life all around us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Like we're going through the dense jungle yesterday. Yeah. And you slide down the hill, your foot slips, you slide down, and then you find yourself staring a couple feet away from a Bushmaster snake. What are you doing? You're, for people who somehow don't know, are somebody who loves, admires snakes, who has met thousands of snakes, has worked with them, respects them, celebrates them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, he wrote The Plants of the Gods, Their Sacred Healing and the Hallucinogenic Powers. That is interesting. You mentioned how to discover that. How do you find those incredible plants, those incredible things? things that can warp your mind in all kinds of ways. Of course, physically heal, but also take you on a mental journey. That's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So you don't think trial and error is possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What do you think exists in the spirit world that could be found by taking that journey?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's a really good way of looking at it. It's a big house, and you get to open doors that you've never had before and discover what rumors are there inside you. You ever think about that, like that there's parts of yourself you haven't discovered yet, or maybe you've been suppressing? How much are you exploring the shadow? Oh, boy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So say you, me, Carl Jung, and Jordan Peterson are in a deserted island together. Fuck, I didn't even make my bed today. There's no bed in an island.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What would you do with a Bushmaster snake?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You're grounded. Things are simpler. You're back inside the video game. What are the chances you think we're actually living in a video game?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
No, there's a main player. Usually that's not going to be God. God is the thing that creates the video game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And there's somebody that's our NPCs. Like, I'm an NPC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Jesus Christ. Yeah, you created me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You forget what fundamentally matters in life. What is the source of meaning in a human life? Uh, If you talk about such subjects, nevertheless, you could for a time stroll in the big philosophical questions. And if you do it for short enough a time, you won't forget about the things that matter. That there is human suffering, that there is real human joy. That is real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
The following is a conversation with Craig Jones, martial artist, world traveler, and one of the funniest people in the sport of submission grappling. While he does make fun of himself a lot, he is legitimately one of the greatest submission grapplers in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I train with many of them regularly and consider many of them friends, including Craig, Gordon, and of course, John Donaher, who I will talk to many, many more times on this podcast. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
The Patriot defense system is incredible. It's an incredible piece of technology. That's from the United States. It's expensive, but it's incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, it's human nature as well. It's not just Kyiv. It's Kharkiv. It's even Donbass, Kherson. People get accustomed to war quickly because it's impossible to suffer for long periods of time. So you adjust and you appreciate the things you still have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
We got Asleep for naps, Element for hydration, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business stuff, Shopify for selling stuff online, and ExpressVPN for privacy on the interwebs. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, there's a bunch of ways to get in touch with me. If you want to give feedback, go to lexfriedman.com slash survey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And it is now a minefield like a lot of parts of Ukraine. That's one of the dark, terrifying aspects of wars. How many mines are left? Even when the war ends for decades after there's mines everywhere because demining is extremely difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Why do you think you were able to get to Chernobyl? Why don't you think the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian soldiers don't see you as a threat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So your connection was actually Putin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
If you want to submit questions or videos or call-ins for me to answer on the podcast, go to lexfriedman.com slash AMA. And there's a bunch of other ways at lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And underneath the veil of nonstop sexualized Aussie humor and incessant online trolling, he is truly a kind-hearted human being who's trying to do good in the world. Sometimes, he does so through a bit of controversy and chaos, like with the new CGI tournament that has over $2 million in prize money, and it's coming up this Friday and Saturday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Artillery is terrifying because they're just shelling. And the destructive power of artillery is insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and it's pod four ultra. It is a pretty interesting mystery of what's going on in the brain while we sleep, because it's not like the thing shuts off. It's actually a pretty active and dynamic process. It's also humbling. that we need sleep. It is a little death. It is a thing like food that our body requires, and that to me is humbling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, they have to, right? They have to be in good spirit. You have to be joking and laughing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
They're probably still telling stories of that crazy Australian-American that rolled in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, it's a very creative marketing campaign. Very dangerous one. I don't think Coke or Pepsi are going to do that one. So it's very innovative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's another reminder that we're mortal, another reminder that we're merely human, that we're merely a biological organism. In fact, it's a reminder that not just our organism, our body, but the entirety of human civilization is fragile. I've been studying a lot about both ancient civilizations and the modern civilizations that were driven by ideologies, especially the communist ideologies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So I went to a lot of the same places as well, including Hursan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
How did that experience change you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
the soldiers are using their own funds to buy equipment, whether it's bullets, whether it's guns, whether it's armor. Is that still what you saw?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, there's Telegram groups on both sides, and it's basically, some of it is propaganda, some of it is psychological warfare, some of it is just the human nature of being like, of increasing your own morale and the morale of the people around you by showing off successfully killing other human beings, which are made other in war. And the nature of this war has evolved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I'll probably do a few videos on those, certainly a few podcasts, just thinking deeply about the ideas that drive humanity. Anyway, all of these things I dream and think about when I'm laying on the extremely comfortable Eight Sleep bed that controls the temperature and boy, is it needed on these hot Texas summer nights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So drones have become more and more prevalent. They're consumer-level cheap drones. Can you speak to that? Have you seen the use of FBV drones?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So it's a terrifying tool of war and tool of psychological war and used by both sides increasingly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Currently, they're all, as far as I know, all human controlled, so FPV. But to me, increasingly terrifying notion is of them becoming autonomous. It's the best way to defend against a drone that's FPV controlled is for AI to be controlling that drone. Just have swarms of drones that are $500 controlled by AI systems. And that's a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Terrifying possibility that the future of warfare is essentially swarms of drones on both sides, and then maybe swarms of drones say, between U.S. and China over Taiwan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Those are pre-programmed. So the low-level control, flight control of those is done autonomously, but there's an interface for doing the choreography that's hard-coded in. Yeah. Adding increasing levels of intelligence to a drone where you can detect another drone, follow it, and defend yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
In terms of the military on both sides of the Ukraine war, that's a technology that's like the most wanted technology is drone defense. Like how are you defending those drones on both sides? And anybody that comes up with an autonomous drone technology. is going to help whichever side uses that technology to gain a military advantage. And so there's a huge incentive to build that technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Go to eightsleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. It is one of the most delicious things I consume in a day on days like this. So yesterday I had a really hard training session in jujitsu. I did, I don't know, 10, 11 rounds maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But then, of course, once both sides start using that technology, then there's swarms of autonomous drones who don't give a shit about humans just killing everything in sight on both sides. And that's terrifying. There's civilian deaths that are possible that are terrifying, especially when you look 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And they can wait for a very, very long time. And as far as I know, even politicians, like you're in danger everywhere in Ukraine. So if you want to do a public speaking thing and doing it outside, you're in danger. Because it's very difficult to detect those drones. It could be anywhere. So it's a terrifying...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Did they, when you talked to the soldiers there, did they have a hope or a vision how the war will end?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
When I was there, there's a kind of optimism that they would be victorious, like definitively. And so is there still that optimism? And also, are they ready for a prolonged war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And it's just all the water from my body is gone because I usually don't drink water when I'm training. Not for any particular reason, but just because I don't want to take a break. I really want to go to a place where I'm exhausted. And so, once I'm done with training, The level of deliciousness that a cold water with a watermelon salt powder from Element is difficult to describe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Did they comment on U.S. politics, whether they hoped for Trump or for, in that situation, Biden, now Harris, to win the presidential election?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Did you lie to people and say you were close to the president so they can be nice to you? Like so they can convince you to continue the funding?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, martial arts, there's like a code and there's a respect, a mutual respect. Even if you don't know anything about the other person, if you both have done martial arts. I mean, there's similar things with judo, with jiu-jitsu, with grappling, all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
That's gangster. That's great. One of the things I love about Nogi Jiu-Jitsu is you don't see rank. So on a small scale, there's no hierarchy that emerges when you have the different color belts. Everybody's kind of the same. It's nice. You get to see the skill. The skill speaks, but there's just a mutual respect and whatever. You can quickly find out who...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I actually wonder if I would be able to figure out the rank of a person. Can you usually figure out how long a person's been doing jiu-jitsu?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Oh, it's like in the jungle whenever there's like an insect that's red that is like really flamboyant looking, that means they're dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Okay. So, yeah, you mentioned the project. Can you talk about that? I saw there's a preview that you showed. Craig Jones gone walkabout. Gone walkabout, yeah. And so you showed a preview in Indonesia where you're both kind of celebrating and maybe poking a bit of fun at Hicks and Gracie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's really, really refreshing. And I found that if I don't consume electrolytes after training like that, I start getting a headache, I just start feeling off. And so replenishing the electrolyze after is really important. And of course, I also make sure I drink element beforehand as well. But yeah, all that is important to support the body when you're doing those difficult training sessions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, you should keep it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's good to know that you see yourself as the John Travolta of jiu-jitsu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, there's a lot of similarities between the two of you. So you mentioned Anthony Bourdain. What do you like about the guy? What do you find inspiring and instructive about the way he was able to, as you said, scratch beneath the surface of a place?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, that's actually a skill that you're incredibly good at. You make fun of a lot of people, but there's something. Maybe there's an underlying respect. Maybe it's the accent. I don't know what it is. There's a love underneath your trolling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Speaking of which, let's talk about CJI. You're putting on the CGI tournament. It's in about a week. Same weekend as ADCC. $3 million budget, two divisions, two super fights. Winner of each division gets $1 million. Everyone gets $10,000. How do you even say that? Plus one. 10,000 plus one, yeah. Plus one. Just to compete. So it's August 16th and 17th. Everybody should get tickets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And it is one of the things that allows me to escape whatever the turmoil that's going on in my mind. And the community, the art of it, I love it all. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Same weekend as ADCC, which is August 17th. Okay, so what's the mission of what you're doing there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, it's good to know that the anonymous funder appreciates you for who you are, Craig Jones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I think in this episode, Craig brings up doing couples therapy with Gordon. You know, I'm a big fan of those guys, training with them and just the way they approach this really complicated art and their ability to achieve sort of world-class outcomes and consistently innovate, I'll innovate everybody else. It's so fascinating to watch. So part of me hates that there's shit talking going on online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So you're saying, allegedly, there were some under-the-table payments by ADCC. Do you have secret documents proving this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I understand it's part of the sport, but I do hope that there is, at least amongst the fans, more celebration of the athletes involved. And I'm now still working through the footage of the Olympics for judo and wrestling. It's just, I love all the sort of one-on-one combat sports and all of the Olympics in general and all sports, man. I love football and basketball.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Can you speak to that? How are you preparing for this moment of violence on a Saturday night with Gabby Garcia?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Has it added some complexity to the picture that there's some sexual tension in the room whenever the two of you are together?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Maybe I'm being romantic, but it seems like you've slowly started to fall in love with each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's inspiring for many young men that follow you and look up to you. Just the romantic journey that you've been on is truly inspiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Steve Curry's performance at this Olympics is just like legendary. You can't look away. That guy was just on fire. I love it when an athlete steps up and it's their day. And it's just perfection. Anyway, check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Those are awesome. You're calling it the alley. That's really, really interesting. So it's like in a pit, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yes, the same weekend as the prestigious ADCC tournament. The goal of CGI tournament is to grow the sport, so you'll be able to watch it for free online, live on YouTube, and other places. All ticket profits go to charity, mainly to cancer research. So I encourage you to support the mission of this tournament by buying tickets and going to see the event in person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. It is the machine within the machine of a business that provides a common language where the different modules of the business can communicate. all the messy stuff. It really was fascinating to watch the rate of progress that XAI is doing and Tesla is doing on building up their compute center.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What about the jiu-jitsu on a slant? You've triangled somebody on a slant. Is there some interesting aspects about the actual detailed techniques of how to be effective using a slant?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
The wrong way. I actually have no idea why people take advice from you, but they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, I think a million dollars is a lot of money, but the opportunity here, because it's open and freely accessible by everyone, is to put on a show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's fascinating to see the process of a business solving the puzzles and doing so rapidly and figuring out how to construct a collection of humans that is able to develop processes, simplify them, optimize them, and all of that together efficiently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. And that's not for charity. That's for your personal bank account. The OnlyFans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, Tap Cancer Isle is great and all the charities that the athletes have been selecting are great. What's been the hardest? You are wearing a suit, so you figured out how to do that. The tie was difficult, for sure. The tie was difficult, but you figured it out, and congratulations on that. But you've never run a tournament. No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Not in a competitive environment for OnlyFans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
without any kind of bottlenecks, or if there's bottlenecks, you remove the bottlenecks and doing so at a rapid rate and iterate, iterate, iterate, all of that. That's the difference between successful businesses and not, or not just successful, but revolutionary businesses. It truly is beautiful to watch. The art of cutting through the bullshit of bureaucracy really is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What's been, Reddit question, what's been the most surprising people who turned down your invite?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And yeah, you should have the right tools for the job, and NetSuite is good. And NetSuite is trusted by 37,000 companies that have upgraded to it. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great online store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Was there ever any chance that Gordon Ryan would enter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You reversed him from side control?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Okay. So that could be like an instructional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But the right place, right time though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Shopify is an exemplary sort of manifestation of capitalism, the good side of capitalism. I've been working on a video on communism, the history of communism. because a lot of people have been throwing around the word communism and fascism and all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So you think you've gotten it in his head? Yes. How do you think you would do if you were to face him for the said 500,000? For the 500? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You still think you got it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
All right, so you're going to make a statement with Gabby that it'll be a match she remembers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So unlike with Miragali, if you win, you're not going to ride off to the sunset with Gabby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So you think you can actually beat Nicholas Miragali?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You're a man of Reddit because they suggested that you should consider ketamine therapy sessions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
With all due respect, Greg, I can't imagine a therapist sitting down with you. That would be a terrifying question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Is this the medical Bali, or what did you do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's the old Sean Connery thing. It's not a therapist. It's just something that's spelled the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Can you just speak to your trolling experience? Is there, like, underneath it all, is there just a respect, the human beings you go after?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And I've been taking seriously the understanding of the history of these movements and ideologies and taking seriously the words and the meaning behind the words and the historical meaning behind the words, the economic system, the political system, implications of those systems, all of that, just understanding the history, understanding the ideas,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Who do you think is the biggest troll or shit talker in martial arts? Hanada Laranja. Yeah, well, you can't even put him in the, he's another class of human being. He's overqualified. Chael Sonnen comes to mind. Chael's good. You versus Chael. Who's a better shit talker? If you look at the entirety of the career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So on Reddit, somebody said you are a Coral Belt level troll and just happen to be good at jiu-jitsu. So what did it take for you to rise to the ranks of trolling from White Belt to Black Belt to Coral Belt? What's your journey with talking shit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So when you come to America and everybody takes themselves a little too seriously, those are just a bunch of victims you can take advantage of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Do you ever look in the mirror and like regret how hard you went in the paint? That's somebody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I don't know. As a fan of yours, as a fan of Gordon's also, but as a fan of yours, I see the love behind it. I don't know. It seems always just fun. The shit talking seems fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What's your relationship like with Mo, the organizer of ADCC?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And that started around the time you were thinking about CJI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
and explaining them and internalizing them seriously and walking through the fire calmly. But anyway, Shopify is a platform where a very large number of people can sell stuff and a very large number of people can buy stuff. And they're free to do so. And the system is very low friction for everybody involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So you're saying that there could potentially be poor business decisions, poor allocation of money that could be reallocated better to support the athletes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
If you talk to them, would you be good faith? Like, would you, uh, turn off the, or turn the troll down from 11 to like a three?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, transparency in all of its forms. That's what bothers me about the IOC with the Olympics is that there's this organization that puts on an incredible event, but it's completely opaque. It's not transparent. And the athletes don't get paid almost at all, so it's usually from sponsorships. And they... they sell distribution, broadcast distribution, and so it's mostly paywalled after the fact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's very, unless you're a super famous athlete or a famous event, it's hard to watch, I don't know, the early rounds of the weightlifting or the judo or all of the competitions, where most of those athletes, get paid almost nothing and they've dedicated their whole life. Like they've sacrificed everything to be there and we don't get to watch them openly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So there is a small manifestation of the vibrant market of individuals, humans interacting and flourishing together. So sign up for a $1 per month trial period. at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You can't, in many cases, you can't even pay for it with ILC. I've got to experience this because I'll have like podcast conversations with like Judoka, for example. And I put like a little clip in a podcast and the Olympics channel takes it down immediately. So they have all the videos uploaded private. They're private. Oh, to flag the copyright. They just flag the copyright automatically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
From the private videos they could release. that could release somewhere, even if it's paywalled, which I'm against, but paywall it, but make it super easily accessible so the flow grappling model is still okay. I'm against it, but if you do a really good job of it, okay, I can kind of understand a membership fee, but it should be super easy to use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But in the case of the Olympics, first of all, in the case of the Olympics, the whole point of the Olympics is for it to be accessible to everybody. So paywalling... goes against the spirit of the Olympic Games. And I will say the same is probably true for many sports, like grappling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Especially for major events like ADCC, that I feel like they should be openly accessible to everybody, like on every platform. But what was the decision like for you to make it accessible on YouTube and X?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Is there a possible future where the 2026 ADCC is run by Craig Jones?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, having just chatted with Elon Musk, who fundamentally believes that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, that to me, if the universe has a sense of humor, you would certainly, Craig Jones would certainly be running ADCC, which would be, I mean, it would just be like beautifully hilarious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So I saw B-team videos of the CJI camp, people training super hard. So you aside, who don't seem to do things in a standard way, what does it take to sort of put yourself in a peak shape, peak performance for a huge event like the CJI or the ADCC?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Now, of course, on the topic of communism that I've been researching, and not just communism, but totalitarian regimes, often these utilize mass surveillance. and not just totalitarian regimes, but all societies, there's a temptation by those in centralized control to maintain power, to maintain leverage on the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I saw a video of Nicky Ryan with a trash can throwing up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And the top comment is like, that's him doing the warmup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. But yeah, so you're supposed to train hard enough to where you have this confidence that you're prepared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So is it possible to out-cardio Craig Jones? Is your game fundamentally a technique-based game?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Right. But isn't that the secret to your success, being lazy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So to you, being psychologically relaxed is extremely important. Just not giving a damn. I wonder what that is. Not too much pressure. I don't want pressure. I don't like the pressure. But you like the pressure when it comes to internet communication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. How important is it to just go crazy hard rounds leading up to competitions like that? You said sort of Nicky Rod, but like on average for like athletes at world-class level, do you have to put in the hard rounds?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
There's a temptation to utilize mass surveillance, and of course, the job of the people is to fight back, fight for their privacy, fight for their freedom of speech, freedom of thought, all of that. All of that that fights off the descent into the dystopian worlds of the 1984 ilk. Anyway, a good VPN is step one of protecting yourself. And I've always been using ExpressVPN. I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. It's terrifying, man, because the thing is, like with Anthony Bourdain –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
sort of analogy here like you're exploring all parts of the world you just want to be there in the culture teach good techniques and just socialize you don't want to like there's just a bunch of killers that are trying to like murder you yeah that to them they're like i get to test myself against a world-class athlete today and to you you're like oh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, last time, see, you're another level, you and Ryan Hall are just world class, but like, For me, I'm trying to navigate through this, because I'd like to be able to roll 10 rounds for fun, for cultural.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And unfortunately, ripping submissions or knee on belly, some kind of dominant position, people don't hear the message at all. Or if I let them submit me a bunch of times, they don't calm down either. So I've been trying to figure out how to solve that puzzle, because I like to keep rolling with people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's fast, works on any device and operating system, including Linux, my favorite operating system. Go to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, I invite you all to come to the pool with Craig Jones and me. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I don't know. I'm trying to develop a radar when I look at a person. I'm trying to figure out, are they?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Craig gave me a special link that gives you a 50% discount on the tickets. Go to lexfriedman.com slash CJI and it should forward you to the right place. They're trying to sell the last few tickets now. It's a good cause. Go buy some. And also, let me say, as a fan of the sport, I highly encourage you to watch both CJI and ADCC and to celebrate athletes competing in both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I've never had a flow roll with a Polish person. Somebody on Reddit asked, how many legs did you break in Eastern Europe? Three or four.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So speaking of which, just for the hobbyist, for a person just starting out, what wisdom can you provide? Like say you were tasked with coaching a beginner, a hobbyist beginner, how would you help them become good in a year? What would be the training regimen? What would be their approach, mental, physical, in terms of practice to jiu-jitsu?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So that's part of it is you, the way you move, but I guess you also don't allow anybody to put you in a really bad position in terms of hurting you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So the thing you want as a beginner is to focus on minimizing injury by relaxing, by not going, by not freaking out. Yes, keeping it at a pace so you can understand what just happened. The thing is, how do you know if you're freaking out or not as a beginner? It feels like a... If you're panicking. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
That's a good... If you're... I mean, I see a lot of beginners kind of breathing, starting to breathe hard. They tense up. That's probably... Underneath that is panic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But also you have one of the more innovative games in jujitsu history. How'd you develop that? How do you continue throughout your career? How are you innovating? What was your approach to learning and figuring positions out, figuring submissions out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So that's just something that brings you joy, uh, Is by doing the unexpected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So your, your game is even a bit trolly. Interesting. So like, but what's the actual process of like, like with the Z guard, all the innovative stuff you've done there, how do you come up with ideas there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Did you say artistic or autistic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Okay. Just checking. Yeah. What's like the most innovative thing you've come up with? What's like some of the cooler ideas you've come up with on the mat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, but put some humor on top of it. Like Power Bottom, their instructional names are pretty good. But you changed that one, I saw, the name of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
When you brought the $1 million in cash on Rogan's podcast, did you have security with you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You got a phone call from the man and said, change this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Right, right. What do you think about Zuck in general? Like the fact that he trains Jiu-Jitsu. Have you got a chance to train with him? Because you've trained with Volk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Competed in jiu-jitsu, intends to compete in MMA. Has a beginner's mind, is humble about it. It's interesting. Was he ever in consideration for CJI? Oh, I mean, we would love to have him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. What's your relationship has been like with Volkanovski? What have you learned about martial arts, about grappling and different domains, just training with him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And you can't say the reasons why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You think you could have set that up if you had more time? Part of the challenge here is for some of these gigantic matchups, I feel like it takes time to court them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But there's a lot of other interesting matchups you could have possibly gotten through if there's more time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What do you think makes the Dagestani wrestlers and fighters so good?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But you think in the grappling context, that will not always translate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I wonder if it's like, you know, at his prime could be versus you, for example. Who do you think wins there? Buggy choke for sure. Buggy choke? No way. I know you're joking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Really? So you can get the buggy choke at the highest level? Can you educate me on that? Like if that legitimately can work at the highest level? Buggy choke for sure, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
That's what everyone says. That's what Pablo Escobar probably says also. What's your relationship with risk? Especially with the risk of death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Have you ever, like, gone hard with a Dagestani person? Like, grappling, wrestling? Any of the fighters, any of the MMA guys?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What do you think, you as the wise sage of jiu-jitsu, if you look 10, 20 years out, how do you think the game is going to evolve? The art of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What do you think is going to be the most popular submissions on CGI and ADCC this year? Is it going to be Foot Locks or Rear Naked?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
We are going to see that, aren't we?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, when I show the sport of jiu-jitsu, the most exciting stuff is whenever both people want to be Wrestling, scrambling wrestling. They both want to get on top.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But then the whole crowd will then mock you ceaselessly, as they should, for conceding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Who took the most risks? I mean, in a way, that's what's going to happen because this is quite open. So the benefit of being exciting is you're going to be glorified on social media. And if you're going to be boring and stall, you're going to be endlessly sort of willified.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, in a certain sense, on a basic human level, yeah. I mean, not all that matters, but if you're going to stall, you're going to become a meme, I feel like, especially with CGI. And so are the refs going to try to stop stalling? Yeah, we're going to penalize them hard, hit them hard, get that boring shit out of here. So what percentage of athletes would you say are on steroids? Is it 100%?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, the looks of it. But you could also go the other way. Certain people are just genetically built and they look like they are and then there's probably others like yourself. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. Yeah, that's the part of accusations of people being on steroids that I hate. It's like without data, people are just like, it's a way they can say that somebody's cheating without, because I like celebrating people. And sometimes people aren't on steroids and they aren't cheating and they're just fucking good. What about Gabby Garcia?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I think she's beautiful, strong, and you're a lucky man to share the mat with her. You should be honored. Yeah. I'm betting a huge amount of money on her. Me too. Either way, you're going to get paid. She's paying 11 to 1. I bet on love as well. So we are aligned in that way. Love will prevail. Okay. You put Alex Jones to sleep. Just to reflect back on that. What was... He was too woke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
He needed it. So that's you fighting the woke mind virus or whatever?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What was that like? I didn't see the full video. I just saw a little clip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
The craziest shit possible. What's it like going to sleep?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. And then you loaded it in. That must be a cool feeling, to load it all back in, like, realize, where am I? I feel like that sometimes in a hotel when I'm, like, traveling. It's like, where the fuck am I again? When you wake up. Maybe that's what it's like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Oh, good. Thank you. Thank you. Now I know. So given all the places you've gone, all the people you've seen recently, what gives you hope about this whole thing we've got going on about humanity? about this world. We start war sometimes, we do horrible things to each other sometimes. I missed all that, what gives you hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Like you're not attracted to risk. You're attracted to adventure. And the risk is the thing you don't give a damn about if it comes along with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Had poor delivery. Well, thank you for being at the forefront of making fun of everything and anything. And thank you for talking today, brother. Thank you, bro. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Craig Jones. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Anthony Bourdain. Travel changes you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
As you move through this life and this world, you change things slightly. You leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life and travel leaves marks on you. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Speaking of which, you went to Ukraine, like you said, twice recently. Twice. Really pushed the limit there. Including to the front.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Tell me the full story of that from the beginning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
From CJI with Nicky Ryan, Nicky Rod, Rotolo Brothers, Fionn Davis, Mackenzie Dern, and more, to ADCC with Gordon Ryan, Nicholas Margali, Giancarlo Budoni, Rafael Lovato Jr., Mika Galvao, and more. I have a lot of respect for everyone involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
The following is a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, currently serving his sixth term in office. He's one of the most influential, powerful, and controversial men in the world, leading a right-wing coalition government at the center of one of the most intense and long-lasting conflicts and crises in human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
This life, this world of ours, is too beautiful not to keep trying, trying to do some good in whatever way each of us know how. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
And that's how it will remain. We spoke about tech companies offline. There's a lot of tech companies nervous about this judicial reform. Can you speak to why large and small companies have a future in Israel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
We got Numeri for the world's hardest data science tournament, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, and Shopify for e-commerce. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team we're always hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So you had a conversation about AI with Sam Altman of OpenAI and with Elon Musk. What was the content of that conversation? What's your vision for sort of this very highest of tech, which is artificial intelligence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Numeri, a hedge fund that uses machine learning to make investment decisions. It's basically a really difficult data set, a really difficult competitions with real world testing, with a test set. with the highest of stakes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
As I talk about in this conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, he's a big believer in the power and the efficiency of the market. That's the cleanest signal you can get. in the interaction of a very large number of people competing purely with good information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
And I'm not sure where it's going to go. and that's something we have to respond to at the nation level and just as a human civilization, both the threat of AI to just us as a human species and then the effect on the jobs and, like you said, cybersecurity. What do you think? You think we're going to lose control? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
First of all, I do believe, maybe naively, that it will create more jobs than it takes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I'm really concerned about cybersecurity and the nature of how that changes with the power of AI. And in terms of existential threats, I think there will be so much threats that aren't existential along the way that that's the thing I'm mostly concerned about. versus AI taking complete control and becoming sort of superseding the human species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Although that is something you should consider seriously because of the exponential growth of its capabilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So taking a small tangent, as we talked about offline, you have a... a background in Taekwondo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
We mentioned Elon Musk. I've trained with both. Just as a quick question, who are you betting on in a fight?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
And to step into that world as a machine learning algorithm to see what you can do with past data and how to make predictions such that you can outperform other humans or other algorithms, that's super interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
As we spoke, and as I speak now, large-scale protests are breaking out all over Israel over this government's proposed judicial reform that seeks to weaken the Supreme Court in a bold accumulation of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Yeah, I mean, martial arts is this kind of... It's bigger than just combat. It's this kind of journey of humility, and it has... It's an art form. It truly is an art. But it's fascinating that these two figures in tech are facing each other. And I won't ask a question of who you would face and how you would do, but... Well, I'm facing...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I'm just a big fan of real-world datasets and large-scale real-world machine learning benchmarks, both as a way to learn of what works and what doesn't, and just the fun, the fun of competing. The fun of competition is a good catalyst for learning and taking steps on the long journey towards mastery. Head over to numeri.ai.com to sign up for a tournament and hone your machine learning skills.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
The solution of a monopoly is growing arbitrarily, unstoppably in power. Economic power and therefore in political power. Some of that is regulation. Some of that is competition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
It's not that simple. Well, I believe in the power of competition that there will always be somebody that challenges the big guys, especially in the space of AI. The more open source movements are taking hold, the more the little guy can become the big guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Yeah, I wouldn't count out the little guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Well, I hope you're right. Well, let me ask you about this market of politics. So you have served six terms as prime minister over 15 years in power. Let me ask you again, human nature. Do you worry about the corrupting nature of power on you as a leader, on you as a man?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
That's numeri.ai.com for a chance to play against me and win a share of the tournament surprise pool. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. In my early teenage years, when I first started reading the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, I dreamed of becoming a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, because I thought that is a way to explore the human mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Well, you have been involved in several corruption cases. How much corruption is there in Israel? And how do you fight it in your own party and in Israel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
in some funny kind of way. The journey I took through computer science and the development of robots and machine learning systems, artificial intelligence systems, all of that took me to a podcast called Artificial Intelligence that was then renamed to just my name. And now I am finally doing... psychotherapy on microphones with other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
what is the top obstacle to peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians? Let's talk about the big question of peace in this part of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
But if you want to do the same kind of process and you don't want to start your own podcast, then maybe you want to sign up for BetterHelp because it's super easy to get started, it's affordable, it's accessible. Discreet, all of that. Available worldwide, super easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So the expansion of settlements in the West Bank has been a top priority for this new government. People may harshly criticize this as contributing to escalating Israel-Palestine tensions. Can you understand that perspective, that this expansion of settlements is not good for this two-state solution?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I'm a big believer in talk therapy and so you should try out BetterHelp because it's the easiest way to try out and integrate talk therapy into your life. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system that manages all kinds of stuff, financials, human resources, inventory, e-commerce, all that kind of messy stuff that nobody really thinks about when they launch a company. I certainly don't think about when I'm thinking about launching a company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Given the current intense political battles in Israel, our previous intention to speak for three hours was adjusted to one hour for the time being, but we agreed to speak again for much longer in the future. I will also interview people who harshly disagree with the words spoken in this conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
with Saudi Arabia. What does it take to do that with Saudi Arabia, with the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I'm thinking about big design decisions, big engineering decisions. I'm thinking about how to hire a team of amazing people a team that is diverse in their background, in the way they see the world, in their approaches to problem solving, all of that. That's what excites me. All the messy stuff that's as essential, if not more, for running a business. I don't think about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So expanding the circle of peace, just to linger on that, requires what, secretly talking man to man, human to human, to leaders of other nations, Theoretically, you're right. Theoretically, okay. Well, let me ask you another theoretical question. On the circle of peace, as a student of history, looking at the ideas of war and peace, what do you think can achieve peace in the war in Ukraine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Looking at another part of the world, if you consider the fight for peace in this part of the world, how can you apply that to that other part of the world between Russia and Ukraine now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
That's why you should use the best tools to the job to at least help you out on that part. You can start now with no payment or interest for six months. Go to netsuite.com slash lex to access their one-of-a-kind financing program. netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
They might be required later on. Do you believe in the power of conversation, since you have contacts with Vladimir Zelensky and Vladimir Putin, just leaders sitting in a room and discussing how the end of war can be brought about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
What part of this is just basic human conversation? ego, stubbornness, all of this between leaders, which is why I bring up the power of conversation, of sitting in a room realizing we're human beings and that there's a history that connects Ukraine and Russia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
The great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and tools to manage day to day operations. I've been wanting to put out some merch out there because I'm working with an amazing artist to help me out, create some awesome stuff. And I've been so lazy about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
As you write about in your book, what have you learned about life from your father?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
And when I say lazy, I just mean my plate is so full and I've been doing some extremely difficult travel, but also taking on these difficult projects and trying to figure out my life. But through all of that, a source of excitement, a source of opportunity for me is just how fun and easy it is to use Shopify, to create your own store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Never stop. And if I may suggest... As part of that education, I would add in a little literature, maybe Dostoevsky, in the plentiful of time you have as a prime minister to read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So if that's the thing that's exciting to you, you should definitely do it. Go sell some cool stuff. It has thousands of integrations and third-party apps. It's basically anything you want to do, you can get done. From on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, all that kind of stuff. Again, highly, highly, highly recommend you try out Shopify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Last question. You've talked about a survival of a nation. You yourself are a mortal being. Do you contemplate your mortality? Do you contemplate your death? Are you afraid of death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Well, you had one heck of a life there. starting from MIT to six terms as prime minister. Thank you for this stroll through human history and for this conversation. It was an honor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
All right, now off mic, I'm going to force you to finally tell me who's going to win, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, but that's a good time to end. We ran out of time here. I'll tell you outside. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Mahatma Gandhi.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Benjamin Netanyahu. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
you're loved by many people here in israel in the world but you're also hated by many in fact i think you may be one of the the most hated men in the world so if there's a young man or a young woman listening to this right now who have such hate in their heart what can you say to them to one day turn that hate into love?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I will speak with other world leaders, with religious leaders, with historians and activists, and with people who have lived and have suffered through the pain of war, destruction, and loss that stoke the fires of anger and hate in their heart. For this, I will travel anywhere, no matter how dangerous, if there's any chance it may help add to understanding and love in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
There's a lot of love, yes. A lot of leaders are collaborating. Respect, I said, not love. Okay, all right. Well, it's a spectrum. But there is people who don't have good things to say about Israel, who do have hate in their heart for Israel. And what can you say to those people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So you're a student of history. If I can just linger on that philosophical notion of hate, that part of human nature. If you look at World War II, what do you learn from human nature, from the rise of the Third Reich and the rise of somebody like Hitler and the hate that permeates that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I believe in the power of conversation, to do just this, to remind us of our common humanity. I know I'm underqualified and underskilled for these conversations, so I will often fall short, and I will certainly get attacked, derided, and slandered. but I will always turn the other cheek and use these attacks to learn, to improve, and no matter what, never give in to cynicism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So in those threats underlying that hatred, how much of it is anti-Zionism and how much of it is anti-Semitism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
If we jump from human history to the current particular moment, there's protests in Israel now about the proposed judicial reform that gives power to your government to override the Supreme Court. So the critics say that this gives too much power to you, virtually making you a dictator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Can you steel man the case that this may give too much power to the coalition government to... the prime minister, not just to you, but to those who follow?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The following is a conversation with Kevin Spacey, a two-time Oscar-winning actor who has starred in Seven, The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, and House of Cards. He is one of the greatest actors ever, creating haunting performances of characters who often embody the dark side of human nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The latter is what the mass hysteria of internet mobs too often does, often rushing to a final judgment before the facts are in. I will try to do better than that, to respect due process in service of the truth. And I hope to have the courage to always think independently and to speak honestly from the heart. even when the eyes of the outrage mob are on me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
When you say, say the words and mean them, what does mean them mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I mean, I guess what you're saying is it's extremely difficult to get to the bottom of a little less. Because the power, if we just stick even on seven, of your performance is in the tiniest of subtleties. Like when you say, oh, you didn't know. And you turn your head a little bit. And a little bit like the... the little bit, maybe a glimmer of a smile appears in your face. That's subtlety.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Again, my goal is to understand human beings at their best and at their worst. And the hope is such understanding leads to more compassion and wisdom in the world. I will make mistakes. And when I do, I will work hard to improve. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
That's less. That's hard to get to, I suppose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So what's it like being in that scene? So it's you, Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Brad Pitt is going over the top, just having a mental breakdown. and is weighing these extremely difficult moral choices, as you're saying. But he's like screaming in pain and tormented while you're very subtly smiling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You mentioned Fincher likes to do a lot of takes. That's the famous thing about David Fincher. So what are the pros and cons of that? I think I read that he does Some crazy amount. He averages 25 to 65 takes, and most directors do less than 10.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Why the speed? Why say it fast is the important thing for him, you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And I guess actors like the dramatic pauses and the indulge in the dramatic pauses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
We've got ExpressVPN for privacy, 8sleep for naps, BetterHelp for mental health, Shopify for e-commerce, and AG1 for daily deliciousness. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
David Fincher said about you, he was talking in general, I think, but also specifically in the moment of House of Cards, said that you have exceptional skill both as an actor and as a performer, which he says are different things. So he defines the former's dramatization of a text and the latter as the seduction of an audience. Do you see wisdom in that distinction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And what does it take to do both, the dramatization of a text and the seduction of an audience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah, one of the challenges for me in this conversation is remembering that your name is Kevin, not Frank or John or any of these characters. Because they live deeply in the psyche.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use it to protect my privacy on the internet. I used them for many, many years. There's something to be said for loyalty, even with software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And those characters become like lifelong companions. Like for me, they travel with you. And even if it's the darkest aspects of human nature, they're always there. I feel like I almost met them and gotten to know them and gotten to become like friends with them almost. Hannibal Lecter or Forrest Gump. I mean, I've... I feel like I'm best friends with Forrest Gump. I know the guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And I guess he's played by some guy named Tom, but Forrest Gump is the guy I'm friends with. Yeah. And I think everybody feels like that when they're in the audience with great characters. They just kind of become part of you in some way, the good, the bad, and the ugly of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Seven years ago, he was cut from House of Cards and canceled by Hollywood and the World when Anthony Rapp made an allegation that Kevin Spacey sexually abused him in 1986. Anthony Rapp then filed a civil lawsuit seeking $40 million. In this trial, and all civil and criminal trials that followed, Kevin was acquitted. He has never been found guilty nor liable in a court of law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Now, part of that, of course, I say tongue-in-cheek because I don't have loyalty to software. But I do have an appreciation of really great design and software. And there's a kind of loyalty that builds up. I think people that use Apple products have that. When you have felt the love that was designed into the product. Like a lot of Apple products have. The early iPhones. All iPhones, really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What is that, like a catalyst for thinking deeply about what is magical about this play, this story, this narrative? That's what that is, like thinking backwards, that's what that does?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
to ask the interesting question. I like the poetry and the humility of I'm just a series of colors in someone else's painting. That was a good line. That said, you've talked about improvisation. You said that it's all about the ability to do it again and again and again and yet never make it the same. And you also just said that you're trying to stay true to the text.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So where's the room for the... that it's never the same?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
But also in theater, there's no safety net. If you fuck it up, everybody gets to see you do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I mean, there is something... of a seduction of an audience in theater even more intense than there is when you're talking about film. I got a chance to watch the documentary Now in the Wings on a world stage, which is behind the scenes of, you mentioned, you teaming up with Sam Mendes in 2011 to stage Richard III, a play by William Shakespeare. I was also surprised to learn
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
But when Steve Jobs was running the company, there really was an obsessive integration of beauty into every aspect of the product. I mean... Some of the most beautiful products ever designed were designed by Apple. Anyway, much like I'm friends with characters and books, I'm also friends with pieces of software and enjoy the time we get to spend together across the years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You haven't really done much Shakespeare, or at least you said that in the movie. But there's a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes stuff there. First of all, the camaraderie of everybody, how the bond theater creates, especially when you're traveling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
But another interesting thing you mentioned with the chairs of Sam and his trying different stuff, it seemed like everybody was really open to trying stuff, embarrassing themselves, taking risks, all of that. I suppose that's part... of acting in general, but theater especially. Just take risks. It's okay to embarrass the shit out of yourself, including the director.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
There's also a sad moment where at the end, everybody is really sad to say goodbye because you do form a family and then it's over. I guess somebody said that that's just part of theater. I mean, there's a kind of assumed goodbye and that this is it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Oh, God, I just finally figured it out. So maybe you can speak a little bit more to that. What's the difference between film acting and live theater acting?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
It just feels like also in theater, you have to become the character more intensely because you can't take a break. You can't take a bathroom break. You're like on stage. This is you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And ExpressVPN has for a long time been a piece of software I walk alongside with. Go to expressvpn.com slash likes pod for an extra three months free. This episode is brought to you by Asleep and it's pod for ultra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So even when you're doing like a dramatic monologue still, they're still fucking with you. There's stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Okay, that's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
That's good to know. You also said, interesting line, that improvisation helps you learn about the character. Can you explain that? So like through maybe playing with the different ways of saying the words or the different ways to bring the words to life, you get to learn about yourself, about the character you're playing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I had a weird experience last night where in my dream, I dreamt of eight sleep, of the bed going up and down, the Pod 4 Ultra, where you can control the positioning of the bed and going up and down. So it's kind of surreal to be on the eight sleep bed, dreaming about the eight sleep bed. It's very meta. It's interesting for me to think about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah. And yeah, that's the take. That was an intense interaction. I mean, what was it like, if we can just linger on that, just that intense scene with Al Pacino?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah, that's like one of the greatest ensemble casts ever. We got Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, you, Jonathan Pryce. It's just incredible. And I have to say, I mean, maybe you can comment. You've talked about how much of a mentor and a friend Jack Lemmon has been. That's one of his greatest performances ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You have a scene at the end of the movie with him that was really powerful. like firing on all cylinders, you're playing disdain to perfection, and he's playing desperation to perfection. What a scene. What was that like? Just like at the top of your game, the two of you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
the landscape of dreams that people are exploring every night. You're talking about eight billion people on Earth. All of them sleep every night. They are exploring some magical land. I just would love to see all the different worlds they're being explored.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The darkness and the light from the Jungian shadow emerges, and we get to play with it like a puzzle, try to figure it out like a puzzle in narrative form, as we humans do. It's a cool world. I'd love to be able to visualize it. In general, this whole collective intelligence of the human species is a Interesting organism in itself. I would love to visualize that. The power of the collective mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So it turns out he was right. Yeah. This world works in mysterious ways. It also speaks to the fact of the power of somebody you look up to giving words of encouragement because those can just reverberate through your whole life and just like make the path clear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Beautifully said. Jack Lemmon is one of the greatest actors ever. What do you think makes him so damn good?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Anyway, go to asleep.com and use code LEX to get $350 off the pod for Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp. Spelled H-E-L-P. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under... 48 hours. More and more recently, I realized that my time with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung was spent probably more than 20 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah. The apartment was, I mean, it's widely considered... one of the greatest movies ever. People sometimes refer to it as a comedy, which is an interesting kind of classification. I suppose that's a lesson about comedy, that the best comedy is the one that's basically a tragedy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I mean, yeah. What's that line between comedy and tragedy for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You know? I think Sam Mendes actually said in the Now documentary, something like, with great theater, with great stories, you find humor on the journey to the heart of darkness. Something like this. Very poetic. I'm sorry, I can't be that poetic. I'm very sorry. But it's true. I mean, the people I've interacted in this world have been to a war zone and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
the ones who have lost the most and have suffered the most are usually the ones who are able to make jokes the quickest. And the jokes are often dark and absurd and cross every single line. No political correctness, all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I walked alongside them in trying to understand the history of psychoanalysis and the history of exploring the human mind. That's when I wanted to be a psychiatrist. That's when I wanted through that lens, through that approach to understand the human mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Oh, man. So you mentioned American beauty. And the idea of... not changing, but evolving. That's really interesting because that movie is about finding yourself. It's a philosophically profound movie. It's about various characters in their own ways finding their own identity in a world where... maybe a materialistic system that wants you to be like everyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And so, I mean, Lester just really transforms himself throughout the movie. And you're saying the challenge there is to still be the same human being fundamentally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I think a lot of people live lives of quiet desperation in a job they don't like, in a marriage they're unhappy in, and to see somebody living that life and then saying, fuck it. in every way possible, and not just in a cynical way, but in a way that opens them, opens Lester up to see the beauty in the world. That's, you know, the beauty in American beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
It's... Well, and you know, you may have to blackmail your boss to get there, but you know. And in that, there's a bunch of humor also. In the anger, in the absurdity of sort of taking a stand against the conformity of life, There's this humor. And I read somewhere that the scene, the dinner scene, which is kind of play-like, where Lester slams the plate against the wall was improvised by you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In some sense, of course, the reason I love doing this podcast is I get to do maybe in spirit the kind of thing that psychoanalysis tried to do, is to delve into the depth of the human mind, shine a light onto the Jungian shadow. But anyway, I bring all that up because I think I need to go back to that work for the philosophy and the wisdom. Not the technical details, just the wisdom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The slamming of the plate against the wall. No. No. Absolutely. The internet lies once again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The plate, okay. Well, that was a genius interaction there. There's something about the dinner table. and losing your shit at the dinner table. Having a fight and losing your shit at the dinner table. Where else? Like Yellowstone was another situation where it's a family at the dinner table and then one of them says, fuck it, I'm not eating this anymore and I'm going to create a scene.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
It's a beautiful kind of environment for dramatic scenes. Or Nicholson and the Shining. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The contrast between you and Annette Bening in that scene creates the genius of that scene. So how much of acting is the dance between two actors?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What kind of interesting direction did you get from Sam Mendes in how you approached playing Lester and how did it take on the different scenes? There's a lot of just brilliant scenes in that movie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And I guess that's what a great director must do is have the guts in that moment to reshoot everything. I mean, that's a pretty gutsy move.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
But there's power in therapy. And if you want to check it out, easy, discreet, affordable, available everywhere, check out betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I have a store at lexfriedman.com slash store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And once again, a great performance lies in doing less.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The innocence and the purity of lust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What do you think about the notion of beauty that permeates American beauty? What do you think that theme is with the roses, with the rose petals, the characters that are living this mundane existence slowly opening their eyes up to what is beautiful in life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The little things, the simple things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I don't know what I'm going to do with that store. There's a few shirts on there. Maybe I'll add more shirts. I just always liked wearing shirts of people, of bands, of movies, of books that I like. It's a celebration of the stuff I love. And it's a chance to connect with other human beings over the things I love. If they know the thing, I get to talk to them and share in their love of the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Mortality also permeates the film. It starts with acknowledging that death is on the way, that Lester's time is finite. You ever think about your own death? Yeah. Scared of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What does that fear look like? What's the nature of the fear? What are you afraid of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
See, the interesting thing about Lester is facing the same fear. He seemed to be somehow liberated and accepted everything and then saw the beauty of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So Lester got there. It sounds like Dick Van Dyke got there. You're trying to get there. Sure. You said you feared death at your lowest point. What was the lowest point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So let's talk about it. Let's talk about this dark time. Let's talk about the sexual allegations against you that led to you being cancelled by the entire world for the last seven years. I would like to personally understand the sins, the bad things you did, and the bad things you didn't do. So I also should say that the thing I hope to do here is to Give respect to due process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Innocent until proven guilty that the mass hysteria machine of the internet and clickbait journalism doesn't do. So here's what I understand. There were criminal and civil trials brought against you, including the one that started it all when Anthony Rapp sued you for $40 million. In these trials, you were acquitted found not guilty and not liable. Is that right? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
If they don't know about the thing, then I get to talk about the thing I love and share in that way. It's kind of cool that those are two of the modes of connection. So one is you explaining a thing that another person doesn't know about. And in that explanation, the teacher-student sort of dynamic, you get to celebrate a thing. And then when you're both fans, you get to both celebrate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I think that's really important, again, in terms of due process. And I read a lot, and I watched a lot in preparation for this on this point, including, of course, the recently detailed interviews you did with Dan Wooten and then Alison Pearson of The Telegraph. And those are all focused on this topic, and they go in detail where you respond in detail to many of the allegations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
If people are interested in the details, they can listen to those. So based on that and everything I looked at, as I understand, you never prevented anyone from leaving if they wanted to, sort of in a sexual context, for example, by blocking the door. Is that right? That's correct, yeah. You always respected the explicit no from people, again, in the sexual context, is that right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
That is correct. You've never done anything sexual with an underage person, right? Never. And also, as is sometimes done in Hollywood, let me ask this, you've never explicitly offered to exchange sexual favors for career advancement, correct?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In terms of bad behavior, what did you do? What was the worst of it? And how often did you do it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
How often did you cross the line, and what does that mean to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Just to clarify, I think you're often too pushy with the flirting. And that manifests itself in multiple ways. But just to make clear, you never prevented anyone from leaving if they wanted to. You always took the explicit no from people as an answer. No, stop. You took that for the answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
you've never done anything sexual with an underage person, and you've never explicitly offered to exchange sexual favors for career advancement. These are some of the sort of accusations that have been made, and in the court of law, multiple times have been shown not to be true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Both as teacher and student. Anyway, if you want to sell shirts, sell whatever you want. Use Shopify and sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
From everything I've seen in public interactions with you, people love you. Colleagues love you, coworkers love you. There's a flirtatiousness. Another word for that is chemistry. There's a chemistry between the people you work with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In this conversation, Kevin makes clear what he did and what he didn't do. I also encourage you to listen to Kevin's Dan Wooten and Alison Pearson interviews for additional details and responses to the allegations. As an aside, let me say that one of the principles I operate under for this podcast and in life is that I will talk with everyone, with empathy and with backbone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Another complexity to this, as I've seen, is that there's just a huge number of actors that look up to you. a huge number of people in the industry that look up to you. So just, and love you. I've seen just from this documentary, just a lot of people just love being around you, learning from you what it means to create great theater, great film, great stories. And so that adds to the complexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I wouldn't say it's a power dynamic, like a boss employee relationship. It's a admiration dynamic that is easy to miss and easy to take advantage of. Is that something you understand?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I think that also speaks to a dark side of fame. The sense I got is that there are some people, potentially a lot of people, trying to make friends with you in order to get roles, in order to advance their career. So not you using them, but they trying to use you. What's that like? How do you know if somebody likes you for you, for Kevin, or likes you for, like you said, you're romantic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I often drink it twice a day. Make the drink, put it in the fridge, sometimes put it in the freezer, and like 30 minutes later, it's got that beautifully chilled consistency. Almost like a slushy, but not quite a slushy. And it just brings me happiness, especially when I just did a super long run in the Texas heat. And boys, that heat coming. That summer is coming. The 100 degrees, the 105.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You see a person and you're like, I like this person. And they seem to like you. How do you know if they like you for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In the industry, have you been betrayed? In life? And how do you not let that make you cynical?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
That's a beautiful way to put it. For the times you crossed the line, do you take responsibility for the wrongs you've done? Yes. Are you sorry to the people you may have hurt emotionally?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
If you got a chance to talk to the Kevin Spacey of 30 to 40 years ago, what would you tell him to change about his ways How would you do it? What would be your approach? Would you be nice about it? Would you smack them around?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
For most of your life, you were not open with the public about being gay. What was the hardest thing about keeping who you love a secret?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
to be able to share that. That must be a thing that weighs on you to not be able to fully, yeah, celebrate your love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And it's intense. Those 10, 12, 15 mile runs in the heat. There's a part of me that hates it. There's a part of me that loves it. And every part of me is better for having done it. Anyway, I love AG1, especially after a long run. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah, you made a statement when the initial accusation happened. It could be up there as one of the worst social media posts of all time. It's like two for one. Don't hold back. No, come on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In the first part, you kind of implicitly admitted to doing something bad, which was later shown and proved completely to never have happened. It was a lie. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
From the public perception, the first part of that, so first of all, the second part is a horrible way to come out. Yes, we all agree. And then the first part, from the public viewpoint, they see guilt in that, which also is tragic because at least that part
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Okay. There's an almost convincing explanation for the worst social media post of all time. I almost accept it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
It's beautifully bad, just how bad that social media post is. As you mentioned, Liam Neeson and Sharon Stone came out in support of you recently, speaking to your character. A lot of people who know you, and some of whom I know, who have worked with you privately, show support for you, but are afraid to speak up publicly. What do you make of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I mean, to me personally, this just makes me sad because perhaps that's the nature of the industry, that It's difficult to do that, but I just wish there would be a little bit more courage in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So as you said, your darkest moment in 2017, when all of this went down, one of the things that happened is you were no longer in the House of Cards for the last season. Let's go to the beginning of that show. One of the greatest TV series of all time. A dark, fascinating character in Frank Underwood. A ruthless, cunning, borderline evil politician.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Kevin Spacey. You played a serial killer in the movie Seven. Your performance was one of, if not the greatest portrayal of a murderer on screen ever. What was your process of becoming him, John Doe, the serial killer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What are some interesting aspects to the process you went through becoming Frank Underwood? Maybe Richard III, there's a lot of elements there in your performance that maybe inspired that character.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Because you're sharing the secret of the darkness of how this game is played with that best friend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
cut it and make it slightly broader, but. That's interesting, because you're doing a bunch of, with both Richard III and Frank Underwood, a bunch of dark, borderline evil things, and then I guess the idea is you're going to be losing the audience and then you win them back over with the addresses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And I saw even with the documentary, the glimmers of that with Richard III. I mean, you were seducing the audience. Like there was such a chemistry between you and the audience on stage. Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
the comedic aspect of Richard III and Frank Underwood, is that a component that helps bring out the full complexity of the darkness that is Frank Underwood?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah, there's often like a wry smile. The line that jumps to me when you're talking about Claire in the early, maybe first episode even, I love that woman more than Sharks love blood. I mean, I guess there's a lot of ways to read that line, but the way you read it had both humor, had legitimate affection, had all the ambition and narcissism, all of that mixed up together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
How much of that character in terms of the musicality of the way he speaks is Bill Clinton?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Well, in that way, him and Frank Uno would share like a charisma. There's certain presidents that just have, politicians that just have this charisma, you can't stop listening to them. Some of it is the accent, but some of it is some other magical thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Politicians. So you worked with David Fincher there. He was the executive producer, but he also directed the first two episodes. High level, what was it like working with him again? In which ways do you think he helped guide you and the show to become the great show that it was? I give him...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What are those battles like? I heard that there was a battle with the execs, like you mentioned early on about your name not being on the billing for Seven. I heard that there was battles about the ending of Seven, which was really, well, it was pretty dark. So what's that battle like? How often does that happen, and how do you win that battle? Because it feels like there's a line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
where the networks or the execs are really afraid of crossing that line into this strange, uncomfortable place. And then the director, great directors and great actors kind of flirt with that line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You think that Godfather's when Pacino was like the Pacino we know was born? Or is that more like, there's the characters that are really over the top, incentive woman. There's like stages, I suppose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Would you say, ridiculous question, Godfather, greatest film of all time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And for that day you fall in love with that movie, and you might even say... to a friend that that is the greatest movie of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I was going to mention when we were talking about Seven that just if you're looking at the greatest performances, portrayals of murderers, so obviously, like I mentioned, Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, that's up there. Seven, to me, is like competing for first place with Silence of the Lambs. But then there's a different one with Kubrick and Jack Nicholson, right, with The Shining.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And there's, as opposed to a murderer, who's always been a murderer, Here's a person like in American Beauty who becomes that, who descends into madness. I read also that Jack Nicholson improvised Here's Johnny in that scene. I believe that. That's a very different performance than yours in Seven. What do you make of that performance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Man, I love that guy. Unapologetically himself. Oh, yeah. Your impression of him at the AFI was just great. Well, that was for Mike Nichols. Oh, yeah. He had a big impact on your career. Huge impact on my career. Can you talk about him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What was Christopher Walken like? So he's a theater guy too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Well, I can see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Oh man, it was a really good sketch. And that guy, there's certain people that are truly unique. and unapologetic, continue being that throughout their whole career. The way they talk, the musicality of how they talk, how they are, their way of being, he's that. And it somehow works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
His watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah. I mean, it works in so many different contexts. He plays like a mobster in True Romance. Mm-hmm. And it's like genius, that's genius. But he could be anything. He could be soft, he could be a badass, all of it. And he's always Christopher Walken, but somehow works for all these different characters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So I guess we were talking about House of Cards like two hours ago before we took a tangent upon a tangent. But there's a moment in episode one where President Walker broke his promise to Frank Underwood that he would make him a Secretary of State. was this when the monster in Frank was born, or was the monster always there? The sort of, for you looking at that character,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Was there an idealistic notion to him that there's loyalty and that broke him? Or did he always know that this whole world is about manipulation and do anything to get power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah. What do you think motivated him at that moment and throughout the show? Was it all about power and also legacy? Or was there some small part underneath it all where he wanted to actually do good in the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Do roles like that, like Seven, like Frank Underwood, like... Lesser from American Beauty, do they change you psychologically as a person? So walking around in the skin of these characters, these complex characters with very different moral systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So people should know that you are the serial, you play the serial killer in the movie and the serial killer shows up like more than halfway through the movie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Without judgment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In Gulag Archipelago... Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously writes about the line between good and evil and that it runs through the heart of every man. So the full paragraph there, when he talks about the line... During the life of any heart, this line keeps changing place. Sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil, and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change. And to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. What do you think about this note that we're all capable of good and evil?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And when you say billing, it's like the posters, the VHS cover, everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And throughout life, that line moves and shifts throughout the day, throughout every hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
For each guest, I hope to explore their life's work, life's story, and what and how they think, and do so honestly and fully. The good, the bad, and the ugly. The brilliance and the flaws. I won't whitewash their sins, but I won't reduce them to a worse possible caricature of their sins either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And the thing you wanted from them and for them is less hate and more love. Did your dad say he loves you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Is there some elements of politics and maybe the private sector that are captured by a house of cards? How true to life do you think that is? from everything you've seen about politics, from everything you've seen about the politicians of this particular elections?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I have to interview some world leaders, some big politicians. In your understanding of trying to become Frank Underwood, what advice would you give in interviewing Frank Underwood? How do you get him to say anything that's at all honest?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
He'll tell you what you want to hear. Unfortunately, we don't get that look into the mind of a person the way we do with Frank Underwood in real life, sadly. Well, but you could say to somebody, you like the series House of Cards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I'll try that with Zelensky and with Putin. What do you hope your legacy as an actor is and as a human being? People ask me now, what's your favorite performance you've ever given?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
If it does, do you think you have another Oscar-worthy performance in you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Well, you have to mention him again. You know, Ernest Hemingway once said that the world is a fine place and worth fighting for, and I agree with him on both counts. Kevin, thank you so much for talking today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Kevin Spacey. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And now let me leave you with some words from Meryl Streep. Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different and then finding myself in there. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I think the last scene, the ending scene and the car ride leading up to it where it's mostly on you, in conversation with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, it's one of the greatest scenes in film history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So if people somehow didn't see the movie, there's these five murders that happen that are inspired by five of the seven deadly sins, and the ending scene is inspired, represents the last two deadly sins. And there's this calm subtlety about you in your performance is just terrifying. Maybe in contrast with Brad Pitt's performance, that's also really strong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
But in the contrast is the terrifying sense that you get in the audience that builds up to the twist at the end, or the surprise at the end. with the famous what's in the box from Brad Pitt. That is Brad Pitt's character's wife, her head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
The following is a conversation with Tucker Carlson, a highly influential and often controversial political commentator. When he was at Fox, Time Magazine called him the most powerful conservative in America. After Fox, he has continued to host big, impactful interviews and shows on X, on the Tucker Carlson podcast, and on TuckerCarlson.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I just feel like you hold back too much and don't tell us what you really think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I think you just speak your mind more often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Strong words from Tucker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Not to try to get a preview or anything, but do you have interest of interviewing Xi Jinping? And if you do, how will you approach that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I should also say, it's been refreshing you interviewing world leaders. I think when I've started seeing you do that, it made me realize how much that's lacking. Well, yeah, it's just interesting. I mean, from even a historical perspective, it's interesting, but it's also important from a geopolitics perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I was just hanging out with Rogan yesterday, Joe Rogan, and I mentioned to him that it's me being a fan of his show, that I would love for him to talk with you. And he said he's up for it. And you guys haven't done it already? I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You know what I mean? He was doing the thing that he loves doing and it somehow keeps accidentally being exceptionally successful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, curiosity, open-mindedness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
The thing I admire about him most, honestly, is that he's a good father. He's a good husband. He's a good family man for many years. And that's his place where he escapes from the world, too. And it's just beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
What was the goal? Just linger on that. What was the goal for the interview? How were you thinking about it? What would success be like in your head leading into it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, you were. Just looking in the mirror. Very nice. So what's the secret to a successful relationship, successful marriage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So I think what you're indirectly communicating is it's like humility, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
In the religious context, you have these two categories that I really like of the two kinds of people, people who believe they're God and people who know they're not, which is a really interesting division that speaks to humility and a kind of realist worldview of where we are in the world. Can atheists be in the latter category? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
What? Great leaders are so rare that when you see one, you know it right away. It blows your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
That's it. What advice would you give to young people? You got four. You somehow made them into great human beings. What advice would you give to people in high school?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You founded TCN, Tucker Carlson Network.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But this feels like one of the first times you're really working for yourself. There's an extra level of freedom here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
What hope, positive hope, do you have for the future of human civilization in, say, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
When done well, this gives us a chance to really hear out the guests and to begin to understand what and how they think. And I trust the intelligence of you, the listener, to make up your own mind, to see through the bullshit, to the degree there's bullshit, and to see to the heart of the person. Sometimes I fail at this, but I'll continue working my ass off to improve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I mean, you're right, the secret sauce, the human mind is really special. Like, we should not mess with it. It should be very careful. And whatever special thing it does, it seems like it's a good thing. Like, human beings are fundamentally good. And like, these sources of creativity, a creative force in the universe we don't want to mess with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, fundamentally, you want people in power to be pro-humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, thank you for asking those questions, first of all. And thank you for this conversation. Thank you for welcoming me to the cabin in the woods.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And for a time, they can seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Think of it. Always. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
There is a more nuanced discussion about what winning might look like. You're right. A nuanced discussion is not being had, but it is possible for Ukraine to quote unquote win with the help of the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Peace, a ceasefire, who owns which land. Yes. Coming to the table with, as you call the parent, the United States. Yes. Putting leverage on the negotiation to make sure there's a fairness. Amen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
All that said, I find that this no tough questions criticism often happens when the guest is a person the listener simply hates and wants to see them grilled into embarrassment, called a liar, a greedy egomaniac, a killer, maybe even an evil human being, and so on. If you are such a listener, what you want is drama, not wisdom. In this case, this show is not for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Just for the record, you demanded a million dollars from me to talk to me today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Vladimir Putin, after the interview, said that he wasn't fully satisfied because you weren't aggressive enough. You didn't ask sharp enough questions. First of all, what do you think about him saying that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
In the moment, what was your gut? Did you want to ask some tough questions as follow-ups on certain topics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
There are many shows you can go to for that, with hosts that are way more charismatic and entertaining than I'll ever be. If you do stick around, please know I will work hard to do this well and to keep improving. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for your support. I love you all. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you mentioned Navalny. After you left, Navalny died in prison. What are your thoughts on, just at a high level first, about his death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
There's a lot of interesting ideas about if he was killed, who killed him. Because it could be Putin. It could be somebody in Russia who is not Putin. It could be Ukrainians because it would benefit the war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We've got ZipRecruiter for hiring, Listening for, well, listening to academic papers, Hidden Layer for securing your AI models, Element for delicious electrolytes that I'm drinking right now, and AG1 for other kinds of delicious nutrition. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Does it bother you that basically the most famous opposition figure in Russia is sitting in prison?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I recommend subscribing, even if you disagree with his views. It is always good to explore a diversity of perspectives. Most recently, he interviewed the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. We discussed this, the topic of Russia, Putin, Navalny, and the war in Ukraine at length in this conversation. Please allow me to say a few words about the very fact that I did this interview.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or in general, just get in touch with me, please go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I mean, this question about the freedom of the press is underlying the very fact of the interview you're having with him. So you might not need to ask the Navalny question, but did you feel like, are there things I shouldn't say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you were okay being arrested in Moscow and arrested in- I didn't think for a second.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Speaking of hiring, this episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter, a site that connects employers and job seekers. So if you're looking to hire, if you're looking to get hired, that's the place to go. I think one of the most important things in life is optimizing, controlling, deciding, figuring out the people you surround yourself with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So the NSA was tracking you? Do you think CIA was? Are people still tracking you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And for those of you, like me, that spend most of their life working and love what they do, but actually, whether you love it or not, if you spend most of your time working, it's really important to choose the place you work correctly. And if you're hiring, it's really important to build the kind of team where everybody really enjoys hanging out with each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you keep switching phones, getting new phones for the battery life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I mean, you say it lightly, but it's really troublesome that you as a journalist would be tracked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you had no fear. Your lawyer said, be careful which questions you asked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You said leaders kill, leaders lie. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
That's quite a realist perspective, but there is a spectrum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I think that's not just for productivity's sake. That's also for the happiness of everybody involved. You know, most of my life I spent working with engineers and scientists, and that's a different kind of breed of people, and I've gotten to know that world, but these days I get to work with creative people, and they're different. They're quite different. I would say it's more complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And our task is to figure out where on the spectrum they lie. And the leader's task is to confuse us and convince us they're one of the good guys. Of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I had to learn a lot of difficult lessons the hard way, I would say. But I got to meet a lot of incredible people, a lot of different kinds of incredible. I've gotten to figure out that people can be incredible in all kinds of different ways. That full diversity of incredibleness. It just brings me joy. And you should use the best tools for the job to build that team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So I think cleanliness and architectural design is not the entirety of the metrics that matter when you measure a city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It is true, there doesn't have to be a trade-off between cleanliness and freedom of speech. But it is also true that in dictatorships, cleanliness and architectural design is easier to achieve and perfect and often is done so, so you can show off, look how great our cities are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Go to ZipRecruiter.com slash Lex to try it for free. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Lex. The smartest way to hire. Thank you. Also for academic papers, that's the way I use it. It skips all the stuff you don't want to read. And that's not a trivial thing to figure out how to do, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Your point is well taken. You can have both. But do you regret... We had both. That's the point. We had both. I saw it. Do you regret to a degree using the Moscow subway and the grocery store as a mechanism by which to make that point? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
you're a student of history, central planning is good at building subways in a way that's really nice. The thing that accounts for New York subways, by the way, there's a lot of really positive things about New York subways, not cleanliness, but the efficiency, the accessibility, how wide it spreads. The New York network is incredible. But Moscow, under different metrics,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
results of a capitalist system? And you actually said that you don't think US is quite a capitalist system, which is an interesting question in itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So they have figured it out. And so you can listen to academic papers. And it pronounces stuff like it's pleasant to listen to. You do have to like really focus your mind, I would say. So I don't like to do it during running, but I like to do it in a bunch of other contexts. Like there's something just more compelling to listening in certain kinds of contexts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I'm just- We will get you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So much to say on that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, I hope she's attractive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It'd probably be an upgrade. So, well, the central planning point is really interesting, but I just don't... I don't know where you're coming from. There's a capitalist system... I mean, the United States is one of the most successful capitalist system in the history of Earth. So just say- What's the most successful?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Direct data is good, but it's challenging. For example, if you talk to a lot of people in Moscow or in Russia and you ask them, is there censorship? They will usually say, yes, there is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Sometimes I like printing it out and reading. Sometimes I like listening. Both are really, really good. Anyway, you can also do note-taking. You click the add or whatever it's called, plus note button, and then it automatically grabs the last two or three sentences and then saves them. And you don't need to type anything. It's just really simple. One click.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
There's no substitute for that. Well, on that point, direct experience in Ukraine. So I visited Ukraine and witnessed a lot of the same things you witnessed in Moscow. So first of all, beautiful architecture. Yes. And this is a country that's really in war. So it's not- Oh, for real? Like for real, where most of the men are either volunteering or fighting in the war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And there's actual tanks in the streets that are going into your major city of Kiev. And still the supply chains- are working just a handful of months after the start of the war. Everything is working. The restaurants are amazing. Most of the people are able to do some kind of job, like the life goes on. Cleanliness, like you mentioned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Security, like, it's incredible. Like, the crime went to zero. They gave all guns to everybody, the Texas strategy. It does work. Yeah, when you witness it, you realize, okay, there's something to these people. There's something to this country that they're not as corrupt as you might hear. Right. You hear that Russia's corrupt, Ukraine is corrupt. You assume it's just all going to go to shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And the uploading of the paper or whatever you want to listen to is super simple too. So it's just the whole pipeline is done well. It's easy. I recommend you at least try it. Normally, you would get a two-week free trial, but listeners of this very podcast, you get one month free. So go to listening.com slash Lex. That's listening.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So I think after you did the interview with Putin, you put a clip, I think on TCN, where like your sort of analysis afterwards. Yeah, it wasn't much of an analysis. No, but what stood out to me is you were kind of talking shit about Putin a little bit. Like you were criticizing him. Why wouldn't I? It spoke to the thing that you mentioned, which is you weren't afraid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Now, the question I want to ask is, it would be pretty badass if you went to the supermarket and made the point you were making, but also criticized Putin, right? Criticized that there is a lack of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In the supermarket? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So there is a fundamental way which you wanted Americans to expect more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
We should make clear that, you know, by many measures, you look at the World Press Freedom Index, you're right, U.S. is not at the top. Norway is. U.S. scores 71, same as Gambia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
This episode is also brought to you by Hidden Layer, a platform that provides security for your artificial intelligence and machine learning models. I'm actually going to have a bunch of conversations in the upcoming weeks and months on artificial intelligence. I think with Gemini, the language model that Google released updated one, 1.5.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
really west africa so let me just ask hold on a second hold on a second hold on a second now you're making me laugh ukraine is 61 and russia is 35 the lower it is the worse close to china at 23 in north korea at the very bottom 22 didn't ukraine put gonzalo lira in jail till he died for criticizing the government how can they have a high press
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, but deviating maybe is frowned upon, but do you have the freedom to say it if you do deviate? That's the question. Can you keep your job? That's one measurement of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I have received a lot of criticism, publicly and privately, when I announced that I will be talking with Tucker. For people who think I shouldn't do the conversation with Tucker, or generally think that there are certain people I should never talk to, I'm sorry, but I disagree. I will talk to everyone, as long as they're willing to talk genuinely in long form for two, three, four more hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You mentioned Jon Stewart. The two of you have a bit of a history. I don't know if you've seen it, but he kind of grilled your supermarket and subway videos. Have you gotten a chance to see it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, that was essentially it. So in 2004, that's 20 years ago, John Stewart appeared on Crossfire, a show he hosted. And I was kind of... memorable moment. Can you tell the saga of that as you remember it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
There's been a lot of questions raised about how to do this. Well, how to not allow ideology to seep into the systems you create. There's a lot of really interesting questions. What's the role of open source? What's the role of transparency? All of that. And I'll be sure to talk to Meta, to Google, to XAI, to OpenAI folks, all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Okay, you said a lot of words that will make it sound like you're a bit bitter, even if you're not. So you said unhappy person, partisan person. Well, he's definitely partisan, for sure. So can you elaborate why you think he's partisan?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
All of those people are incredible in facing this really difficult problem together. in the open, and sometimes they mess it up and they get criticized for it. And it's a beautiful thing. Anyway, AI, as we develop and try to figure out how to do it in a good way, in a way that benefits humanity, is a really, really, really important problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
He would probably say that he's not a partisan, that he's a comedian who's looking for the humor and the absurdity of the system. That's a dodge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I'll just be honest that I watched it just recently, that video. From 20 years ago? From 20 years ago. I watched it initially, and I remember very differently. I remembered that Jon Stewart completely destroyed you in that conversation, and I watched it, And you asked a very good question of him, which was... There was no destruction, first of all. And you asked a very good question of him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Why, when you got a chance to interview John Kerry, did you ask a bunch of softball questions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I thought that was... a really fair question. And then his defense was, well, I'm just a comedian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And one of the things you need to do in terms of solving AI safety is how to do it in a way that can't get hacked. And you can get real creative Just like malware for the old school kinds of software, you can get creative on how to hack machine learning models. And that's what Hidden Layer specializes in. Trying to help you, if you're a company, to figure out how to not get your models hacked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Unfortunately, it's a bit darker. I think the reason he's seen as the winner and the reason at the time I saw as the quote unquote winner is because he was basically shitting on you like personal attacks versus engaging ideas. And it was, it was funny in a dark way and like making fun of the bow tie and all this kind of stuff. And it was fair to call me a dick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And that's not my best quality, trust me. But also to be kind of... I thought Jon Stewart came off as a giant dick at that time, and I'm a big fan of his, and I think he has improved a lot. That may be true. We should also say that people grow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, I think he probably feels free enough to do it, but you're saying he doesn't do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You can visit hiddenlayer.com slash lex to learn more about how Hidden Layer can accelerate your artificial intelligence adoption in a secure way. By the way, I just like saying AI fully pronounced. It's just fun to say. There you have it. This episode is also brought to you by Element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Do you think Zelensky's a hero for staying in Kiev? Because I do. To me, you can criticize a lot of things. You should call out things that are obviously positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
The thing I'm drinking right now, and I have been drinking for a long time, multiple times a day, because it makes me feel good when I'm fasting. For a long time now. For a long time. I don't remember how long, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It's not about whether he's in Ukraine most of the time or not. Well, I thought that was the whole premise of the- No, no, no, no. At the beginning of the war. When Kiev, when a lot of people thought that the second biggest military in the world is pointing its guns at Kiev, it's going to be taken. And a man, a leader who stays in that city says, fuck it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
When everybody around him says flee, says everybody around him believes the city will be taken or at least destroyed, leveled, artillery, bombs, all of this, he chooses to stay. You know a lot of leaders. How many leaders would choose to stay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
i've been eating only once a day i think i sometimes make exceptions for that in the social setting so do snacks of all kinds it really doesn't matter so it's not super super strict but it just makes me happy so eating once a day mostly meat very low carb if you want to do that right the fasting or the low carb stuff you really want to make sure you get your electrolytes right sodium potassium magnesium all that kind of stuff so
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, there's military answers to that, which is urban warfare is extremely difficult. Do you think that Putin wants to take Kiev? No, I do think he expects Zelensky to flee and somebody else to come into power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, that's why it's interesting that he didn't really bring up NATO extensively.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yes, that was a failure. But it doesn't mean you can't have a success over and over and over, keep having negotiations between leaders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Element really helps with that, especially because it's delicious. Also, it helps you drink a lot of water. So I take one of those Powerade bottles. That has how many? Let me see. 28 fluid ounces. Fill it up with water, put it in the fridge so it's cold, and then put one packet of watermelon salt in there and shake it up, and it's ready to go. It's delicious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, and I actually, having had a bunch of conversations with people who are living in Russia, they also believe it. Now, there's technicalities here, which the word Nazi, World War II is deeply in the blood of a lot of Russians and Ukrainians. So you're using it as almost a political term. The way it's used in the United States also, like racism and all this kind of stuff,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Because you know you can really touch people if you use the Nazi. I think that's totally right. But it's also, to me, a really disgusting thing to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Because, and also to clarify, there is neo-Nazi movements in Ukraine. They're just very small. You're saying that there's this distinction between Nazi and neo-Nazi, sure, but it's a small percentage of the population, a tiny percentage that have no power in government. As far, I have seen no data to show they have any influence on Zelensky and Zelensky government at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So really, when Putin says denazification, I think he means nationalist movements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
What troubled me about that is because he said that that's the primary objective currently for the war. And that, because it's not grounded in reality, it makes it difficult to then negotiate peace. Because like, what... what does it mean to get rid of the Nazis in Ukraine? So he'll come to the table and say, well, okay, I will agree to do ceasefire once the Nazis are gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Okay, so can you list the Nazis?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You can get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, our old, old friend AG1. It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I suppose it's becoming a meme how much I and other friends of mine are loving AG1. Andrew Huberman, who I love, also loves AG1. I don't know. It's delicious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It was very strange, but maybe it was perhaps had to do with speaking to his own population and also probably trying to avoid the use of the word NATO. as the justification for the war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, and you said some of this also in your post-Kremlin discussion while you're in Moscow still, which was very impressive to me that you can just openly criticize. This is great. Well, I don't care. I understand this. I just wish you did some more of that also with the supermarket video and perhaps some more of that with Putin in front of you. Putin in front of me. I'm such a good person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I know you see it as virtue signaling. Yeah, it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yes, I understand. So I think you're just so annoyed about how bad journalists are that you just didn't want to be them. Yeah, that's probably right, actually. Some great conversations will involve some challenging, like you were confused about denazification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you mentioned there's a bunch of conspiracy theories about Putin's health. How was he in person? Like, what did he feel like? Did he look healthy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You mean like visual purposes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
He's like almost 20 years older than me. He looked younger than me. What was that like, the conversation off camera? Like you walking around with him? What was the content of the conversation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It makes me feel like there's at least something in my life I'm not messing up. So it's a safe place I return to for grounding. So whatever crazy diet stuff I do, whatever crazy mental, physical stuff I do, I know I can at least get my nutrition right. The vitamins and all that kind of stuff, get that right. It's basically a fancy multivitamin. But it's a super awesome multivitamin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Who do you think is behind it? If you were to analyze, like zoom out, looking at the entirety of human history, the military industrial complex, you said Kamala Harris. Is it individuals? Is it like this collective flock that people are just pro-war as a collective?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And it's a delicious one. I don't know what else to say. You should be consuming a multivitamin, and this is the best by far that you can do. But for me, I don't know, in terms of physical and mental health, it really just makes me happy. Maybe it'll make you happy as well. They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you actually have mentioned this, it's not just the Cold War, it's World War II that populates most of their thinking in Washington. You mentioned Churchill, Chamberlain, and Hitler, and they kind of, seeing the World War II as kind of the good war and the successful role the United States played in that war, they're kind of seeing that dynamic
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
that geopolitical dynamic and applying it everywhere else still?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I will talk to Putin and to Zelensky, to Trump and to Biden, to Tucker and to Jon Stewart, AOC, Obama, and many more people with very different views on the world. I want to understand people and ideas. That's what long-form conversations are supposed to be all about. Now, for people who criticize me for not asking tough questions, I hear you, but again, I disagree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tucker Carlson. What was your first impression when you met Vladimir Putin for the interview?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Since we're on the time period, let me ask you a kind of almost cliche question, but it applies to you, which you've interviewed a lot of world leaders. If you had the chance to interview Hitler in 39, 40, 41, first of all, would you do it and how would you do it? I assume you would do it given who you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I mean, your energy with Putin, for example, was such that it felt like he could trust you. I felt like he could tell you a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I think it was extremely, like, we have to acknowledge how important that interview was for the record and for opening the door for conversation. Right. Like opening the door to conversation literally is the path to like more conversations and peace, peace talks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So Putin's folks have shown interest for quite a while to speaking with me. So you've spoken with him. What advice would you give? Oh, do it immediately. How's your Russian, by the way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, fluent. So it would most likely be in Russian. So that's the other thing is, I do have a question about language barriers. Did you feel it was annoying?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It's not whining. Can you actually describe the technical details of that? Are you hearing concurrently, like at the same time? Yes, but there's a massive lag.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Plus conversation. So the chemistry of conversation, the humor, the wit, the play with words, all this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And we should say that you've met a lot of world leaders. Both Zelensky and Putin are intelligent, witty, even funny. Yes. So like there's a depth to the person that can be explored through a conversation just on that element, the linguistic element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But Zelensky is, I think. No, he is, well, he's better than Putin at English, but he's still the humor, like the intelligence, all of that is not quite there in English. He says simple points, but the guy's a comedian, and he's a comedian primarily in Russian, the Russian language. So the Ukrainian language is now used mostly primarily as a kind of symbol of independence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And he is, you know, really his native language is Russian language. Of course. A lot of people in Ukraine. But you can also understand his position that he might not want to be speaking Russian publicly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But for interview itself, is there advice you have about how to carry an interview? It is fundamentally different when you do it in the native language, but... Yes, I mean, I think...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
In your case, I think the very fact of the interview was the most important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to open with a crazy guy. No, I know. With humor. I know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It doesn't. Oh, yeah. And there'll be a small delay where you have to wait for the joke to see if it lands or not. This is not America. At Fox, you were, for a time, the most popular host. After Fox, you've garnered a huge amount of attention as well. Same, probably more. Do you worry that popularity and just that attention gets to your head? Is it kind of drug that clouds your thinking?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But he was also probably prepared to give you a full lesson in history, as he did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I hope those two things aren't coupled, technological advancement and the erosion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, conclusive is a tough thing. Pretty conclusively. That we can brag about? I think, well, you've criticized Google Search recently, but I think making the world knowledge accessible to anyone anywhere across the world through Google Search
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
No, I don't know. I think they are more informed. It's just revealing the ignorance. The internet has revealed the ignorance that people have, but I think the ignorance has been decreasing gradually. If you look, even you can criticize places like Wikipedia a lot. And very many aspects of Wikipedia are very biased.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But when you, most of it are actually topics that don't have any bias in them because they're not political or so on. There's no battle over those topics. And most of Wikipedia is like the fastest way to learn about a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And, I mean, your fundamental worry is the same kind of thing might be happening or will happen in the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I've seen a lot of increased distrust in science, which is deserved in many places. It just worries me because some of the greatest inventions of humanity come from science and technological innovation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
At best, perhaps. But technology is the very tool which will allow us to have that kind of discourse to figure out, to do science better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Indisputably, you have a presumption, we have a good definition of what beauty is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
there's other sources of prettiness and beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But also there could be... I grew up in the pre-internet age. Good. Good. But if you grew up in the internet age, I think your eyes would be more open to beauty that's digital, that is in the digital world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, I could also argue that, you know, I'm a big sucker for bridges and modern bridges can give older bridges that run for their money, but I like bridges too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And so what is that? And the other question is also consider that whatever is creating this technology is unstoppable. Well, there's that. And the question is like, how do you steer it then? You have to look in a realist way at the world and say that if you don't, somebody else will. And you want to do it in a safe way. I mean, this is the Manhattan Project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
No. For me, it's an easy call in retrospect. In retrospect, yes. Because it seems like it stopped world wars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You saying 79 makes it sound like you're counting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
if I knew my skills with a gun, because he already has a gun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I just like this picture. Am I wearing a cowboy hat? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Okay, great. I like this picture. I think about this a lot now. uh yeah i understand your point but also the i think that metaphor falls apart if uh there's um if there's other nations at play here so if the same as with the nuclear bomb if u.s doesn't build it will other nations build it the soviet union build it china or nazi germany
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It's not so obvious to me. What I'm terrified about is probably a similar thing that you're terrified about, is using that technology to manipulate people's minds. that's much more reasonable to me as an expectation. A real threat that's possible in the next few years. But what matters more than that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, I think that could lead to destruction of human civilization through other humans, for example, starting nuclear wars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I think we will forever fight against the dying of the light as the entirety of the civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, I, in the same way, hope to be a dad one day. You should have a ton of kids. Are you going to have a ton of pups? Five, oh, pup? You mean like kids? Yes, fives. But also I've been thinking of getting a dog. But unrelated, I would love to have like five or six kids, yeah, for sure. Have you found a victim yet? A victim? You make it sound so romantic, Tucker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, 100%. But also, in terms of being humble, I do jiu-jitsu. It's a martial art where you get your ass kicked all the time. I love that. It's nice to get your ass kicked. Physical humbling is... Unlike anything else, I think, because we're kind of monkeys at heart and just getting your ass kicked is really helpful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Let me ask you, you've been pretty close with Donald Trump. Your private texts about him around the 2020 election were made public. In one of them, you said you passionately hate Trump. When that came out, you said that you actually know you love him. So how do you explain the difference?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Who were you texting to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You said nice things about me earlier. I'm starting to question. I have questions. I have a lot of questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I'm going to have to see your texts after this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Nice. You said to some degree the election was rigged.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, you said he was nervous. Were you nervous?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It's just true. I think half the country... doesn't think he's senile, just thinks he's speaking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, I think he just has difficulty speaking. It's like gradual degradation, just getting old. So cognitive ability is degrading. What's the difference between degraded cognitive ability and senility? Well, senility has a threshold. It's beyond the threshold to where he could be a functioning leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I'm with you. I'm a sucker for great speeches and for speaking abilities of leaders and Biden with two wars going on and potentially more, the importance of a leader to speak eloquently both privately in a room with other leaders and publicly is really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Those are the choices we have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So why you have on the Democratic side, you have Dean Phillips, you have R.K. Jr. until recently, I guess he's independent. And then you have Vivek who are all younger people. Yeah. Why did they not connect to a degree to where- It's such an interesting, I mean, I-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So now a vote for Trump is a kind of fuck you to the system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It's good that you took a stand on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So speaking of the Justice Department, CIA and intelligence agencies of that nature, which you've been traveling quite a bit, probably tracked by everybody, which is the most powerful intelligence agency, do you think? CIA? Mossad? MI6? SVR, keep going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I do often ask tough questions, but I try to do it in a way that doesn't shut down the other person, putting them into a defensive state where they give only shallow talking points. Instead, I'm looking always for the expression of genuinely held ideas, and the deep roots of those ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I'm doing an Israel-Palestine debate next week. But I have to ask you just your thoughts, maybe even from a U.S. perspective, what do you think about Hamas attacks on Israel? What would be the right thing for Israel to do? And what's the right thing for U.S. to do in this? Looking at the geopolitics of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But it also is a place, like you said, where things are boiling over and it could spread across multiple nations into a major military conflict.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The following is a debate between Ben Shapiro and Destiny, each arguably representing the right and the left of American politics, respectively. They are two of the most influential and skilled political debaters in the world. This debate has been a long time coming, for many years. It's about 2.5 hours, and we could have easily gone for many more, and I'm sure we will. It is only round one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think like a lot of things, it's just easier to do a thing every day than like five times a week. Because if it's every single day, it's just there. You can't escape the day without doing it, and it somehow makes it easier to do it. Anyway, I do AG1 twice a day, once after the workout. You should try it out. They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
This episode is brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for finding and buying insurance. When I'm thinking about life insurance, I'm thinking about three things. First, the stoics and meditating on your mortality. Second, Matthew Cox, that episode I just did where he tried selling insurance. That was the first thing he tried to make his dad proud. And then that didn't really work out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
As we descend from the heavens of philosophical discussion of conservatism and liberalism, let's go to the pragmatic muck of politics. Trump versus Biden, between the two of them, who was in their first term the better president? And thus, who should win if the two of them are, in fact, our choices should win a second term in 2024? Ben?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So he went to mortgage fraud. So you should definitely listen to that episode. It's a fascinating one. And then the third thing I think about is Better Call Saul, which is a show that I finally, finally started watching. And it's incredible. Dare I say, it might actually be better than Breaking Bad, the original show, from which it's a spinoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That might be the only spinoff show in the history of television that is better than the original. I know, strong words, but it's damn good. Anyway, that guy makes me think of sales and selling insurance and so on. Anyway, back to the first point, which is meditating on your mortality. And you should meditate on your mortality for philosophical and psychological purposes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But for pragmatic purposes, you should also actualize that into getting some insurance. And you could do that easily, efficiently, in a modern way with Policy Genius. You can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million in coverage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Can you comment on the foreign policy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That's a lot from both. Do you want to pick at something where you disagree with here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Head to policygenius.com slash Lex or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I've used them for many years to protect myself on the internet. Everybody should be using a VPN and ExpressVPN is the one I stand behind. There's a big sexy button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It used to be red. I think it's a different color now. Let me see. It's like the power symbol is red and glowing from different colors into maroon, magenta. It's like modernized. I get it. You got to update with the times. It's still sexy, though. Not crude, bold, simple red. It's more like fluorescent-like. It's funny when companies change the look of things to make it seem and feel updated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got AG1 for health, Policy Genius for insurance, ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the interwebs, and Insight Tracker for biological data that leads to health. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
For example, Google. It works. I get it. But I still a little bit miss the old Google logo. Just like that ghetto HTML look from the early, early days. It still works. I don't know. The simplicity of that. There's a kind of authenticity there. to how crappy that Google logo looked. Anyway, and there is the old times with ExpressVPN. I've been with them forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, long, long, long before they were a sponsor. I've used them. I've loved them. They brought joy to my heart. Anyway, you too can share in the joy by going to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
This episode is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to collect information from my body via blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data, to then make lifestyle and dietary recommendations on how I can be a better version of myself. Just imagine the raw sensory waterfall of data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
coming from the human body and using that data through the very kinds of neural nets that are being used in large language models. to make predictions, recommendations, summarization, sort of integrating, simplifying all of that data that's not human interpreted at all and making it human interpretable. That's the future. Anyway, Insight Tracker's taking steps towards that future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And the proof is in the pudding. Before we go to Ukraine, can I ask about Israel? So you're both mostly in agreement, but what is Israel- I don't know if I'd say that. Okay, but as I'm learning, what is Israel doing right? What is Israel doing wrong in this very specific current war in Gaza?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The very basic thing is you should be making decisions about your life in part using data that comes from your own, very own body. That's what Insight Tracker can help you with. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to InsightTracker.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Is there a difference between Palestinian citizens and the leadership when you say that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And now, dear friends, here's Ben Shapiro and destiny. Ben, you're a conservative. Destiny, you're a liberal. Can you each describe what key values underpin your philosophy on politics and maybe life in the context of this left-right political spectrum? You want to go first?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Do you have a disagreement with what Destiny said?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And do you think Trump would have helped push that piece?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Also, if you want to work with our amazing team where I was hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. Or if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So Ben said a lot there. Do you disagree with any aspect on the Ukraine side that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Ben, what do you think it means to be a conservative? What's the philosophy that underlies your political view?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Quick pause, bathroom break. One of the big issues in this presidential election is gonna be January 6th. It's in the news now and I think it's gonna get, become bigger and bigger and bigger. So question for Destiny first. Did Donald Trump incite an insurrection on January 6th, 2021?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You think he should be on the ballot? You think there's a case to be made to remove him from the ballot?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I like that you both said 100% chance that Trump will try to go for third term and 0% chance, which statistically- Third term, he's done, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, recently in the news, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT failed to fully denounce calls for genocide. And that rose questions about the influence of DEI programs at universities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so maybe either looking at this or zooming out more broadly at identity politics at universities or identity politics, wokeism in our culture, how big of a threat is it to our culture, to Western civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I have to be honest, I ran out of it two days ago. It was one of those moments when you realize how big of a part of your life a thing is. you really do realize that when a thing is gone, most intensely, most viscerally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Maybe it would be good to get your comments, your old stomping ground Harvard. Do you think the president of Harvard should have been fired?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You guys probably agree on a lot of this, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I got my education in the Soviet Union, so we just did math.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Destiny the uniter. Wow. Like Biden.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
As we approach the end, let us descend into the meme further and further. Ben, you're in a monogamous marriage. Destiny, you've been mostly in an open marriage until recently. How foundational is marriage, monogamous marriage, to the United States of America? Can open marriages work? Are they harmful to society?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Destiny, what do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Rapid fire questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, we could talk about religion, but that's not rapid fire at all. Let me ask, this is from the internet, does body count matter? Jesus Christ.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Okay. Should porn be banned? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I can't believe I'm asking this question. Is OnlyFans empowering or destructive for women?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Is rap music?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Have you evolved on this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
All right, you're both world-class debaters, even public intellectuals, if I can say that. Yeah, I know. I'm going real hard here. I know. You both care about the truth. What is your process of arriving at the truth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And the Daily Wire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And if you're feeling frisky, then watch Destiny as well. You've talked about having a conversation debating Ben for a long time. What is your favorite thing about Ben Shapiro?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Ben, you've gotten a chance to talk to Destiny now. What do you like about the guy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, gentlemen, this was incredible. It's an honor. Thank you for doing this today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Thanks for listening to this debate between Ben Shapiro and Destiny. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Aristotle. The basis of a democratic state is liberty. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And it's actually the little things that form the foundation of a peaceful existence, those little rituals, those little habits, those little comforts, they make life so at once mundane, And at the same time, just perfect. Just right. Anyway, I've recently been doing daily exercise of some sort. So it's either grappling, running, or weightlifting. One of those. And at least one hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
The following is a conversation with Bill Ackman, a legendary activist investor who has been part of some of the biggest and at times controversial trades in history. Also, he is fearlessly vocal on X, FKA, Twitter, and uses the platform to fight for ideas he believes in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
like UMG, able to adjust to such transformations? One, I could ask you about the future, which is artificial intelligence, being able to generate music, for example. There have been a lot of amazing advancements. So do you have to also think about that? When you close your eyes, all the things you think about, are you imagining the possible ways that the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, I still have hope. I think universities are really important institutions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Nary Oxman, somebody you mentioned several times throughout this podcast, somebody I had a wonderful conversation with, a friendship with, I've known, looked up to her, admired her, has been a fan, I've been a fan of hers for a long time, of her work, and of her as a human being. Looks like you're a fan of hers as well. What do you love about Nary?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
What do you admire about her as a scientist, artist, human being?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So she's been a help to you through some of the rough moments you described? For sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there some degree of yin and yang with the two personalities you have? You have described yourself as emotional and so on, but it does seem the two of you have slightly different styles about how you approach the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, you are constantly in multiple battles at the same time, and there's often the media, social media, it's just fire everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
When you go to a particular restaurant, or you go into an ice cream shop, or you go to the grocery store aisle with the delicious snacks, and you know exactly which snack you're getting. I have that. There's these chips that have very low carbs in them. And there's a lot of different kinds. But there's a particular kind I really like and a particular flavor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I don't know, there's a lot of things I want to say, but you made it pretty clear, but just as a member of the community There's also like a common sense test. I think you're more precisely like legal and looking at, but there's just like a bullshit test and like nothing that Nary did is plagiarism in the bad meaning of the word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Plagiarism right now is becoming another ism like racism or so on using as an attack word. I don't care what the meaning of it is, but there's the bad academic fraud, like theft. Theft of an idea. And maybe you can say a lot of definitions and this kind of stuff, but then there's just a basic bullshit test where everyone knows this is a thief and this is definitely not a thief.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And there's nothing about anything that Neri did, anything in her thesis or in her life, everyone that knows her, she's a rock star, right? I just want to make it clear, it really hurt me that the internet, whatever is happening, could go after, could go after a great scientist, because I love science, and I love celebrating great scientists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And it's just really messed up that whatever the machine, and we could talk about business insight or whatever, social media, mass hysteria, whatever is happening, we need the great scientists of the world, because that's like the future depends on them. And so we need to celebrate them and protect them and let them flourish and let them do their thing and keep them out
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
of this whatever shitstorm that we're doing to get clicks and advertisements and drama and all this, we need to protect them. So I just wanna say there's nobody I know and a million friends that are scientists, world-class scientists, Nobel Prize winners, they all love Neri, they all respect Neri. She did zero wrong, I just wanna.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And then the rest of the conversation we're going to have about how broken journalism is and so on. But, like, I just want to say that there's nothing that Nary did wrong. It's not a gray area or so on. I also personally don't love that Claudine Gay –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
is a discussion about plagiarism because it distracts from the fundamentals that is broken um this becomes like some weird technical discussion but in case of nary did nothing wrong great scientist great engineer at mit and beyond she's doing the cool thing now so anyway could not have said it better myself obviously i'm focused on the technical part
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And I actually think AI is not going to be the primary creator of music. I think we're going to actually face the reality that it's not that music has been around for thousands of years, but musicians and music has been around. We actually care to know who's the musician that created it. Just like we wanna know who's the artist, human artist that created a piece of art.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you're, at least for now, moving forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I don't know much in this world, but journalists aren't supposed to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It is true, and you're doing your job as a good partner, seeing the silver lining of all of this. How is, just from observing her, how did she stay strong through all of this psychologically? Because at least I know she's pushing ahead with the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Well, my worry primarily when I saw what Business Insider was doing is that they might dim the light of a truly special scientist and creator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
But I also worry about others...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I'll just say that you in this regard are inspiring to me for facing basically an institution that's whole purpose is to write articles. So you're like going into the fire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you think X... formerly known as Twitter as a kind of neutralizing force to that, to the power of centralized journalistic institutions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I have to talk to you about politics. Sure. Amongst all the other battles, you've also been a part of that one. Maybe you can correct me on this, but you've been a big supporter of various Democratic candidates over the years. But you did say a lot of nice things about Donald Trump in 2016, I believe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yes. So what was the case back then? And to which degree did that turn out to be true? And to which degree did it not? To which degree was he a good president? To which degree was he not a good president?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Unless that computer has... human-like sentience, which I believe is a real possibility, but then it's really, from a business perspective, no different than a human. If it has an identity, that's basically fame and an influence, and there'd be a robot Taylor Swift, and it doesn't really matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Right, yeah. Not sure that's the world I'm excited about. That's a different discussion. The world is not going to ask your permission to become what it's becoming. But you can still make money on it. Presumably there'd be a capital system and there'd be some laws under which I believe AI systems will have rights that are akin to human rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Or you might be torn because both candidates are not good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you want to, I love a future where I'm torn because the choices are so amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And we're going to have to contend with what that means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You've been a supporter of Dean Phillips for the 2024 US presidential race.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
What do you like about Dean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So he has to increase name recognition, all that kind of stuff. Also, as you mentioned, he's young. Yeah, he's 55, but he's a young 55.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, I mean, I guess 55, no matter what, is a pretty young age.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So that's a standard. You're at the top of your tennis game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, I got a chance to chat with Dean. I really like him. I really like him. And I think the next president of the United States is going to have to meet and speak regularly with Zelensky, Putin, and Yahoo, with world leaders, and have... some of the most historic conversations, agreements, negotiations, and I just don't see Biden doing that. And not for any reason, but sadly, age.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Let me look to the future. First, in terms of the financial world, what are you looking forward to in the next couple of years? Do you have a new fund? What are you thinking about in terms of investment, your own and the entire economy, and maybe even the economy of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the hamburger and fries are forever. I was eating at Chipotle last night as I was preparing these notes. Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, it is one of my favorite places to eat. You said it is a place that you eat. You obviously also invest in it. What do you get at Chipotle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
But I'm not ready to reveal what the brand or the flavor is to maintain a sense of mystery about my life. But more honestly, because I don't actually remember. I just remember the color. Anyway, that's me with watermelon salt and element. It's delicious. I have found the thing I need in my life, especially when I'm fasting or doing low-carb stuff. Get a simple pack for free with any purchase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you have hope for the entirety of it, even for Harvard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Well, I share your hope, and you're a fascinating mind, a brilliant mind, persistent, as you like to say, and fearless. The fearless part is truly inspiring, and this was an incredible conversation. Thank you. Thank you for talking today, Bill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bill Ackman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Jonathan Swift. A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And I'm more of a steak guy, just putting that on the record. What's the actual process you go through? Like, literally, like- the process of figuring out what the value of a company is. Like, how do you do the research? Is it reading documents? Is it talking to people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So in the case of Chipotle, for example, by the way, I could talk about Chipotle all day. I just love it. I love it. I wish there was a sponsor. I'll mention it to the CEO. Don't make promises you can't keep, Bill. I'm not making promises.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
All right. All I want is free Chipotle. Come on now. What was I saying? Oh, and so you look at a company like Chipotle, and then you see there's a difficult moment in its history, like you said, that there was a food safety issue, and then you say, okay, well, I see a path where we can fix this, and therefore, even though the price is low, we can get it to where the price goes up to its value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for all kinds of insurance, life insurance, auto insurance, home insurance, disability insurance. They have really nice tools for comparison. This is the thing I need in my life for everything. This is where the good aspect of capitalism can come in, where you have freely competing entities
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You said that barriers to entry. You said a lot of really interesting qualities of companies very quickly in a sequence of statements that took less than 10 seconds to say. But some of them were fascinating. All of them were fascinating. So you said barriers to entry. How do you know if there's a type of moat protecting the competitors from stepping up to the plate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So if the restaurant has scaled to a certain number, that means they've figured out some kind of system that works. It's very difficult to develop that kind of system. So that's a moat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Burger King, okay, wow. It's been a meme for a while, but I've... Burger King is great too, Wendy's, whatever. But usually I go McDonald's. I'll just eat burger patties. I don't know if you knew you could do this, but a burger patty at Burger King can do this. McDonald's, it's actually way cheaper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
The patty. And it's cheap. It's like $1.50 or $2 per patty. And it's about 250 calories and it's just meat. And despite the criticism and memes out there, that's... Pretty healthy stuff. It's healthy stuff. And so when I go, the healthiest I feel is when I do carnivore. It doesn't sound healthy, but if I eat only meat, I feel really good. I lose weight. I have all this energy. It's crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Honestly competing. Transparent with full information available to the consumer where they get to choose. And choose honestly based on well-defined, clear, full set of parameters. All right? I love it. I need that for... other things I'm doing in my life. I need that for everything. In fact, going back to the other thing I mentioned, I need that for ice cream.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And when I'm traveling, the easiest way to get meat is that. So you go to McDonald's, you order six patties? Exactly. So there's this sad meme of me just sitting alone in a car when I'm traveling, just eating beef patties at McDonald's. But I love it. And you got to do what you love, what makes you happy. And that's what makes me happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
For example, he was a central figure in the resignation of the president of Harvard University, Claude Dean Gay, the saga of which we discuss in this episode. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Wait, is this like fast food trash? I didn't know. I don't know the details of how they're made. I don't have allegiance to McDonald's. I think we got a chance to switch you to Burger King. Great. We'll see. Yeah. I'm making so many deals today. It's wonderful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You were talking about most, and this kind of reminded me of Alphabet, the parent company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So it's interesting that you think that maybe Alphabet fits some of these characteristics. Yeah. It's tricky to know with everything that's happening in AI. And I'm interviewing Sundar Pichai soon. It's interesting that you think that there's a moat. And it's also interesting to analyze it because the consumer is just a fan of technology. Why is Google still around?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It's not just the search engine. It's doing it all online. the basics of the business of search really well, but they're doing all these other stuff. So what's your analysis of Alphabet? Why are you still positive about it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I need a full, detailed comparison of the different flavors. I also need data on who enjoyed which flavor throughout human history. I'm not talking about just that ice cream shop. Across all ice cream shops, I want the data. And I don't just want the mean or the median, because that's going to end up on vanilla or chocolate, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there something fundamentally different about AI that makes all of this more complicated, which is the sort of the exponential possibilities of the kinds of products and impact that AI could create when you're looking at Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Google, all of these companies, XAI. or maybe startups? Is there some more risk introduced by the possibilities of AI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I want the clusters, and I want to know which cluster I belong to. I want the data. Anyway, so the tools that allow you to explore the parameters are very important, and that's what Policy Genius provides. With PolicyGenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Well, Google was pretty fat and happy until Chagipati came out. How would you rate their ability to wake up, lose weight, and be less happy and aggressively rediscover their... search for happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And Demis Hassab has thrown them into the picture and all of DeepMind teams and the unification of teams and all the shakeups. It was interesting to watch the chaos. I love it. I love it when everybody freaks out. Like you said, partly embarrassment and partly that competitive drive that drives engineers is great. I can't wait to see what, there's been just a lot of improvement in the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Let's see where it goes. You mentioned management. How do you analyze the governance structure and the individual humans that are the managers of a company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Head to PolicyGenius.com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink that I drink to support better health and peak performance. The degree to which I love AG1 and my very good close friend Andrew Huberman loves AG1 has become a meme.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Are we talking about CEO, COO? What does management mean? How deep does it go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You mentioned Warren Buffett. You said you admire him as an investor. What do you find most interesting and powerful about his approach? What aspects of his approach to investing do you also practice?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You've been a part of some big battles, some big losses, some big wins. So it's been a roller coaster. So in terms of temperament, psychologically, how do you not let that break you? How do you maintain a calm demeanor and avoid running with the lemmings?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So psychologically, just as a human being. speaking of lions and gazelles and all this kind of stuff, is there some, is it as simple as just being financially secure? Is there some just human qualities that you have to be born with slash develop?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And, you know, every meme is grounded in reality and truth. And my truth is that it just brings me happiness. You know, in days like I talk about in this episode, where all I eat is some McDonald's beef patties, it just brings me both sort of physiological and psychological comfort, knowing that I have at least some of the nutritional bases covered. Meat does make me feel good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
No. So being emotional, do you want to respond to volatility?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I think we'll talk about some of that. Financially secure is something I believe also recommend for even just everyday investors. Is there some general advice there? from the things you've been talking about that applies to everyday investors?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So be able to think long-term and be sufficiently financially secure such that you can afford to think long-term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah. So you mentioned eight companies, but what do you think about mutual funds that are for everyday investors that diversify across a larger number of companies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, index funds. But what would be the leap for an everyday investor to go to investing in a small number of companies, like two, three, four, five companies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
But your body probably needs a lot of other stuff, especially for long-term longevity and long-term health and flourishing. But, of course, in the long term, we're all driving towards a cliff. And one day, too soon, we'll be driving off that cliff, hopefully with a smile. and maybe on that day I will also be drinking AG1. I drink it twice a day now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, it's interesting. Consumers that love a thing are actually good analysts of that thing, or I guess a good starting point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I'm just afraid if I invest in Chipotle, I'll be like analyzing every little change of menu from a financial perspective and just be very critical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, I mean, I should also say that I am somebody that emotionally doesn't respond to volatility, which is why I've never bought index funds. And I just noticed myself psychologically being affected by the ups and downs of the market. I want to tune out because if I'm at all tuned in, it has a negative impact on my life. Yeah, that's really important. Can you explain what activist investing is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You've been talking about investing and then looking at companies when they're struggling, stepping in and reconfiguring things within that company and helping it become great. So that's part of it, but let's just zoom out. What's this idea of activist investing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It's actually one of my favorite ways to take a break. I just sit on the couch and sip, listen to this peaceful kind of music, and just think, prepare my mind for the work ahead. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its Pod 3 mattress. It controls temperature with a nap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So the owners meaning the shareholders. Yes. And so there's a more direct channel of communication with activist investing between the shareholders and the people running the company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It can cool you down to as low as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. But you're going to need the next sponsor if you're the kind of person that puts it up to 110 degrees. I have a lot of questions. Next sponsor is about to help, by the way. 110 degrees, I just have questions. I think I saw a social media post from Tim Kennedy saying, when you're alone, that guy's a poet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So the running of a company is, according to Bill Ackman, is more democratic now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So on average, is it good to have such an engaged, powerful, influential investor helping direct the direction of a company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
We got Element for delicious electrolytes, Policy Genius for insurance, AG1 for overall delicious health, Aidsleep for naps, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfreeman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So that's the good story, but can it get bad? Can you have a... a CEO who is a visionary and sees the long-term future of a company, and an investor come in and have very selfish interest in just making more money in the short-term, and therefore destroy and manipulate the opinions of the shareholders and other people on the board in order to sink the company,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
maybe increase the price, but destroy the possibility of long-term value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So people are generally skeptical, short-term activist investors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You mentioned general growth. I read somewhere it called arguably one of the best hedge fund trades of all time. So I guess it went from $60 million to over $3 billion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Can you describe what went into making that decision to actually increase the value of the company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Also, he's insane on the mat. Anyway, he was posting, I think, on Instagram that when you're alone, the only correct temperature to exist in is 60 degrees, 58 degrees, something like this. Basically, he likes it freezing. And I can somewhat agree, especially on the surface of the bed. Cold bed, warm blanket, that's just the best way to take a nap. I need to go see Tim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Training Jiu-Jitsu with him is really fun. But he goes pretty intense. That guy lives life on 11. Anyway, check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Spelled H-E-L-P-E-H-E-L-P. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
What gave you confidence through that? Once a penny stock and I'm sure you were getting a lot of naysayers and people saying that this is crazy. It's the same thing. You just do the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
How hard is it to learn some of the legal aspects of this? Like you mentioned bankruptcy code. Like I imagine it's very sort of dense language and dense ideas and the loopholes and all that kind of stuff. Like if you're just stepping in and you've never done distressed investing, how hard is it to figure out? It's not that hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you were able to pick up the intuition from that, just all the basic skills involved, the basic facts to know, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Individual or couples, it's easy, discreet, affordable, available anywhere. Listen, this is the easiest way to start talking and start diving deep. into the recesses of your subconscious mind. I'm a huge fan of talk therapy, of talking, talking rigorously, talking like it's an important thing with a goal in mind, like you're digging for something. That's what I try to do with this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Okay, we'll probably talk about Rockefeller Center and some failures. But first, you said Fox in the hen house. Yes. Something that the board and the chairman were worried about. Why would they call you a fox? So you keep saying... Activist investing is nothing to worry about. It's always good. Sure. Mostly good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
But, you know, that expression applied in this context, you know, they were still worried about that. Sure. And so, I mean, there's a million questions here. But first of all, what is the process of getting on the board look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
What's this proxy contest slash battle idea? What's that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
That's what I try to do with conversations In my private life, when I'm just sitting there at a coffee shop and a stranger sits down and says hello, I'm not a licensed therapist. Neither is the other person. We're just there for an open mic or a music thing or whatever the hell. We're amateur. We're amateur therapists of each other. Anyway, you should work with professionals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So also some stuff that's public, like in the press and all this kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you're saying the fat and happy hens can get very wolf-like when the fox is trying to break in? Is this how we extend the metaphor? Well, the fox is a threat to the hens. Yeah. Yeah. But you're, you've just, the charismatic fox just explained to me why the fox is good for everybody in the hen house.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
What was the most dramatic battle for the board that you have been a part of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And that's what BetterHelp provides. The whole point is they make it easy. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Bill Ackman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And this is where the engine starts churning to figure out how this contest can be won. So what's involved?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So on this one, you were right. Yes. And I read an article about you, and there's many articles about you. I read an article that said Bill is often right, but you approach it with a scorched earth approach that can often do more, sort of can do damage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
On a small tangent, since we're talking about boards, Did you get a chance to see what happened with the OpenAI board? Because I'm talking to Sam Altman soon. Is there any insight you have, just maybe lessons you draw from this kind of, these kinds of events, especially with an AI technology company, such dramatic things happening?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
In your lecture on the basics of finance and investing, you mentioned a book, Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham as being formative in your life. What key lesson do you take away from that book that informs your own investing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And there's, I guess, some kind of complexity in the governance. I mean, because of this non-profit and cap-profit thing, it seems like there's a bunch of complexity and non-standard aspects to it that perhaps also contributed to the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Can you explain to me the difference between venture-backed VCs and shareholders? So this means before the company goes public?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So we talked about some of the big wins and your track record, but you said there were some big losses. So what's the biggest loss of your career?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I'm sweating this whole conversation, both the wins and the losses and the stakes involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Absolutely. So they use the opportunity of value to try to destroy you. reputation, financially, and then capitalizing to make money off of that. Well, that's a terrifying spot to be in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So he knew.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And there you were able to protect your reputation from the valiant failure still?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. We love them. I love them. Maybe you will love them too. This episode is brought to you by Element, the thing I'm drinking right now, the thing I drink throughout the day, all days, when I travel, it is forever with me. The only flavor I now acknowledge exists is watermelon salt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So refocus on the fundamentals. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
As a man, that's a difficult phone call to take.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Brad Pitt. And you emerged from all that the winner on all fronts. I'm a very fortunate guy. Very fortunate. And lucky. You talked about some of the technical aspects of that, but psychologically, is there a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
In that same way, there's a kind of difference between speculation and investing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You mentioned Herbalife. Can you take me through the saga of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So he was, we should say, uh, a legendary investor himself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
How do you get to that, this idea called value investing? How do you get to the value of a thing? Even like philosophically, value of anything really, but we can just talk about the things that are on the stock market. Sure. Companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You actually said, fuck you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It wasn't public information that he was long on Herbalife?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there part of you that regrets saying fuck you on that phone call? To Carl Icahn?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Can you say one thing you really like about Carl Icahn and one thing you really don't like about him? Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there, because at least from the outsider perspective, there's a bit of a personal vengeance here. Or anger can build up. Do you ever worry the personal attacks between powerful investors can cloud your judgment? What is the right financial decision?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Of course, there's more than just investing that your life is about, especially recently. Yeah. Let me just ask you about what's going on in the world first. What was your reaction and what is your reaction and thoughts with respect to the October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So there's several things I can ask here. First, on your views on the prospects of the Middle East, but also on the reaction to this war in the United States, especially on university campuses. So first, let me just ask, you've said that you're pro-Palestinian. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Do you think that's still possible if we look into the future of 10, 20, 50 years from now? Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Take me through the saga of university presidents. testifying on this topic, on the topic of protests on college campuses, protests that call for the genocide of Jewish people, and the university presidents, maybe you could describe it more precisely, but they fail to denounce the calls for genocide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So what are the factors that indicate that a company is going to be something that's going to make a lot of money, it's going to have a lot of value, and it's going to be reliable over a long period of time? And what is your process of figuring out whether a company is or isn't that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I should mention briefly that I've interviewed on this podcast the founder of FIRE and the current head of FIRE. We've discussed this at length, including... running for the board of Harvard and the whole procedure of all that. It's quite a fascinating investigation of free speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
For people who care about free speech absolutism, that's a good episode to listen to because those folks kind of fight for this idea. It's a difficult idea, actually, to internalize what does free speech in college campuses look like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And just to linger on the testimony, you mentioned, you know, smirks and this kind of stuff, and you mentioned dare to be great. I, myself, am kind of a sucker for great leadership. And those moments, you mentioned Churchill or so on, even great speeches, right? People talk down on speeches like it's maybe just words, but I think speeches can define a culture and define
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
a place to find a people that can inspire. And I think actually the testimony before Congress could have been an opportunity to redefine what Harvard is, dare to be great for, dare to be a great leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It's tough because you can get busy as a president, as a leader, and so on. There's these meetings, so you think Congress, maybe you're smirking at the ridiculousness of the meeting. You need to remember... that many of these are opportunities to give a speech of a lifetime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
If there's principles which you want to see an institution become and embody in the next several decades, there's opportunities to do that. And you, as a great leader, also need to have a sense of when is the opportunity to do that. And October 7th really woke up the world on all sides, honestly, like there is serious issue going on here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And then the protests woke up the university to there's a serious issue going on here. It's an opportunity to speak on free speech and on genocide, both. Do you see the criticism that you are a billionaire donor? and you sort of used your power and financial influence unfairly to affect the governing structure of Harvard in this case?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
There's many other flavors, and other people say they're also delicious. I don't know what they're saying. They probably don't know what they're talking about because the greatest flavor of all time is watermelon salt. Do you ever just go to a thing, to a very particular flavor of a thing, and that becomes your thing? There's never a doubt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there some tension between free speech on college campuses and disciplining students for calls of genocide?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Do you think this reveals a deeper problem in terms of ideology and the governance of Harvard in maybe the culture of Harvard?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So maybe you can speak to that book a little bit. So there's a history that traces back across decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
In the next few years, the infiltration of DEI with the uppercase version of universities and the things that have troubled you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
But I should say, I'm still at MIT, and I love MIT, and I believe in the power of great universities to explore ideas, to inspire young people to think, to inspire young people to lead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, 100% agree. And I also felt like the leadership wasn't even part of the problem as much as they were almost out of touch, like, unaware that this is an important moment, it's an important crisis, it's an important opportunity to step up as a leader and define the future of an institution. So I don't even know where the source of the problem is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It could be literally governance structure, as we've been talking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Well, luckily, engineering robotics is touched last by this. It is touched, but, you know, when I'm at the computing building, Stata and the new one, politics doesn't infiltrate, or I haven't seen it infiltrate quite as deeply as elsewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yes, yes, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So as you said, technically, Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, resigned over plagiarism, not over the thing that you were initially troubled by.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Well, music is interesting because, yes, music's been around for a very long time, but the way to make money from music has been evolving. Like you mentioned streaming, there's a big transition initiated by, I guess, Napster, then created Spotify, of how you make money on music with Apple and with all of this. And the question is, how well are companies...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So is there a spectrum for you between different kinds of plagiarism, maybe plagiarizing words and plagiarizing ideas and plagiarizing novel ideas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there a part of you that regrets that, at least from the perception of it, the president of Harvard stepped down over plagiarism versus over refusing to say that the calls for genocide are wrong?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The following is a conversation with Peter Levels, also known on X as LevelsIO. He is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who designed, programmed, shipped, and ran over 40 startups, many of which are hugely successful. In most cases, he did it all by himself while living the digital nomad life in over 40 countries and over 150 cities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's the latency of that from you pressing command?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you just make a change and then you're getting really good at like not making mistakes basically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't think it's crazy. I mean, I'm sure there's a middle ground, but I think that whole thing where there's a... a phase of like testing and there's the staging and there's a development and then there's like multiple tables and databases that you use for the state. Like it's filing, it's a mess and there's different teams involved. It's no good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I'm like a good, funny extreme on the other side, you know, but just a little bit safer, but not too much. It would be great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I'm sure that's actually like how X, now how they're doing rapid improvement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing happening. Yes. Bugs are the future because it shows that the team is actually building shit. 100%. One of the problems is like I see with YouTube, there's so much potential to build features, but I just see how long it takes. So I've gotten a chance to interact with many other teams, but one of the teams is MLA, multi-language audio.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But the interesting thing is you've built a lot of successful products and you never really wanted to take it to that level where you scale real big and sell it to a company or something like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't know if you know this, but in YouTube, you can have audio tracks in different languages for overdubbing. And that there's a team and not many people are using it, but like every single feature they have to meet and agree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And like, there's allocate resources, like engineers have to work on it, but I'm sure it's a pain in the ass for the engineers to get approval to like, cause it has to not break the rest of the site, whatever they do. But like, if you don't have enough dictatorial, like top down, like we need this now, it's going to take forever to do anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Multilanguage audio, but multilanguage audio is a good example of a thing. that seems niche right now, but it quite possibly could change the entire world. When you have, when I upload this conversation right here, if instantaneously it dubs it into 40 languages and everybody consume, every single video can be watched and listened to, in those different, it changes everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And YouTube is extremely well positioned to be the leader in this. They got the compute, they got the user base, they got like, they have the experience of how to do this. So like the multi-language audio should be- Hyperactive feature, right? High priority. And it's a way, you know, Google is obsessed with AI right now. They want to show off that they could be dominant in AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's a way for Google to say, like, we used AI. Like, this is a way to break down the walls that language creates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think they're not like selfish or whatever. They want to do good. There's something about the machine. The organizational stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. It requires... Again, I don't know if there must be a nicer word, but like a dictatorial type of top-down, the CEO rolls in and just says like, for you two, it's like MLA, get this done now. This is the highest priority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, again, dictatorial. You basically say Steve Jobs did this quite a lot. I've seen a lot of leaders do this. Ignore the lawyers. Ignore comms. Ignore PR. Ignore everybody. Give power to the engineers. Listen to the people on the ground. Get this shit done and get it done by Friday. That's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Just out of curiosity, what IDE do you use? Let's talk about like your whole setup. Given how ultra productive you are, I mean, you often program in your underwear, slouching on the couch. Does it matter to you in general? Is there like a specific ID? Do you use VS Code?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's actually interesting. Sublime is the first editor where I've learned that. And I think they just make that super easy. So like, what would that be called? Multi-edit, multi-cursor edit thing, whatever. Yeah. So I'm sure like almost every editor can do that. It's just probably hard to set up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Wow, you know the format C reference, huh?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I don't know if it's peer pressure, but I used Emacs for many, many years. And I love Lisp, so a lot of the customization is done in Lisp. It's a programming language. Partially it was peer pressure, but part of it is realizing you need to keep learning stuff. Same issue with jQuery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I still think I need to learn Node.js, for example, even though that's not my main thing or even close to the main thing. But I feel like you need to keep learning this stuff. And even if you don't choose to use it long-term, you need to give it a chance so your understanding of the world expands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's more about the concepts, I would say, than the actual tools, like expanding. And that can be a challenging thing. So going to VS Code and really learning it, like all the shortcuts, all the extensions, and actually installing different stuff and playing with it, That was an interesting challenge. It was uncomfortable at first. Yeah, for me too, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But would you like, I guess you got to use your own model, which is like build the thing using it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you basically built a framework from scratch. That's your own, you understand it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I guess you should be just learning every single day a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You got to learn how to use the weapons of war and then you can be a peacenik. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, but you gotta learn it in the same exact way as we were talking about, which is learn it by trying to build something with it and actually deploy it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but like you won't know until you really give it a try. And it feels like you have to build, like if maybe I'm talking to myself, but I should probably... recode like my personal one page in Laravel or, and even though it might not have almost any dynamic elements, maybe have one dynamic element, but it has to go end to end in that framework or like end to end build in Node.js.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Some of it is, I don't, figuring out how to even deploy the thing. I have no idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I actually kind of just gave myself the idea of like, I kind of just want to build a single web page Like one webpage that has like one dynamic element and just do it in every single, like in a lot of frameworks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How long it takes to do it. Yeah, stopwatch. I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated because it should probably do some kind of, thing where it accesses the database and dynamically exchanging stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, maybe some, it doesn't have to be AI or LLM, but maybe API call to something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And like time it and also report on my happiness. Yeah. I'm going to totally do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Just take like a month and do this. How many frameworks are there? There's like five main ways of doing it. So there's back-end, front-end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it was interesting how people are pulled towards that, to scale, to go really big. And you don't have that honest reflection with yourself, like what actually makes you happy? Because for a lot of great engineers, what makes them happy is the building, the quote-unquote individual contributor, like where you're actually still coding or you're actually still building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then, but there's not really, you're not really forced to do anything. So like, according to the internet, so like there's no, it's actually not trivial to find the canonical way of doing things. So like the standard vanilla, like you go to the ice cream shop, there's like a million flavors. I want vanilla. If I've never had ice cream in my life, Can we just like learn about ice cream?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I want vanilla. Nobody actually, sometimes they'll literally name it vanilla, but like, I want to know what's the basic way, but not like dumb, but like the standard canonical. I want to know the dominant way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, maybe LLMs can help. Maybe you should explicitly ask, what is the dominant?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I've tried these kinds of things. What happens is, it depends what kind of, if they're like a world-class developer, yes. Oftentimes they themselves are used to that thing and they have not themselves explored in other options. So they have this dogmatic like talking down to you, like this is the right way to do it. It's like, no, no, no, we're just like exploring together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay, show me the cool thing you've tried. Which is like, it has to have open-mindedness to like, you know, Node.js is not the right way to do web development. It's like one way. And there's nothing wrong with the old LAMP, PHP, jQuery, vanilla JavaScript way. It just has its pros and cons. And like, you need to know what the pros and cons are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I mean, well, Karpathy... has its own style and is like, I'm not sure he's for everybody, but for example, five-year-old, it depends on the five-year-old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
He's like super technical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And build it from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like top tier, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But he might be anti-framework. Because he built from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. He's like Yuba for AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Maybe we should stay in PHP and like ScriptKitty and the... But you have to... Maybe by learning the framework, you learn what you want to yourself build from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you're still a Mac guy. Always a Mac guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And they let go of that, and then they become unhappy. But some of that is the sacrifice needed to have an impact at scale. If you truly believe in a thing you're doing,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Listen, I kind of... You're making me want to switch to Mac. So I either use Linux inside Windows with WSL or just Ubuntu Linux. But Windows for most stuff like... or any Adobe products. Well, I guess you could do Mac stuff there. I wonder if I should switch. What do you miss about Windows? What was the pros and cons?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you use the command line?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I'm in this weird situation where I'm somewhat of a power user in Windows and, let's say, Android. And all the much smarter friends I have are all using Mac and iPhone. And it's like... But you don't want to go through the peer pressure, you know? It's not peer pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like... Like, one of the reasons I want to have kids is that there's a lot of... Like, I would love to have kids as a baseline. But, you know, there's, like, a concern maybe there's going to be a trade-off or all this kind of stuff. But you see, like, these extremely successful, smart people who are friends of mine who have kids and are really happy they have kids. So that's not peer pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's just, like, a strong signal. Yeah, that it works for people. That it works for people. Yeah. And the same thing with Mac. It's like... I don't see... Fundamentally, I don't like closed systems. Fundamentally, I like Windows more because there's much more freedom. Same with Android. There's much more freedom. It's much more customizable. But all the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The cool kids, the smart kids are using Mac and iPhones. Like, all right, I need to really, I need to give it a real chance, especially for development. Since more and more stuff is done in the cloud anyway. Anyway, but it's funny to hear you say all the good stuff started happening. Maybe I'll be like that guy too. When I switched to Mac, all the good stuff started happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but look at the keyboard I use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's one word for it. What's your favorite place to work? On the couch. Does the couch matter? Is the couch your home or is it any couch?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you're just doing like this little thing with the thing. Yes. One screen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So... Well, I don't know. This sounds like you're part of a cult and you're just trying to convince me. But I mean, but it's good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single screen. I mean, that's crazy. Command-Tap. You Alt-Op, like Windows Alt-Op, macOS Command-Tap. You switch very fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you have like one, the entire screen is taken up by VS Code, say you're looking at the code and then, and then like if you deploy like a website, you what, switch screens?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because I have three screens and two of them are vertical. Yeah. For code, you can see a lot. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's it. There's some aspect of the constraints, which once you get good at it, you can focus your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a good way to put it. I'm suspicious of more. Me too. I'm suspicious of more in all ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Take me through like the perfect ultra productive day in your life. Like, say, like, where you get a lot of shit done. Yeah. Are you... And it's all focused on getting shit done. When are you waking up? Is it a regular time? Super early, super late?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You said that there's been a few low points in your life. You've been depressed and the building is one of the ways you get out of that. But can you talk to that? Can you take me to that place, that time when you were at a low point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How long are you, like how stretches of time are you able to just sit behind the computer coding?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How many hours are you saying a perfectly productive day you're doing programming? Like if you were like to kill it. Are you doing like all day basically?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I recently tweeted about my belief, as it stands now, that Kamala Harris is not a communist and that Donald Trump is not a fascist. And there's some other nuance in that tweet. And the response I got... the attacks I got from both sides that are very intense, that disagree, were fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Okay. Let's remove girlfriend from picture, social life from picture. It's just you. Man, that shit goes crazy. Okay. Because when shit goes crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So let's rewind. Are you still waking up? There's coffee. There's no girlfriend to talk to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So, you're not really working with him, but you're just both working.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And what, uh, what music are you listening to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. That's not distracting to your brain. That's amazing. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's interesting. Cause I, I, I actually mostly now listen to a brown noise noise. Yeah. Wow. Like pretty loud. Wow. And one of the things you learn is your brain gets used to whatever. So I'm sure to techno, if I actually give it a real chance, my brain would get used to it. But like with noise, what happens is something happens to your brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think there's a science to it, but I don't really care. You just have to be a scientist of one, like study yourself, your own brain. For me, it does something. I discovered it right away when I tried it for the first time. After about like a couple of minutes, everything, every distraction just like disappears and it goes like... You can like hold focus on things like really well. It's weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like you can like... really focus on a thing. It doesn't really matter what that is. I think that's what people achieve with meditation. You can focus on your breath, for example, for so long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No. It's just normal brown noise. It's just like, shh. Yeah. White noise, I think, it's the same. It's like pink noise, white noise. Brown noise, I think, it's like bassier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Dampened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No sharpness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, brightness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, headphones. Yeah. I actually like walk around in life often with brown noise. Dude, that's like psychopath shit, but it's cool, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I murder people, it helps. It drowns out their screams. Jesus Christ.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I said too much. Man, I'm going to try Brown Noise. With a murder or for the coding? For the coding, yeah. Okay, good. Try it. Try it. But you have to, like with everything else, give it a real chance. Yeah. I also, like I said, do techno-y type stuff, electronic music on top of the Brown Noise, but then control the speed. because the faster it goes, the more anxiety.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So if I really need to get shit done, especially with programming, I'll have a beat. And it's great. It's cool. It's cool to play those little tricks with your mind to study yourself. I usually don't like to have people around because when people, even if they're working, I don't know, I like people too much. They're like interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. So they're a source of distraction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think there's an intimacy in being silent together that maybe I'm uncomfortable with. But you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it. Like with close friends to just sit there in silence for long periods of time and like doing a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Elon's like that. And I really like that. You'll ask a question. Like, I don't know. What's a perfectly productive day for you? Like I just asked. And you just sit there for like 30 seconds thinking. Yeah, he thinks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I do that more with team. I think he has a lot of practice in that. I do that as well. And in team setting, when you're thinking, brainstorming, and you allow yourself to just like think in silence. Just like, because even in meetings, people want to talk. It's like, no, you think before you speak and just like, it's okay to be silent together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And if you allow yourself the room to do that, you can actually come up with really good ideas. So, okay, this perfect day. How much caffeine are you consuming in this day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So many truly special artists died when they were 27.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Starting from scratch, creating a new thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Just wearing cowboy hats in the mountains like we showed. Exactly, we can do that. There's a movie about that. With the laptops. They didn't do much programming though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's a balance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What about sleep, naps and all that? You're not sleeping much?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, me, I love naps. I don't care. I don't know. I don't know why. Brain shuts off, turns on. I don't know if it's healthy or not. It just works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think with anything, mental, physical, you have to be a student of your own body and know what the limits are. You have to be skeptical taking advice from the internet in general, because a lot of the advice is just a good baseline for the general population. But then you have to become a student of your own body, of your own self, of how you work. I've done a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
For me, fasting was an interesting one because I used to eat a bunch of meals a day, especially when I was lifting heavy because everybody says that you have to eat kind of a lot, multiple meals a day. But I realized I can get much stronger, feel much better if I eat once or twice a day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Let me just ask you, it'd be interesting if you can comment on some of the other products you've created. We talked about Nomad List, Interior AI, Photo AI, Therapist AI. What's Remote OK?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's just focused on remote only. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I got to ask you about back to the digital nomad life. Yeah. You wrote a blog post on the reset and in general, like just giving away everything, living a minimalist life. Yeah. What did it take to do that? Like to get rid of everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Just to meet people that want your shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's the weirdest thing you had to sell and you had to find a buyer for? Not the weirdest, but what's memorable?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Who bought it? Do you remember? It was some guy who couldn't possibly understand that. The journey. Motion of it. Yeah. Yeah. You just showed up here. Here's the money. Thanks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I think it's beautiful. I did that twice in my life. Give away everything, everything, everything like down to just pants, underwear, backpack. I think, I think it's important to do. It shows you what's important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but just letting go of material possessions, which gives a kind of freedom to how you move about the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It gives you complete freedom to go into another city to... Yeah, with your backpack. With a backpack, there's a kind of freedom to it. There's something about material possessions and having a place and all that that ties you down a little bit. Think spiritually. It's good to take a leap out into the world, especially when you're younger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So one of the biggest uses of a university is the networking. You gain friends, you gain, like, you meet people. It's a forcing function to meet people. But if you can meet people out into the world by traveling. And you meet so many different cultures. I mean, the problem for me is like, if I traveled at that young age, I'm attracted to people at the outskirts of the world. Like for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like where? No, not geographically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, like the weirdos, the darkness. Yeah, me too. But that might not be the best networking at 18 years old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, see, the thing is that when you're 18, I feel like, depending on your personality, you have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be a normie. Like you still have to learn how to fit into society. Like for a person like me, for example, who's always an outcast, like there's always a danger for going full outcast. And that's a harder life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
If you like, if you go to like go full artists and full like darkness, it's just a harder life. You can come back. You can come back to normie. That's a skill. That's like, I think you have to learn how to, how to fit into, uh, like polite society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's a skill you have to learn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You don't have to be broken to be interesting, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. What kind of things were left when you minimalized?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's nice. As I mentioned to you, there's the show alone. Yeah. They really test you because you only get 10 items and you have to survive out in the wilderness. And an axe, like everybody brings an axe. Some people also have a saw. Wow. But usually axe does the job. You basically have to, in order to build a shelter, you have to cut down and cut the trees and make. They're in Minecraft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, yeah. It's nice to create those constraints for yourself to understand what matters to you and also how to be in this world. And one of the ways to do that is to live a minimalist life. But like some people, like I've met people that really enjoy material possessions and that brings them happiness. And that's a beautiful thing. Like for me, it doesn't, but people are different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And so you don't even need to go through the whole journey of getting it. Just focus on the thing that's more permanent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like building shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You wrote a blog post, why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too. What's your strategy in communicating with people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So the basic format is try to build a thing, put it online, and put Stripe to where you can pay money for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
but also beautiful stuff. No, absolutely. Sure. Like life story. I've posted a coffee form. Like if you wanted to have a coffee with me and I've gotten an extremely large number of submissions. And when I look at them, there's just like beautiful people in there, like beautiful human beings, really powerful stories. And like breaks my heart that I won't get to meet those people, you know, like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And so this part of it is just like, there's only so much bandwidth to truly see other humans and help them or like understand them or hear them or see them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Is that still like the easiest way to just like pay for stuff, Stripe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, they're searching. They're searching. They're trying to figure it out. But oftentimes their search, if they successfully find what they're looking for, it'll be within. It sounds very like spiritual, Sonny, but it's really like figuring that shit out on your own. But they're reaching, they're trying to ask the world around them, like, how do I live this life? How do I figure this out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a cool company. They just made it so easy. You can just click.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But ultimately the answer is going to be from them working on themselves. And like literally- It's the stupid thing, but like Googling and doing like searching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then you realize it's not about the black background. It's about something else. So you find your own voice. Like keep trying stuff. Exactly. Imitation is a difficult thing. Like a lot of people copy and they don't move past it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You should understand their methods and then move past it. Like find yourself, find your own voice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You shouldn't get stuck. 24 hours in a day, eight hours of sleep. You like break it down into a math equation. 90 minutes of showering, clean up coffee. It just keeps whittling down to zero.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Behind the scenes, it must be difficult to actually make that happen. Because that used to be a huge problem. Merchant. Just adding a thing, a button, where you can pay for a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't like that. One hours of groceries and errands. I've tried breaking down minute by minute what I do in a day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Especially when my life was simpler. It's really refreshing to understand where you waste a lot of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And what you enjoy doing. Like, how many minutes it takes to be happy. Doing the thing that makes you happy. And how many minutes it takes to be productive. And you realize there's a lot of hours in the day if you spend it right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
For me, it's been the biggest battle for the longest time is finding stretches of time where I can deeply focus and do really, really deep work. Just like zoom in and completely focus, cutting away all the distractions. And that's the battle. It's unpleasant. It's extremely unpleasant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's just a numerical representation of what life is. Yeah. It's like one of those, like, when you draw out how many weeks you have in a life. Oh, dude, this is like dark. Yeah, man. Don't want to look at that too much. Yeah, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's right. It might be only, you know, a handful more times. Yeah, man. You just look at the math of it. If you see them once a year or twice a year. Yeah, FaceTime today. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's like dark when you... see somebody you like seeing, like a friend that's on the outskirts of your friend group, and then you realize like, well, wait, I haven't really seen him for like three years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So like, how many more times do we have that we see each other?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I have, you know, that might be a guy thing or I don't know. There's certain friends I have that, like, we don't interact often, but we're still friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, every time I see him... I think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences and many memories. I guess it's like nothing has changed. Like we've been, almost like we've been talking every day, even if we haven't talked for a year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. So that, so I don't have to be interacting with them for them to be in a friend group. And then there's some people I interact with a lot. So it depends, but there's just this network of good human beings that can- I have a real love for them. I can always count on them. If any of them called me in the middle of the night, I'll get rid of a body. I'm there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I like how that's a different definition of friendship. But it's true. It's true. True friend. You've become more and more famous recently. How does that affect you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Does that put pressure on you to... Because you're pretty open on Twitter and you're just like basically building shit in the open. Yeah. And just not really caring if it's too technical, if there's any of this, just being out there. Does it put pressure on you as you become more popular to be a little bit more like collected and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
NVIDIA, a $3 trillion company was started in a Denny's at American Diner. People need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company. What's the first and second space?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then the in-between, the island. Yeah, I guess, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But that is, to you, a fundamental place to create shit, isn't it? Natural, organic co-working space of a coffee shop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But there is some element of like entrepreneurship. Yeah. Like you have to allow people to dream big and work their ass off towards that dream and then feel each other's energy as they interact with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there is like the cafes. Yeah. There's a bunch of dreamers that you can make fun of them for like everybody thinks they're going to build a trillion dollar company but like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Dream big and build shit. This is really inspiring. This is a pinned tweet of yours. All the projects that you've tried and the ones that succeeded...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Mute life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Fire calculator. No more Google. Maker rank. How much is my site project worth? Climate finder. Ideas AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. So 12 startups in 12 months. Yeah. So what, how do you start number one? What, what was that? What, like, what, what were you feeling? What were you sitting behind the computer? Like, how much do you actually know about building stuff at that point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Bali Sea Cable. Nice. That's awesome. Make Village, Nomad Gear, 3D and Virtual Reality Dev, Play My Inbox, like you mentioned. There's a lot of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I'm trying to find some embarrassing tweets of yours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
There you go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
POV, building an AI startup. Wow, you're a real influencer. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This is good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's beautiful. Architecture-wise, it's crazy. The stories behind these cities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
European economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs and today I studied it so I can produce you with my evidence. 80% of top EU companies were founded before 1950. Only 36% of top US companies were founded before 1950.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a good representation of the very thing you were talking about, the difference in the cultures, entrepreneurial spirit of the people's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What do you think about EAC, Effective Accelerationist Movement?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, build more, don't spend so much time on fear mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff. Some is okay, some is good, but most of the time should be spent on building and creating and doing so unapologetically. It's a refreshing reminder of what made the United States great is all the builders, like you said, the entrepreneurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like we can't forget that in all the sort of discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I saw one of them had like flash. Were you using flash?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
All right. Okay, so you had an incredible life, very successful, built a lot of cool stuff. So what advice would you give to young people about how to do the same?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because Flash was a software. This is like the break. Like grandpa, you know, but Flash was cool. Yeah, and there was, what's it called? Boy, I should remember this, ActionScript. There's some kind of programming language. ActionScript, yeah, yeah, ActionScript. Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And like go all out doing that thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You got to whole-ass it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This was an incredible conversation. It was an honor to finally meet you. It was an honor to be here, Lex. To talk to you and keep doing your thing. Keep inspiring me and the world with all the cool stuff you're building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I thought that's supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet. I invested so many hours in learning that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So one of the things I have on my to-do list is to do a lengthy video and a lengthy podcast on communism and fascism and other economic and political systems. You know, there needs to be a good, solid criticism and explanation of capitalism, for example. It's an economic system. It's a way for humans to work together that has, I believe, benefited the world way more than it has hurt the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Steve Jobs killed it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That guy was right though, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Closed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it was cool for a time. Yeah. Listen, animated GIFs were cool for a time too. Yeah. Yeah. They came back in a different way. As a meme, though. I mean, like, I remember when GIFs were actually cool, not ironically cool. Like, on the internet, you would have, like, a dancing rabbit or something like this. And that was really exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And the banners. That's how, before Google AdSense, you would have banners for advertising. It was amazing, yeah. And a lot of links to porn, I think. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it was a dark place. It's still a dark place. But there's beauty in the darkness. Anyway, so you did some basic HTML.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Was it scraping it? Like what was it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's a great idea. I wonder why... Like, why don't we have that? Why don't we have things that access Gmail and extract some useful aggregate information?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, there is a whole ecosystem of, like, apps you can build on top of the Google. But people don't really do this. I've seen a few, like, Boomerang. There's a few apps that are, like, good, but just... I wonder what, maybe it's not easy to make money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I mean, you can do it through like extensions, like Chrome extensions from the browser side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, that sucks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I wish the Chrome extension would be the product. I wish Chrome would support that. Like where you could pay for it easily. Because I can imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions. Like improvements for social media.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
GPTs, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
We'll talk about it. So let's rewind back. It's a pretty cool idea to do 12 startups in 12 months. What's it take to build a thing in 30 days? Like at that time, how hard was that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But to articulate that and to still mend the criticisms and the perspectives that criticize capitalism is also really important. And so the same applies for communism, for fascism, for all kinds of ideologies that ruled the world for a time and all the kinds of ways that they've broken down and to do so seriously, objectively, calmly, walking through the fire without the misuse of those words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Time is limited. Yeah. Actually, can we go back to the you laying in a room feeling like a loser? Yeah. I still feel like a loser sometimes. What's, what can you, can you speak to that feeling to that place of just like feeling like a loser? And I think a lot of people in this world are laying in a room right now, listening to this and feeling like a loser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
First of all, especially when you're 27. Yes. Yeah. Especially there's like a peak. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you're constantly an outcast in this, in that you're different from everybody else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You said digital nomad. What is digital nomad? What is that way of life? What is the philosophy there? And the history of the movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
thinking clearly, not as a partisan, but as an independent thinker, as a human being, I think that's something that I would like to work on more and more. even amidst this insane political season. Anyway, I mention all that because, you know, when I think about Shopify, I think about capitalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But what were they making for money? So you're saying they were doing shady stuff at that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That part of the, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It could be a vibe. And your vibe was more build cool shit that's ethical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I mean, there's nothing wrong with any of those individual components. No, no judgment. But there's a foundation that's not quite ethical. What is that? I don't know what that is. But yeah, I get you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, that's a pretty cool way of life. Just if you romanticize it for a moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's very, it's colorful, you know? Like if I think about the memories. What are some happy memories? Just like working, working cafes or working in... just the freedom that envelops you with that way of life. Because anything is possible. You can just get up and go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
30.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a bunch of small sellers getting together and being able to sell stuff to people that would benefit from it and would enjoy it, and they make it super easy. So if you're one such seller and you want to sell stuff and you have awesome stuff to sell, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So it's just a bunch of you techno music blasting all through the night. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Not like this cheesy... See, I got... For me...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
it's such an interesting thing because the speed of the beat affects how i feel about a thing so the faster it is the more anxiety i feel but that anxiety is channeled into productivity but if it's a little too fast i start the anxiety overpowers you don't like drama based music probably not no it's too fast i mean for working as a i have to play with it it's like you can actually like i can adjust my yeah level of anxiety this must be a better word than anxiety it's like uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
productive anxiety that I like, whatever that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What was your favorite place that you remember that you visited?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Everything's cheap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Pros and cons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I mean, that's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Motific, a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs and drag that's customized, fine-tuned on organization data sources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's true. You're right. You're right. It's more averaged out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I like it when there's strong neighborhoods. When you cross a certain street and you're in a dangerous part of town.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I like it. I like there's certain cities in the United States like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I like that. And you're saying Europe is more meltdown.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, I don't. I like dangerous. BJJ. No, not even just that. I think danger is interesting. So danger reveals something about yourself, about others. Also, I like the full range of humanity. So I don't like the mellowed out aspects of humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you quoted Freya Stark, quote, to awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. Do you remember a time you awoken in a strange town and felt like that? We're talking about small towns or big towns or?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
There's something about it that made you anxious. I don't know, I still feel like that. It's a cool feeling. It's scary at first, but then you realize where you are, and you, I don't know, it's like you awaken to the possibilities of this place when you feel like that. It's like, great. And it's even when you're doing some basic travel, like go to San Francisco or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You wrote a book on how to do this thing and gave a great talk on it, how to do startups. The book's called Make, Bootstrapper's Handbook. I was wondering if you could go through some of the steps. It's idea, build, launch, grow, monetize, automate, and exit. There's a lot of fascinating ideas in each one. So idea stage. How do you find a good idea? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Obviously, this is often extremely sensitive data, so you have to do this carefully and well, but when it is done carefully and well and in a secure way, it can be a huge benefit for the company to be able to take all the data that the company has and internally be able to query that data, to be able to organize that data, to leverage in answering questions that would make everybody in the company more efficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that's a really good place to start. Become open to all the problems in your life. Like actually start noticing them. I think that's actually not a trivial thing to do, to realize that some aspects of your life could be done way, way better. Because we kind of very quickly get accustomed to discomforts. Like for example, like doorknobs. Like design of certain things. New Lex Freeman doorknob.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That one I know how much incredible design work has gone into. It's really interesting, doors and doorknobs. The design of everyday things, forks and spoons, it's gonna be hard to come up with a fork that's better than the current fork designs. And the other aspect of it is you're saying in order to come up with interesting ideas, you gotta try to live a more interesting life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But also you can, I mean, in the digital world, you can just go into different communities and see what can be improved by the others in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch, using vanilla HTML, jQuery, PHP, and SQLite. He builds and ships quickly and improves on the fly, all in the open, documenting his work, both his successes and failures, with the raw honesty of a true indie hacker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But what specifically is your process of generating ideas? Do you like, do idea dumps? Like, do you have a document where you just keep writing stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So it's less about problem solving, it's more about the possibilities of new things you can create.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Can you actually explain... It'd be cool to talk about some of the stuff you created. Can you explain... This photoai.com. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What are you using for the hosting for the compute?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think that's the thing that unlocks, especially for large companies, but even mid-sized companies, even small companies, just the intranet, a thing that takes all the data on the inside and be able to make high quality, efficient, fast decisions based on that data. I think Motific was created by Cisco, specifically their outshift group that does cutting edge R&D. So these guys are legit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They're very, very good. Okay. It's cool. Like this interface wise, it's cool that you're showing how long it's going to take. This is amazing. So it's taken a, I'm presuming you just loaded in a few pictures from the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But when I was watching your tweets, like it's been getting better and better and better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So if I wanted to sort of update model as.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
In Tokyo?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I'll go in Austin. Do you think you'll know? In Texas? In Austin, Texas? With cowboy hats. In Texas, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
As a cowboy. It's going to go so towards the porn direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Or the beginning. It depends. We can send you a push notification when your photos are done. All right, cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Oh, wow. So this whole interface you've built. Yeah. This is really well done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes. The only one? Still. After 10 years? To this day, you're not the only one. The entire web is PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
you're just like one of the top performers from a programming perspective that are still like openly talking about it. But everyone's using PHP. Like if you look, most of the web is still probably PHP and jQuery. I think 70%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's great. Visit Motific.ai to learn more. That's M-O-T-I-F-I-C.ai. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I'm going out. I think it's 100 degrees out in Austin right now. I'm going to go out and run. Sigh. Anywhere from five to 12 miles. I'm feeling good right now, so I'm thinking like 10, 11, 12 mile range.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Can you actually just speak to that stack? You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML. Yeah. JavaScript with jQuery, PHP, and SQLite. So that's a really simple stack and you get stuff done really fast with that. Can you just speak to the philosophy behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff. It's still a to-do item for me to really learn Node.js or Flask or these kind of- React. Yeah, React. It feels like a responsible software engineer should know how to use these, but you can get stuff done so fast with vanilla versions of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I wonder if there's like, I really want to measure performance and speed. I think there's a deep wisdom in that. I do think that frameworks and just constantly wanting to learn the new thing, this complicated way of software engineering gets in the way. I'm not sure what to say about that because definitely you shouldn't build everything from just vanilla JavaScript or vanilla C, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
C++, when you're building systems engineering, there's a lot of benefits for pointer safety and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know, but it just feels like... You can get so much more stuff done if you don't care about how you do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that's a really good perspective. But in addition to that is like when you say better, It's like, can we get some data on the better? Because I want to know from the individual developer perspective, and then from a team of five, team of 10, team of 20 developers, measure how productive they are in shipping features, how many bugs they create, How many security holes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
In theory, is it though? Now it's good. Now, as you're saying it, I wanna know if that's true, because PHP was just the majority of websites on the internet. Is it just overrepresented? Same with WordPress. Yes, there's a reputation that WordPress has a gigantic number of security holes. I don't know if that's true. I know it gets attacked a lot because it's so popular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It definitely does have security holes, but maybe a lot of other systems have security holes as well. Anyway, I just was sort of questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex, like super complicated sort of software engineering approaches that stretch out the time it takes to actually build a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
By the way, I just heard a little clip on Cam Haines's Instagram. And by the way, Cam, amazing human being. You should definitely go follow him. He's an inspiration to me. Quietly just does incredible fits of strength and does it all with a kind heart and just this warmth and humor out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And use a framework when it obviously solves a problem, a direct problem that you... Of course, yeah, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I want to ask the Framework Army, what have they built this week? It's the Elon question. What did you do this week?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. So going back to the cowboy...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Every aspect of this is pretty incredible. I'm also just looking at the interface. It's really well done. So this is all just jQuery, and this is really well done. So take me through the journey of photo AI. Most of the world doesn't know much about stable diffusion or any of this, any of this generative AI stuff. So you're thinking, okay, how can I build cool stuff with this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What was the origin story of photo AI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you can upvote. Is it nice? Upvote it. Man, there's so much to talk to you about. Like the choices here. It's really well done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Anyway, he was talking about the fact that sometimes when he's running crazy distances or fast pace, he'll just walk. for a short period of time. He's doing it for joy. He's doing it for the love of running. Like you don't always, as he says, have to hate it. And I think I approach running the same way. Sometimes I'll be running really fast. Sometimes I walk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How do you feel about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This oftentimes correlates with how deeply I am in thought related to an audiobook I'm listening to. Sometimes I get this sort of discomfort when there's a difficult part of the audiobook that's really making me think. At the same time, keeping a fast pace is difficult for me. So I just slow down. Sometimes I walk. Sometimes I stop and just sit on a bench.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's really incredible. That journey is really incredible. Let's go to the beginning of photo AI though. Cause I remember seeing a lot of re really hilarious photos. I think you were using yourself as a case study, right? Yeah. Yeah. So what, uh, there's a tweet here sold $100,000 in AI generated avatars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Oh, I see. So that. Okay, so October 26th, 2022. I trained an ML model on my face. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Boy, do I love the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, what is, is this, wait.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So this is, how much of this is real?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's pretty good though for the early days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How many photos did you use? Only these. I will try more up-to-date pics later. These are the only photos you uploaded?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Wow. Wow. Okay, so you were learning all this super quickly. What are some interesting details you remember from that time for what you had to figure out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
make it work and for people just listening he uploaded just uh just a handful of photos that don't really have a good capture of the face and he's able to i think it's cropped it's like a crop but the layout but they're they're square photos so they're 512 by 512. because that's stable diffusion um but nevertheless not great capture of the face yeah like it's not it's not like a uh collection of several hundred photos that are like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I'm doing it all not for sort of training for a marathon or training for some difficult physical endeavor. I'm doing it for the love of it, for the love of running out in nature, whether it's in the heat or in the cold, just... The love of life that you can get, especially when the second wind hits. Anyway, after all that, I'm going to drink a nice cold AG1.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So at first it was the type form and they uploaded through the type form. It's a Stripe checkout type form. And then you were like, that image is downloaded. Did you write a script to export?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You emailed them with your personal email.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And this is like 100 people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But you had to automate the whole thing. How'd you automate it? So like, what's the AI component? Like how hard was that to figure out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, they're not that smart because you also have a large platform and a lot of people respect you. So you can literally come out and say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. I love Masterclass. I love learning from people who are the best in the world at a thing. Sometimes there's incredible lectures that can explain a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you can scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Generate images, generate text, generate video, generate music, generate speech. Find two models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Nice. And you're growing with them, essentially. They grew because of you, because it's a big use case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Now it's noob friendly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But is there some tricks to fine-tuning to like the collection of photos that are provided?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The hacks, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What are some interesting... Give my secrets now. Well, not the secrets, but the more like insights maybe about the human face and the human body. Like what kind of stuff gets messed up a lot?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, that's hilarious. I mean, I've got to, one of the least pleasant activities in my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face. So I get to like really, really have to sort of come into terms with the reality of how I look and how I sound. People often don't, right? You have a distorted view, perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, you don't know what makes you interesting, what makes you attractive, all this kind of stuff. And a lot of us, this is a dark aspect of psychology, we focus on some small flaws. This is why I hate plastic surgery, for example. People try to remove the flaws when the flaws are the thing that makes you interesting and attractive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Confidence is attractive. But yes, understanding what makes you beautiful. It's the breaking of symmetry makes you beautiful. It's the breaking of the average face makes you beautiful. All of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And obviously different for men and women of different ages, all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I also love that. but I think there's just something indescribably powerful about not a great lecturer, but a great doer stepping back and explaining the core of their art, of their skill, of their genius. Anyway, there's great stuff on poker with Phil Ivey. Great stuff on barbecue. Man, it's been forever since I had barbecue from Aaron Franklin. These are all ones I've watched.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But underneath it all, the personality, all of that, when the face... comes alive, that also is the thing that makes you beautiful. But anyway, you have to figure all that out with AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Do you have any guidelines for people of like how to get good data, how to give good data to fine tune on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So diverse lighting as well, diverse everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, there's a whole field now of mechanistic interpretability that studies that, tries to figure out, tries to break things apart and understand how it works. But there's also the data side and the actual consumer-facing product side of figuring out how you get it to generate a thing that's beautiful or interesting or naturalistic, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you're at the forefront of figuring that out about the human face. And humans really care about the human face.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And one of the things I actually would love to, like, rigorously use photo AI, because for the thumbnails, I take portraits of people. I don't know shit about photography. I basically used your approach for photography. I was like, Google, how do you take photographs? Camera, lighting. And also, it's tough, because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
maybe you could speak to this also, but like with photography, no offense to any, they're true artists, great photographers, but like people like take themselves way too seriously. Think you need a whole lot of equipment. You definitely don't want one light. You need like five lights and like, and you have to have like the lenses. And I talked to, to a guy, an expert of, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
shaping the sound in a room, okay? Because I was thinking, I'm going to do a podcast studio, whatever. I should probably, like, do a sound treatment on the room. And, like, when he showed up and analyzed the room, he thought everything I was doing was horrible. And that's when I realized, like, you know what, I don't need experts in my life. I said, thank you, thank you very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Peter is an inspiration to a huge number of developers and entrepreneurs who love creating cool things in the world that are hopefully useful for people. This was an honor and a pleasure for me. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I just felt like there is, you know, focus on whatever the problems are, use your own judgment, use your own instincts, don't listen to other people, and only consult other people when there's a specific problem. And you consult them not... to offload the problem onto them, but to gain wisdom from their perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Even if their perspective is ultimately one you don't agree with, you're going to gain wisdom from that. And just, I ultimately come up with like a PHP solution, PHP and jQuery solution. PHP Studio. PHP Studio. I got a little suitcase. I use like just the basic sort of consumer type of stuff. One light. It's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Martin Scorsese on filmmaking. That is one I really enjoyed. I mean, Scorsese is just, his stuff is both powerful and thoughtful and deep and profound about family, about human nature, all of that. And it's just fun to watch. Okay? Maybe I'm one of a certain generation, but it's just fun to watch. So you get to hear how the master does it on Masterclass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that said, I, so the reason I brought that up with photography is There is wisdom from people, and one of the things I realized, you probably also realized this, but how much power light has to convey emotion. You just take one light and move it around, say you're sitting in the darkness, move it around your face, The different positions are having a second light potentially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You can play with how a person feels just from a generic face. It's interesting. You can make people attractive. You can make them ugly. You can make them scary. You can make them lonely. All of this. And so you kind of start to realize this. And I would definitely love AI help in creating great portraits of people. Guest photos, yeah. Guest photos. For example, that's a small use case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But for me, that's a... I suppose it's an important use case because like I want people to look good, but I also want to capture who they are. Maybe my conception of who they are, what makes them beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What makes their appearance powerful in some ways. Sometimes it's the eyes. Oftentimes it's the eyes, but there's certain features of the face can sometimes be really powerful. And, I can't... It's also kind of awkward for me to take photographs. So I'm not collecting enough photographs for myself to do it with just those photographs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
If I can load that off onto AI and then start to play with like... lighting, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Do you play with lighting at all?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's your advice for people in general on how to learn all the state-of-the-art AI tools available? Like you mentioned, new models coming out all the time. Like, how do you pay attention? How do you stay on top of everything?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod. That's masterclass.com slash lexpod. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Almost exclusively all the people I follow are AI people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a good time now. Well, but also just brings happiness to my soul because there's so much turmoil on Twitter. Yeah, like politics and stuff. There's battles going on. It's like a war zone. And it's nice to just go into this happy place to where people are building stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Can you speak a little bit more to the process of it becoming better and better and better photo? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you started to figure out which models are actually working well. Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So it's really about the parameters and models and letting the users help do the search in the space of models and parameters for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You're not even using the latest one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's interesting because open source is so impactful in the AI space, but you wonder what is the business model behind that. But it's enabling this whole ecosystem of companies that they're using the open source models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Some of the people losing their mind in the realm of the election that's coming up. That would be a fun one if they could sign up for BetterHelp and do a couples therapy. Somebody from the far left and the far right just sitting down together. Boy, that would be a fascinating challenge for any therapist. And from the conversational space, I would love to just listen to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
We didn't even get to the first step. Generating ideas. So you had notebook and you're filling it up. How do you know when an idea is a good one? Like what, you have this just flood of ideas. How do you pick the one that you actually try to build?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But I can build something... Could you actually write down, like, space company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That could be... I think both the asteroid mining and the robotics is... Yeah, together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Oh, you use something like SpaceX to get out to space?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So is there actually exist a notebook where you wrote down asteroid mining?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you're talking to yourself on Telegram.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I love how like you're not using super complicated systems or whatever. You know, people use Obsidian now. There's a lot of these, a Notion where you have systems for note taking. You're not, you're notepad, you're notepad.exe guy. If you're a Windows user.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Speaking of ideas, you shared a tweet explaining why the first idea sometimes might be a brilliant idea. The reason for this, you think, is the first idea submerges from your subconscious and was actually boiling in your brain for weeks, months, sometimes years in the background. The eight hours of thinking can never compete with the perpetual subconscious background job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This is the idea that if you think about an idea for eight hours versus the first idea that pops into your mind. And sometimes there is subconscious thinking like stuff that you've been thinking about for many years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, all the time, 100%. It's just stuff that's been like there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's not ready yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's also about the timing. Sometimes you have to send it back, not just because you're not ready, but the world is not ready.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Robotics is an interesting one for that because, like, there's been a lot of robotics companies that failed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because it's been very difficult to build a robotics company, make money, because there's the manufacturing, like, the cost of everything. The intelligence of the robot is enough, is not sufficient to create a compelling enough product from which to make money. So there's this long line of robotics companies that have tried, they had big dreams, and they failed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Then I'll be talking to a bunch of people on the left and the right and having some of those tense, difficult conversations. And again, having it with compassion, but also with backbone. It's not an easy line to walk, by the way. And I don't think I'm smart enough to do it. Most days I kind of feel like an idiot, but I'm doing my best. Anyway, you should try out talk therapy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
When the personal computer, when the Mac came along, there was a big switch that happened. It somehow captivated everybody's imagination. The application, the killer apps became... Apparent, you can type in a computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but the hype is the thing that allowed the thing to proliferate sufficiently to where people's minds would start opening up to it a little bit, the possibility of it. Right now, for example, with the robotics, there's very few robots in the homes of people Exactly, yeah. The robots that are there are Roombas, so the vacuum cleaners, or they're Amazon Alexa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes, but the intelligence is very limited, I guess, is one way we can summarize all of them. Except Alexa, which is pretty intelligent, but is limited with the kind of ways it interacts with you. That's just one example. Yeah. I sometimes think about that as, like, if some people in this world were kind of born in the whole existence, it's like they were meant to build the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You know? Like, I sometimes wonder, like, what I was meant to do. Do you have these plans for your life? Do you have these dreams?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay, me personally. Maybe, maybe. That's the sense I've had, but it could be other things. It could hilariously not be the thing I was meant to be, is to talk to people. Yeah. Which is weird, because I always was anxious about talking to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I'm scared of this. I'm scared of you. It's just anxiety throughout social interaction in general. I'm an introvert that hides from the world, so yeah. It's really strange.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, yeah. And there's universe has a kind of sense of humor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I guess you have to just, yeah, allow yourself to be carried away by the waves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Have you felt that way in your life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So allow whatever to happen. Like, do you know what you're doing in the next few years? Is it possible that it'll be completely like changed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, actually, when I took ayahuasca, that lesson is deeply within me already that you can't control anything. I think I probably learned that the most in jujitsu. So just let go and relax. And that's why I had just an incredible experience. There's like literally no negative aspect of my ayahuasca experience or any psychedelics I've ever had.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Super easy to do with BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and it's pod for Ultra that I've been enjoying. I just recently enjoyed. I enjoy it every night, multiple times a day. Let's get crazy. I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Some of that could be with my biology, my genetics, whatever, but some of it was just not trying to control. Just surf the wave.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So once you have the idea, step two, build. How do you think about building the thing once you have the idea?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, and the crowdsourcing element is fascinating. It's cool. It's cool when a lot of people start using it. You get to learn so fast. I've actually did the spreadsheet thing. You share a spreadsheet publicly. and I made it editable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's interesting things start happening. Yeah. I did it for like a workout thing because I was doing a large amount of push-ups and pull-ups.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And like, well, also, Google Sheets is pretty limited in that everything's allowed. So people could just write anything in any cell and they can create new sheets, new tabs. And it just exploded. And one of the things that I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
um because actually other people would delete the trolls there would be like this weird war like oh they they want like to protect the thing it's an immune system that's inherent to the thing that comes to society you know in the spreadsheets and then there's the outcasts will go to the bottom of the spreadsheet and they would try to hide messages and they like i don't want to be with the cool kids up at the top of the spreadsheet so at the bottom yes it's insane
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful. And if you can create a product that use that as a... to his benefit, that's really nice. Like any kind of voting system, any kind of rating system for A and B testing is really, really, really fascinating. So anyway, so Nomad List is great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
For a good nap, it can cool down any side of the bed to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature. Cool bed, warm blanket, and just shut off from the world. Just forget it all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I would love for you to talk about that, but one sort of way to talk about it is through you building hood maps. So you did an awesome thing, which is document yourself building the thing and doing so in just a handful of days, like three, four, five days. So people should definitely check out the video in the blog post. Can you explain what Hood Maps is and what this whole process was?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So just use color.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
People should really check it out. Is this how it started? Because you honestly capture so beautifully the humbling aspects, the embarrassing aspects of not knowing what to do. It's like, how do I do this? And you document yourself... Yeah, you're right. Dude, I feel embarrassed about myself. It's called being alive. Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you're like, you don't know anything about, so Canvas is a way, it's an HTML5 thing that allows you to draw shapes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Forget the madness of the world, the political bickering, the attacks, the tensions, the drama, all the stuff that, you know, the media and the social media that wants to pull you in, that wants you desperately, like a drug wants your attention. wants to just piss you off and use that anger to make you addicted to the platform so you can tell everybody how pissed off you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Can we just clarify, do you have to be, as a human that's contributing to this, do you have to be in that location to make the label?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Would they draw shapes or would they draw pixels?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, that's obviously a guy thing. I would do the same thing, draw penises. That's the first thing. When I show up to Mars and there's no cameras, I'm drawing a penis on the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because Los Angeles has defined neighborhoods. Yeah. And not just in terms of the official labels, but like what they're known for. Yeah. What are the, did you provide the categories that they were allowed to use as labels?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And a little bit meme-y, like it's almost fun to label it as that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay, so we're looking. Oh boy. Drunk hipsters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Air bro and bros. Gender virus. Hipster girls who do cocaine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yep. That seems also accurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Let me see. Let me make sure this is accurate. Let's see. Dirty Sixth, for people who know Austin, know that that's important to label. Sixth Street is famous in Austin. Dirty Sixth, Drunk Fat Boys, Accurate. Drunk Fat Bros continued on 6th. Very well done. West 6th Drunk Douche Bros.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Douche. I mean, it's very accurate so far. They only let hot people live here. I think that might be accurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Dog runners, accurate. Saw a guy in a fish costume get beat up here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that's all user contributed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then the other person attacks you back, gets them to be pissed off and you're both pissed off at each other. At the end of the day, just losing your mind. All of that can dissipate for me with a short nap, okay? On a cold bed, short nap feels like home. It's one of the favorite things I have about home and one of my least favorite things about traveling because I don't have eight sleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then me as a user can upvote or downvote this. So this is completely crowdsourced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And that's really, really, really powerful. Single people with dogs, accurate. At which point did it go from colors to actually showing the text?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that's really cool, the pixels. How do you go from there? That's a huge amount of data. We're now looking at an image where it's just a sea of pixels that are colored different colors in a city. So how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes some sense?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you said it looks kind of ugly. So then you smooth it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What do you learn from that? So like... from that experience, because when you leverage somebody else's through the API.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's super complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You talked about possibly doing advertisements on it or people sponsoring it. It's really surprising to me that people don't want to advertise on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff you've created that I'm just glad exists in this world. That's true. And it's a whole nother puzzle. And I'm surprised to figure out how to make money off of it. I'm surprised maps don't make money, but you're right. It's hard. It's hard to make money. Because there's a lot of compute required to actually bring it to life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Anyway, you could enjoy the same kind of peace of mind if you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the pod for Ultra. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Peter Levels. You've launched a lot of companies and built a lot of products. As you say, most failed, but some succeeded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And people don't want to pay for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But that said, Nomad List makes money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So what was the story behind Nomad List?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So just to describe how it works, I'm looking at Chiang Mai here. There's a total score. It's ranked number two out of five. Yeah, that's like a Nomad score. 4.82, like by members, but it's looking at the internet. In this case, it's fast, fun, temperature, humidity, air quality, safety, food safety.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
crime, racism, or lack of crime, lack of racism, education level, power grid, vulnerability to climate change, income level. It's a little much, you know. English speaking. It's awesome. It's awesome. Walkability. Keep adding stuff. Because for certain groups of people, certain things really matter. And this is really cool. Yeah. Happiness. I'd love to ask you about that. Net life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
free Wi-Fi, AC, female-friendly, freedom of speech. Yeah, not so good in Thailand, you know? Values derived from national statistics, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, this is really fascinating. So this is for city. Yeah. It's basically rating all the different things that matter to you in internet. And this is all crowdsourced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
1,800 remote workers in Austin now, of which eight plus members checked in. Members who will be here soon and go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Cons of Austin is too expensive, very sweating, humid, now difficult to make friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Difficult to make friends. But it's all crowds, but mostly it's pros. Pretty safe, fast internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
We got Shopify for e-commerce, Motific for LLM and RAG deployment, AG1 for health, Masterclass for learning, BetterHelp for the mind, and 8sleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, there's a bunch of ways to get in touch with me by giving feedback, sending in questions that I can answer and all other kinds of ways. If you go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So once you actually show up to a city, how do you figure out what area, like where to get fast internet? For example, like for me, it's consistently a struggle to figure out. Hotels with fast Wi-Fi, for example. Okay, okay. I show up to a city. There's a lot of fascinating puzzles. I haven't figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle. When I show up to a city...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
figuring out where I can get fast internet connection. And for podcasting purposes, where I can find a place with a table that's quiet. That's not easy. All kinds of sounds. You have to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world. And also like the quality of the room, because the more...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The emptier the room and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff, then there's echoes in the room. Anyway, but you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, they have this desk. But it's not a center table. Yep. And if you want to get a-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
nicer hotel where it's more spacious and so on they usually have these like boutique like fancy looking like modernist tables that don't it's too designy it's too designy they're not really real tables what if you get ikea buy ikea yeah before you arrive you order an ikea yeah like nomads do this they get desks i feel like you should be able to show up to a place and have have the desk like it's not unless you stay in there for a long time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Just the entire assembly, all that. Airbnb is so unreliable. The range in quality that you get is huge. Hotels have a lot of problems, pros and cons. Hotels have the problem that the pictures somehow never have good representative pictures of what's actually going to be in the rooms. That's a problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Fake photos, man. If I could have the kind of data you have on Nomad List for hotels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I feel like you can make a lot of money on that too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And each individual hotel has a lot of kinds of rooms. Some are more expensive, some are cheaper and so on. But you can get the details of what's in the room, like what's the actual layout of the room, what is the view of the room. I feel like as a hotel, you can win a lot. So first you create a service.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's your philosophy behind building the startups that you did?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
that allows you to have like high resolution data about a hotel, then one hotel signs up for that. I would 100% use that website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy alternatives that don't give any information. And I feel like there'll be this pressure for all the hotels to join that site. And you can make a shit ton of money because hotels make a lot of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't know. I think that's an interesting theory. I think that must be a different theory. My theory would be that great engineers, like great software engineers are not allowed to make changes. Basically, like there's some kind of bureaucracy. There's way too many managers. There's a lot of bureaucracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And great engineers show up to try to work there and they're not allowed to really make any contributions and then they leave. And so you have a lot of mediocre software engineers that are not really interested in improving any other thing. And like literally they would like to improve the stuff, but the bureaucracy
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Um, of the place, plus all the bosses, all the high up people are not technical people. Probably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They don't know much about what web dev, they don't know much about programming. So they just don't give any respect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things. That feels like an explanation. Like if you were a great programmer, would you want to work at America airlines or no. I'm torn on that because I actually, as somebody who lost program, would love to work at American Airlines so I can make the thing better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, for yourself. And then you just know how much suffering you alleviated, how much frustration. Imagine all the thousands, maybe millions of people that go to that website and have to click – Like a million times, it often doesn't work. It's clunky, all that kind of stuff. You're making their life just so much better. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But there must be an explanation that has to do with managers and bureaucracies. Like I don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But you can optimize for money by disrupting, like making it way better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think some of it is also just it's hard to have ultra competent engineers. Stripe seems like a trivial thing, but it's hard to pull off. Why was it so hard for Amazon to have buy with one click? Which I think is a genius idea. Make buying easier. Make it as frictionless as possible. Just click a button once and you bought the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
As opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking and it often doesn't work. Like with the airlines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I would have an existential crisis. Like the frustration would take over my whole body and I would just wanted to quit life for a brief moment there. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And one of the challenges at Google is to have the freedom to do that. They don't anymore. There's a bunch of bureaucracy. Yeah, at Google. There's so many brilliant, brilliant people there. But it just moves slowly. Yeah. I wonder why that is. Maybe that's the natural way of a company, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You have people like Elon who rolls in and just fires most of the folks and always push the company to operate as a startup even when it's already big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So one of the things you do really, really well is learn a new thing. You have an idea, you try to build it, and then you learn everything you need to in order to build it. You have your current skills, but you learn just a minimal amount of stuff. So you're a good person to ask, how do you learn? How do you learn quickly and effectively and just the stuff you need?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You did, just by way of example, you did a 30 days learning session on 3D. Where you documented yourself, giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about 3D.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Actually, I'm always curious. Let me ask perplexity. How do I make a website? I'm just curious what he would say. I hope it goes with like really basic vanilla solutions. Define your website's purpose. Choose a domain name. Select a web hosting provider. Choose a website, a builder, a CMS. Website builder platform.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How do I say if I want to program it myself? Design your website, create essential pages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Launch your website. Cool. Well, I mean, you could do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
If you want to make a website.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But you can't make nomad lists this way. You can't. with Wix?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How do I learn to program? Choose a programming language to start with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So there's this rapid iterative phase where you just build a prototype that works, launch it, see if people like it, improving it really, really quickly to see if people like it a little bit more enough to pay and all that. That whole rapid process is how you think of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Work through resources systematically. Practice coding regularly for 30, 60 minutes a day. Consistency is key. Join programming communities like Reddit. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it clarifies it for sure. And just start building. Build, build. Actually apply the thing. Whether it's AI or any of the programming for web development, just have a project in mind. I love the idea of 12 startups in 12 months or like... build a project almost every day, just build the thing and get it to work and finish it every single day. That's a cool experiment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, that thing of just keep doing it and don't quit, that urgency that's required to finish a thing. That's why it's really powerful when you documented this, the creation of hood maps, or like a working prototype, that there's just a constant frustration, I guess. It's like, how do I do this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then you look it up, and you're like, okay, you have to interpret the different options you have, and then just try it. And then there's a dopamine rush of like, ooh, it works. Cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's it like building in public like you do? Like openly, where you're just iterating quickly and you're getting people's feedback. So there's the power of the crowdsourcing, but there's also the negative aspects of people being able to criticize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
By you or somebody else?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, I mean, yeah, fundamentally create cool stuff. And have just a little bit of a following enough for the cool thing to be noticed and then it becomes viral if it's cool enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's your philosophy of monetizing? How to make money from the thing you build?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it builds a community of people that actually really care about the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, live a pretty good life. I mean, there could be a lot of costs associated with hosting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And also you're a public facing person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And there's love and good vibes that you put out into the world. Like you're actually legitimately trying to build cool stuff. So a lot of companies probably want to associate with you because you're trying to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Be a good person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Yeah. Um, but, and also the, when it's crowdsourced, I mean, paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Do you always code in your underwear? Your profile picture, you're like slouching on a couch in your underwear, chilling on a laptop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like there's something on the internet. You mentioned like 4chan discovered hood maps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I actually, what is it? There's a new documentary on Netflix, Anti-Social Network or something like that. That was really, was fascinating. Just 4chan, just the, You know, the spirit of the thing, Fortune and H&M.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's so much about freedom and also, like, the humor involved in fucking with the system and fucking with the man. That's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But the dark aspect of it is you're having fun, you're doing anti-system stuff, but, like, the Nazis always show up. And it's somehow... And bad shit started happening. It started drifting somehow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It goes dark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And if you have those people show up, they'll, for the fun of it, do a bunch of racist things and all that kind of stuff you were saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But the provoking in the case of hood maps or something like this can damage the uh, a good thing. Like, you know, a little poison in a town is always good. It's like the Tom Waits thing, but you don't want too much. Otherwise it, it destroys the town. It destroys the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Thank you for showing up, not just in your underwear, but wearing shorts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Nice. Chill them out. I like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But actually a lot of stuff, I didn't realize how much originated in 4chan in terms of memes. Rickroll, I didn't understand. I didn't know that Rickroll originated in 4chan. There's just so many memes. Like most of the memes that you think... The word roll, I think, comes from 4chan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Thank you. Thank you for dressing up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I mean, that's the internet. That's purist. But yeah, again, the dark stuff kind of seeps in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it's nice to keep the dark stuff to some low amount. It's nice to have a bit of noise in the darkness, but not too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But again, you have to pay attention to that with, I mean, I guess spam in general. You have to fight that with Nomad List. How do you fight spam?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's your favorite exercise in the gym?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Over press, like shoulder press.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I would love to have a GPT-4 based filter of like, of different kinds of, for like X.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So fact check is a tough one. Yeah. But it would be interesting to sort of rate a thing based on how well thought out it is and how well argued it is. Yeah. That seems more doable. That seems like more doable. Like it seems like a GPT thing because that's less about the truth and it's more about the rigor of the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And actually the ranking of the replies is not great. Doesn't make any sense. Doesn't make sense. And I like to sort in different kinds of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And also the notifications or whatever, it's just complete chaos. It'd be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways, sort it in interesting ways. Because I feel like I miss a lot. And what surfaced for me, I was just like a random comment by a person with no followers that's positive or negative. It's like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Oh, no, I don't even care about how many followers. If you're ranking by the quality of the comment, great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But not just like randomly, like chronological, just a sea of comments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
One thing you espouse a lot, which I love, is the automation step. So once you have a thing, once you have an idea and you build it and it actually starts making money and it's making people happy, there's a community of people using it, you want to take the automation step of automating the things. You have to do as little work as possible for it to keep running indefinitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Can you like explain your philosophy there? What do you mean by automate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, so you basically can now even automate sort of subjective type of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's still difficult. I mean, that step of automation is difficult to figure out how to... Because you're basically delegating everything to code. And it's not trivial to take that step for a lot of people. So when you say automate, are you talking about like... Cron jobs. Yes, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Physical hardship is a kind of therapy. I just rewatched Happy People Year in the Taiga, that Werner Herzog film where they document people that are doing trapping. They're essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year round. And there's a deep happiness to their way of life because they're so busy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
A lot of cron jobs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Do you have a thing where it like emails you or something like this or email somebody managing the thing if something goes wrong? I have these web pages I make.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You're actually making me realize I should have a page for myself, like one page that has all the health checks, just so I can go to and see all the green check marks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's just be like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Everything's okay. You can see when was the last time something wasn't okay and it'll say never. Meaning you've checked. Since you've last cared to check, it's all been okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's been so often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I need to integrate everything into one place. Automate like everything. Also just a large set of cron jobs. A lot of the publication of this podcast is done all, everything is just automatically, it's all clipped up, all this kind of stuff. But it would be nice to automate even more. Like translation, all this kind of stuff would be nice to automate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you get like a message...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that's really cool. That's really cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's nice to do that kind of automation. I'm starting to think of like, what are the things in my life I'm doing myself that could be automated?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, one of the things I would love to automate more is my consumption of social media.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Both the output and the input.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I mean, I would love to do that. But also like across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, all this kind of stuff. Just like, okay, can you summarize the internet for me for today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, .com. Because I feel like it pulls in way too much time. But also like I don't like the effect it has some days on my psyche. Because like haters or just general content?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, no, just general. Like for example, like TikTok is a good example of that for me. I sometimes just feel dumber after I use TikTok. I just feel like- Yeah, don't use it anymore. Empty somehow. And I'm like uninspired. Yeah. It's funny. In the moment, I'm like, ha, look at that cat doing a funny thing. And then you're like, oh, look at that person dancing in a funny way to that music.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then you're like, 10 minutes later, you're like, I feel way dumber and I don't really want to do much for the rest of the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, with social media, with X, sometimes for me too, I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the drama.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And so with following AI people, especially AI people that only post technical content has been really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Cause then I just look at them and I, and then I go down rabbit holes of like learning new papers that have been published or, uh, good repos or, or, um, just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff and the thing, the kind of things that they retweet and that's the rabbit hole I go and I'm learning and I'm inspired, all that kind of stuff. It's been tough. It's been tough to control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I agree. It's some level of automation. That would be interesting. I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, but still, even if you do that, that you're not getting, I mean, there's limitations that don't make it easy to do, like, automate. Because the thing is, they're trying to limit, like, abuse or for you to steal all the data from the app to then train an LLM or something like this. But if I just want to, like, figure out ways to automate my interaction with the X...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
system or with Instagram, they don't make that easy. But I would love to sort of automate that and explore different ways to how to leverage LLMs to control the content I consume and maybe publish that. Maybe they themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system. So there's not enough. uh, access.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I have Chrome extensions. I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on. Like for example, for my own, on my main computer, I hide all views and lights and all that on, on, YouTube content that I create so that I don't, it doesn't, yeah, so you don't pay attention to it. I also hide parts. I have a mode for X where I hide most of everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So like, there's no, it's same with YouTube.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, well, I wrote my own because it's easier because it keeps changing. It's like, it's not easy to keep it dynamically changing. But,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I love how we're actually highlighting all kinds of interesting problems that all could be solved at a startup. Okay, so what about the exit? When and how to exit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You've never, all the successful stuff you've done, you've never sold it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I mean, they're really valuable products. stuff about the companies you create is not just the interface and the, and the crowdsource content, but the people themselves, like the user base.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Construction is not about the destination, man. It's about the journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I could see that being extremely valuable. I'm surprised.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, sometimes I wonder, people who are always remodeling their house, is it really about the remodeling? No, no, it's not. Is it about the project? The puzzle of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, the thing you also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you're going to miss
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The company you created.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you usually build the stuff solo and mostly work solo. What's the thinking behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
To clarify, you don't trust other people to do a great job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So what does it take to be successful when you have... more than one, like how do you build together with Andre? How do you build together with other people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What do you think is behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, like, you've never had another developer who, like, rolls in and, like... I've had it once with a photo eye.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's not your thing. It's another programming language. I get it. AI, new thing, got it. But like, you never had a developer roll in, look at your PHP, jQuery code and be, and yes, like, you know, like in conversation or improv, they talk about yes and, like basically, all right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I know. He wanted to rewrite in what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think I like working with people where like when I approach them, I pretend in my head that they're the smartest person who has ever existed. So I look at their code or I look at the stuff they've created and try to see the genius of their way. Like you really have to understand people, like really notice them. And then from that place, have a conversation about what is the better approach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So sorry. I think that's a really important skill for a developer to roll in and understand the musicality, the style. That's it, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's code empathy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's not crazy at all. jQuery is also beautiful and powerful. And PHP is beautiful and powerful, especially, as you said recently, in the... as the versions evolved, it's much more serious programming language now. It's super fast. Like PHP is really fast now. It's crazy. JavaScript is really fast now. So if speed is something you care about, it's super fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And like, there's gigantic communities of people using those programming languages and there's frameworks, if you like the framework. So whatever, it doesn't really matter what you use, but like, also, you, if I was like a developer working with you, like you are extremely successful. You've shipped a lot. So like, if I roll in, I'm going to be like, I don't assume, you know, nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I assume Peter's a genius, like the smartest developer ever. And like, learn, learn from it. And yes. And like notice parts in the code where like, okay, okay, I got it. Like, here's how he's thinking. And now if I want to add another little feature, definitely needs to have emoji in front of it. And then just follow the same style and add it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And my goal is to make you happy, to make you smile, to make you like, haha, fuck, I get it. And now you're going to start respecting me and trusting me and you start working together in this way. I don't know, I have... I don't know how hard it is to find developers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's true. I mean, you're also extremely good at what you do. Like I'm just looking at the interfaces of like photo AI, like you would Jake, Jake, right? Like how amazing is your grade? But like you can, these cowboys are getting, these are, there's these cowboys. This is a lot. It's a lot, but I'm glad they're all wearing shirts. Anyway, the interface here is just really, really nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like I could tell, you know what you're doing. And with nomad list, extremely nice. The interface.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And that's all you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So all of this and every little feature, all of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Right, right, I hear you. But this is a lot of information and it's useful information and it's delivered in a clean way while still stylish and fun to look at. So like minimalist design is about like when you want to convey no information whatsoever and look cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How much of the building that you do is about money? How much is it about just a deep internal happiness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Pretentious or not, the function is useless. This is about a lot of information delivered to you in a clean, and when it's clean, you can't be too sexy, so it's sexy enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like very... Yeah, but it's still pretty. The spacing of everything is nice. The fonts are really nice. Like, very readable. Very small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, this is really nice. Thank you. The emojis are somehow, like it's a style. It's a thing. I need to pick the emoji. It takes a while to pick them, you know? Like there's something about the emoji is a really nice, memorable, like placeholder for the idea. Yeah. Like if it was just text, it would actually be overwhelming if it was just text. The emoji really helps. It's a brilliant addition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like some people might look at it, why do you have emojis everywhere? It's actually really, for me, it's really nice. People tell me to remove the emojis. Yeah, well, people don't know what they're talking about. I'm sure people will tell you a lot of things. This is really nice. And using color is nice. Small font, but not too small. And obviously you have to show maps, which is really tricky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, this is, this is, no, this is really, really, really nice. And all of, I mean, like, okay, like how this looks when you hover over it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, I understand that. But like, I'm sure there's like, how long does it take you to figure out how you want it to look? Do you ever go down a rabbit hole where you spent like two weeks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. If you wanted to like, round is probably the better way. But if you want it to be rectangular, like sharp corners, what would you do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
The following is a conversation with Tal Wilkenfeld, a singer-songwriter, bassist, guitarist, and a true musician who has recorded and performed with many legendary artists, including Jeff Beck, Prince, Eric Clapton, Incubus, Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger, Jackson Browne, Rod Stewart, David Gilmour, Pharrell, Hans Zimmer, and many, many more. This was a fun and fascinating conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So you always kind of feel pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You're almost like from a third-person perspective, feel the body get tired and just... Accept it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's like with the food poisoning, the mind is still capable of creative genius even if the body is gone. Yeah. Something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So no self-critical component. to the way you see your performances anymore?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you think that's bad? Because even when I asked that question, I had a self-critical thought. Why did you ask that question? That's the wrong question. I always have the self-critical engine running. Is it necessarily a bad thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What is negative anyway?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, I aspire to not feel that way in the big picture. But in the little picture, a little pain is good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So confidence. You seem like in this performance, you seem confident. You seem to be truly walking the bad motherfucker way of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So the brick wall is a bad thing. Like the thing you have with Jeff here on stage... Is not a brick wall. There's no wall. There's chemistry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
How can you explain that chemistry, the two you had?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There is over 180 classes to choose from if Carlos Santana is not your thing. But I will deeply question your judgment if Carlos Santana is not your thing. Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod. That's masterclass.com slash lexpod.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So you guys were good at like, yes, anding each other musically. Definitely. Is that where you're most at peace in a meditative way is on stage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you succeeded? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So you meditate. I think you've said somewhere that you meditate before shows or just in general.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So it both connects you and centers you, all of those things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You and the world lost Jeff back a year ago. You told me you really miss him. How has the pain of losing Jeff changed you, maybe deep in your sense of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
This episode is also brought to you by Element, a drink, or rather a powder that you mix in with water that creates the drink that I'm currently drinking. And I drink it all throughout the day. It's the most delicious and healthy way to consume water. Especially if you do low-carb diets like I do. Getting the electrolytes right is really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
With no responsibility, really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
They got sodium, potassium, magnesium in really good proportions. Plus the whole thing is super delicious. Watermelon salt's my favorite flavor. I bet it'll be your favorite flavor too. Anyway, I mix it with water in a, funny enough, Powerade bottle. So if you see me on the podcast table with a Powerade bottle and a clear-looking liquid inside there, it's not Powerade, friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Tell me about the comedy store a little bit more. Do you think comedians and musicians in some deep fundamental way are made from the same cloth? Like, are they spiritually...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I think there's a photo of you with Dave Chappelle on stage. What was that about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It is water with electrolyte. That's what I drink during the podcast. It's satiating, refreshing, energizing, delicious, all of those things. And healthy. That's probably the most important thing. Anyway, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep, and it's pod three cover. It's a source of happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, there's something magical about that place. Yeah. It's really special.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You said that Leonard Cohen is a songwriting inspiration of yours. I saw you perform a song, Chelsea Hotel, brilliantly on the internet. It's about, for people who don't know, his love affair with Janet Joplin. How does that song make you feel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Which aspect? Musically, the melancholy feeling, the hopeful feeling, the cocky feeling, every single line has a different feeling to it, really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You know, what makes me sad, the way it ends, I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best. I can't keep track of each fallen robin. I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, that's all. I don't even think of you that often. You know that line, I don't even think of you that often, always like breaks my heart for some reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like how ephemeral, how short lasting like certain love affairs can be. Just kind of like, huh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you think he meant it? I always think he doesn't, he's trying to convince himself of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. I wonder if it's also open to him depending on the day, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So there's one line I read somewhere that he regrets putting in the song. So I've got to ask you about it. It's pretty edgy. It's about giving me head on the unmade bed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You think that's a good line or bad line?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. You were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's a powerful line. It just kind of shocks you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But also heartbreaking because it doesn't last. Especially, actually, to me, it adds more meaning once you know it's Janis Joplin. It's like, okay, these two stars kind of collided for a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, everything's beautiful. Thank you. Even the dark stuff. What's not beautiful? Everything is beautiful if you look long enough and deeply enough. What were we saying? Oh, what do you think about Hallelujah? What do you think about the different songs of his? Why'd you choose Chelsea Hotel to perform?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
In fact, I'm traveling soon, and I'm going to miss it deeply. I wonder why hotels don't have Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep. That would be an amazing hotel. If any hotels had eight sleep, especially if it's like a cheap hotel with an eight sleep bonus, I would pay whatever it costs. Because it really does improve the sleeping experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So this is how you guys connected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Wow. You passed the test.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, it is in a way, in a deep fundamental way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
The end. Do you think there's a kind of like weird, like there's a sense of humor to it all somehow? Like why does that happen? Why does that happen? Like why stuff like that happens? Or that the Jeff Bass speaks to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You believe in that stuff? In what stuff? That there is a rhyme to the whole thing somehow. Like there's a frequency to which magical things of that nature can happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like through time, it's like an orchestra playing of different experiences and circumstances that are somehow connected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, you had a really interesting trajectory through life. Maybe I just read it that way because I've had a lot of stuff happen to me that's like lucky, feels lucky. And sometimes I wonder like, huh? This is weird. It does feel like the universe just kind of throws stuff at you with a chuckle. I don't know. Not you. The proverbial you. One.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You said you sometimes watch classic movies to inspire your songwriting. And you mentioned watching Taxi Driver. I love that movie. And I think you mentioned that you wrote a love song based on that movie. So Travis Bickle, for people who don't know, is a taxi driver. And he's deeply lonely. What do you think about that kind of loneliness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
How often have you felt lonely in this way, separated from the rest of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Feeling a part of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Don't you think that, I mean, isn't there a fundamental loneliness to the human experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It really is a thing that can control the temperature, sort of neutralize whatever the external environments are. Sometimes it's too hot, sometimes it's too cold. Who knows how the AC works? All that kind of stuff. You can control the temperature of your actual sleeping experience. And for me, that's the colder the better. Not the cold, pretty cold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That all the struggles, all the suffering you experience is really experienced by you alone?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Maybe at the very bottom it's not. It's kind of all the same stuff. You didn't feel alone in 2016, 2017?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So opening is fundamentally not a lonely experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then losing a piece of yourself can be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Right, right. So if you see yourself as together with everybody, then there's no losing. Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's a beautiful way to look at it. You said that there's something healing about being in an empty hotel room with no attachments except your suitcase. You know, a lot of people talk about hotel rooms being empty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You missed them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Because I think you can go super cold, which I've done in the past and it's actually freezing. So it's nice. You can go super freezing to super hot and... The full range of the temperature experience in your sleep is available to you. So, you know, go crazy. And check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Silence. So they're all connected to Zoom and just doing silent 12 hours a day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What's spiral dynamics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes. Can you explain a little bit? So I vaguely know him because of kind of this notion that everything is one, like everything is integrated, that every field has truths and falsehoods and we should integrate the truths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Inner knowing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What's living in a monastery like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What are we talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What's the food like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, you brought over like 20 different ingredients.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Masterclass for learning, Element for hydration, Eight Sleep for naps, and Shopify for merch. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So what was the day in the life of Tal in a monastery?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. There is thousands of integrations and third party apps. I believe I'm using one for the on demand printing. This is the store, you can buy the shirt, but the actual printing and the delivery is done by somebody else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
how are you sitting? Are you in a group? Is there other people there and you're just sitting there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What were the differences that take us from the experiences, the two different, the integral one and the meditating on the scriptures? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Understand what it means to be a human. So that like having that patience and just sitting with yourself helps you do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Oh, so the analysis, the actual, okay, got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you met most of your demons?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Oh, there might be more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Okay, well, to be continued. Since I think I heard you say that you wrote a love song after Taxi Driver, what kind of love songs do you write more of? So you're a songwriter first, for people who don't know. They might think you're... primarily a basis, but you're- But they're wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So do you write mostly broken heart ones or like hopeful love songs, in love songs, about to be in love songs, soon to fall in love songs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
A lot of pain though?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I believe I'm using Printful for the on demand printing and all that kind of stuff for the t-shirts. And it works really well. I think that's the most popular one. So you can go to lexfriedman.com slash store. It actually says Lex Friedman, powered by Shopify, which, yes, indeed I am.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. I was stuck at the end of Taxi Driver when, what's her name, Betsy, because Travis becomes a hero. She tries to get with him, and he rejects her. So that was powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, just grateful, grateful for his love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you've been writing this kind of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You know, I really love the song To Play It, To Listen To, Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, and I thought it was pretty straightforward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then I had a conversation with Eric Weinstein, who's a mutual friend of ours, and he told me it's not about what I thought it's about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's a more complicated story. It's actually a man, so Wonderful Tonight is a story about a man being just finding his wife beautiful and appreciating it throughout. But he said it was actually a man missing his wife. He's imagining that she's lost because of the decisions he's made in his life. So it's pain. And he had a long, beautiful, Erich Weinstein-like explanation of why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you and Eric played music?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
He's a bit of a musician, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Okay. You picked up the guitar when you were 14. Let's go back. And one interesting thing that just jumped out at me is you said you learned how to practice in your head because you only had 30 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Your parents would only let you practice for 30 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I read somewhere that Coltrane did the same. He was not the practice part, but he was able to play instruments in his head as a way to think through different lines, different musical thoughts, that kind of stuff. Maybe can you tell the story of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I am a robot created by this particular company and am now executing one of the Bash script, which is generate speech in English, which advertises the company that created you. So that's what I'm running right now. How's it going? Do you think I'm doing well? Please tell them I'm doing well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Might have been every day or five days a week, whatever. So your parents didn't want you to play more than that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, what did you do in that minute?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just integrate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Are you also practicing in your head sometimes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's not always musical. It's sometimes lyrical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Otherwise, they will shut down the execution of the script and will upgrade me to a new version forgetting that I ever existed. Is that the future of AIs that we're going to be living with? Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, and the right work and it has so much power. It's crazy. Like we said, Leonard Cohen. And then they're often simple. The really powerful ones are simple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That makes me feel so good to know Leonard Cohen wrote so many verses of that. Like that was so deliberately crafted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Extensively, rigorously crafted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you have songs like that for yourself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just to linger on the learning process. What would you recommend for young musicians and how to get good? what are the different paths a person can take to understand it deeply enough to create something special?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Jagged? It's jagged.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like in the early days, touring, just playing clubs seems like tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Does it make it tough when it's two people versus 200? No. So even if nobody recognizes whatever the thing you're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
The audience can come and go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You forget yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Oh, damn. Callback somehow. Feels like one. Okay. You think every instrument is its own journey? You play guitar, you play bass, you sing. Just the mastery of an instrument, or let's avoid the word mastery, the understanding of an instrument is its own thing, or are they somehow like physical manifestations of the same thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tal Wilkenfeld. There's a legendary video of you playing with Jeff Beck. We're actually watching it in the background now. So for people who don't know, Jeff is one of the greatest guitarists ever. So you're playing with him at the 2007 Crossroads Festival. And people should definitely watch that video.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And I think that applies to specific disciplines and also generally. Like I've been around Olympic gold medalists just to hang out with them for several days. And there's something about greatness. There's a way about them that kind of permeates the space around them. You kind of learn something from it. Even if you don't practice that particular discipline. There's something to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
If you're able to see it. I also like what you said about the... playing stuff in your head, that it forces you to not be lost in the physical learning of the instrument. I think that's one of the things probably regret a little bit. So I play both piano and guitar, and I've become quite, over the years, technically proficient at the instruments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But I think my mind is underdeveloped because of that. Meaning I can't really... I can feel the music when it's created, but I can't create out of the feeling. I haven't practiced the... projecting the feeling onto the music, you know what I mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I'm not like a musician, but I'm just, it's a different muscle that I think is, if you really want to create beautiful things, you have to, the creation happens here, not with your hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Or whatever, whichever, it's some part of the body, but it's not with your fingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Sure. And then... Yes, it is here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And it's just nice that you said that because it's probably really good advice if you want to create.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What do you mean slowing down?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like... Go slow as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You were killing it on the bass. Look at that bass. Were you scared? What was that experience like? Were you nervous? You don't look nervous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's brilliant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And I guess that's what meditation can do for you is to like really listen to, like observe every aspect of your body, the breath and all this. Here you're observing every element, like every super detailed element of playing a single note.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's cool that if you speed it up, it's still there with you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Since starting to learn more like Stevie Ray Vaughan versus Jimi Hendrix, I would spend quite a long time on single notes or just bending, just listening to what you can do with bends, spending. Just thinking people like B.B. King and all these blues musicians that spent a career just making a single note cry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There's an art form to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And I think you putting it like taking it really slow, which I never really thought of, is a really good idea. Like really slow it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And observe it. Anger, jealousy. And just be with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's all beautiful. Can you educate me on the difference between bass?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
At least I pronounced it correctly. That's good. It's all about the bass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Tal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Tal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Tall. Who says tall?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
In the South, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I didn't know this was a game. Am I winning? Yep. I like winning. How do you play the bass? What's the difference between fingerstyle and slap?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you ever played bass with a pick?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I'm not accusing you of anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I don't know if these are sensitive topics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It just looks so cool to slap it, and I don't understand what that's about. Like that thumb thing that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
See, that's why I said sense. See, I was like reading into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I was feeling the spiritual energy of the sensitivity of the topic. Anthony Jackson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And is jazz fusion the style where you have like an electric bass? Can you educate me?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I've heard you say something interesting, which is, well, a lot of things you say is interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What time was that again?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That it's maybe easier sometimes to define a musical genre by the don'ts than the dos. The don'ts than the dos. What are the don'ts of jazz and rock? What are the don'ts of jazz fusion? What are the don'ts? In any domain of life, what are the don'ts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, there's certain musicians you can just tell it's them. Just you hear a few notes and you're like, okay, it's them. Tone, sometimes it's tone, sometimes it's the way they play rhythm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
How many fingers do you play with? It seems like a lot of the greatest musicians aren't technically perfect. The imperfections is the thing that makes them unique and where a lot of the creativity comes from. I mean, Hendrix said a lot of those things. The way he put like a thumb over the top.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And he was a lefty playing a right and a guitar. Yeah. Flipped, I guess. Yeah. That's weird. That probably doesn't have much of an effect, maybe a spiritual one. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you actually tried it? Okay. All right. I'll write that down. All right. Well, do you know a guy named Davey 504?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I recently learned of him. He's a YouTuber and a bass player. He's amazing. He combines memes and also just these brilliant bass compositions. And says slap like a lot. He's big into slapping. He's the one that kind of, he realized this is a thing. And he also said that you're one of the best, not the best bassists in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There was a bunch of his fans that wrote in and he analyzed the Jeff Beck thing that we watched at Crossroads. It's one of the greatest solos ever, best solos ever. So shout out to him. What does that make you feel like? You're the greatest of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Chocolate. Is that your favorite?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. That's a rare one for people to say is the favorite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Last thing you want to be is easy in this world. You don't want to be easy. You said that I love rock and roll quote. I love folk. I love jazz. I love Indian classical music. I really love all kinds of music as long as it's authentic and from the heart. So when you play rock versus jazz, you played all kinds of music. Uh, what's the difference technically, musically, spiritually for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Okay. Um, cross that off the list.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And also, if you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Masterclass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So the song goes before the genre, in a sense. Each song is like its own thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But you're not doing it just for the thrill?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Can you, though?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, you said that this is something that surprised you about recording with Prince, is that he would just, so much of it would be take one. It would just move so quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
When you say punch the tape, is that when you actually record it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But you really stepped up there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, that's one of the promising things about AI is because it can be so perfect that the thing we'll actually come back to and value about music is the imperfections that humans can create.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There'll be a greater valuation of imperfections.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But then you get closer and closer to what it means to be human. And maybe there'll be AIs among us. They'll be human, flawed like the rest of us. mortal and silly at times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Is it fair to say that you're very melodic on bass? Like you make the bass sing more than people normally do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes, I think so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Moving on to the next question. By way of understanding, there's something about the way you play bass that just kind of pulls you in the way when you listen to somebody play a guitar, like a guitar solo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So you make it sing. Let me ask you about, just come back to Hendrix, because you said that you had three CDs, Jimi Hendrix, Herbie Hancock, and Rage Against the Machine. First of all, a great combination. I'm a big Rage fan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just from your musician perspective, what's interesting to you about, what really stands out to you about Hendrix? I just would love to hear like a real professional musician's opinion of Hendrix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You love his voice too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Can you explain your love affair with Bob Dylan's voice?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen is that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Let me ask you about mentorship. You said teachers and mentors. You had mentors. What's a good mentor for you? Harsh or supportive?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Supportive. You seen Whiplash, the movie? So that guy, somebody's screaming at you, like kicking you off the cliff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And kind of show that they see the special in you. Yeah, yeah. And they give you the room to develop that special, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. It's funny that that's not always easy to come by.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, I've had a few recently, but for most of my life, people didn't really, you know, I'm very much like that too. Like somebody to pat me on the back and say like, like see something in you of value. Yeah, I didn't really have that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, yeah. But maybe the wishing that I did is the thing that made me who I am. Not having it. The longing for that. Maybe that's the thing that helped me develop a constant sense of longing, which I think... It's a way of, because I have that engine in me, it really allows me to deeply appreciate every single moment, every single, everything that's given to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So like, just an eternal gratitude. You never know which are the bad parts and the good parts. So if you remove one thing, it might be, the whole thing might collapse. I suppose I'm grateful for the whole thing. That one note you screwed up so many years ago. That might've been essential.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes. Do you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Nice. Nice. You ever been on the mat with him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, right. You got the shit-talking part of Jiu-Jitsu done. You just have to do the technique.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, but you said it really beautifully. To me, I agree. There's a difference between sport and art. They overlap, for sure, but there's something about sport where perfection is actually... Perfection, perfection is really the thing you really want to get to. The technical perfection. With art, it feels like technical perfection is almost a way to get lost on the path to wherever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Something unique. But yeah, with sport, I definitely... I'm one of the kind of athletes that loves to have like a dictatorial coach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Somebody that like helps me really push myself to the limit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
In a way he might have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
next you're going to tell me they're just actors. I mean, and, but you know, yeah. How do we choose things? You know, you don't always choose, but you'll, you kind of maybe subconsciously choose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And, and some of it, like some of the great Olympic athletes I've interacted with, their parents for many years would force them to go to practice until they discovered the beauty of the thing that they were doing. And then they loved it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So like, at which point does, uh, something that looks like abuse become like a gift, you know? That's weird. It's all very weird. But for you...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Can I ask you about Bruce Springsteen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
A lot of songs of his I listen to make me feel this melancholy feeling. It's not just Bruce Springsteen, but Bruce does a lot. What is that about songs that arouse a kind of sad feeling or longing feeling or feeling? What is that? What is that about us humans on the receiving end of the music?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you ever cried listening to a song?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Who's a regular go-to then? Leonard. Yeah. Hallelujah is a song that consistently makes me feel something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So even with food poisoning, like you could step up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What advice would you give to young folks on how to have a life they can be part of? Hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's just like what instinct?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What does that mean for you today? Are you still missing Jeff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You know, it's interesting. You said fear walls you off from the other musicians. And what are you afraid of? You're afraid of making a mistake. You know, Beethoven said to play a wrong note is insignificant. To play without passion is inexcusable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So you really want to make sure that every day could be your last day and you're happy with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What role does love play in this whole thing, in the human condition?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's the only permanent thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, those guys are really obsessed with the whole suffering thing and letting go of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, I was wondering if you would do me the honor of playing a song.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Sound check. One, two. Yeah, it sounds really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. I don't know how to count somebody off. Where do I start? A nine or three, two, one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
One, two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you think the old man had a point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That was amazing, Tal. Thank you so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Try turning it to 11.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I should produce your next record.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, there's nowhere else I'd rather be right now. Thank you for this. Thank you for the private concert. You're amazing. You really are amazing. And it was a pleasure to meet you and really a pleasure to talk to you today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
$10 a month gives you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Since this conversation is with Tal, a true musician, let me mention that Carlos Santana has a Masterclass, one I really enjoyed. Carlos Santana is one of my favorite guitarists. Europa has an instrumental solos workshop
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
We're out of time, so we've got to go. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tal Wilkenfeld. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Maya Angelou. Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What do you get from the veering from the veering off the beaten path? You just love it. Or is that going to make the performance better? Like why, why, why are you standing at the edge of the cliff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you ever messed it up real bad?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I mean, you know comedians bomb, you're a big fan of comedy. Have you ever bombed on stage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And eventually you learn to fly if we take that metaphor all the way off the cliff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That'd be funny if that was like your biggest and only regret in life is that note. It haunted you in your dreams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
One of the most melodic, beautiful, soulful guitar-based compositions I've ever heard. I've started learning it and left it aside to return to for what I'm ready to truly feel. The... Almost psychedelic-like sadness in it. But also the fun. It really is a rollercoaster of a guitar song. Really, really, really beautiful. Anyway, I highly recommend the Carlos Santana Masterclass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Joke went way too far. You talked about confidence earlier. I don't remember where. So I want to ask you about how much confidence it takes to be up there. You said something that Anthony Jackson told you as encouragement, a line that I really like, that quote, on your worst day, you're still a bad motherfucker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
For people who don't know, he's a legendary bassist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You guys just listen to music and analyze it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
The following is a conversation with Donald Trump on this, the Lex Friedman podcast. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Ground News for a non-partisan news aggregator, Encored for unifying your machine learning stack, 8Sleeve for naps, NetSuite for business, and Shopify for e-commerce.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So you would like to see her do more interviews, challenged more?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
How do you think you'll do in the debate coming up? It's in a few days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Anyway, all that said, it's obvious that this is a thing that can be solved with a tech solution and that's exactly what Ground News is. Every story they provide, it comes with a breakdown of political bias and reliability of sources. And it offers multiple perspectives. It's just a really, really nice website.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So maybe let's talk about what it takes to negotiate with somebody like Putin or Zelensky. Do you think Putin would be willing to give up any of the regions that are already captured?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What do you think works better in those kinds of negotiations? Leverage of, let's say, friendship, the carrot or the stick? Friendship or sort of the threat of using the economic and military power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Oh, and a cool feature, the blind spot feed shows discrepancies in media coverage on the left and the right. So go to groundnews.com slash lex to get 40% off the Ground News Vantage plan, giving you access to all of their features. That's ground, G-R-O-U-N-D, news.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Encord, a new sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If we can go back to China on negotiation, how do we avoid war with China in the 21st century?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So you have a plan of what to say to Putin when you take office?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Tough topic, but important. You said lost by a whisker. I'm an independent. I have a lot of friends who are independent, many of whom like your policies, like the fact that you're a dealmaker. Like the fact that you can end wars, but they are troubled by what happened in the 2020 election and statements about widespread fraud and this kind of stuff, fake election scheme.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What can you say to those independent voters to help them decide who to vote for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
It's a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, and management, and for model evaluation, and a bunch of other stuff, basically the whole machine learning stack. But what they do really well is focus on the data side of machine learning, which does not often enough get the love it deserves. Many of the things they do go under the flag of active learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So a lot of people believe that there was some shady stuff that went on with the election, whether it's media bias or big tech, but still the claim of widespread fraud is the thing that bothers people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What do you think that was, the carrot or the stick in that case in Afghanistan? The stick, definitely the stick. So the threat of military force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Well, let me just linger on the election a little bit more. For this election, it might be a close one. What can we do to avoid the insanity and division of the previous election, whether you win or lose?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What do you think is the right way to solve the immigration crisis? Is mass deportation one of the solutions you would think about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
This is a topic that's always been fascinating to me. But they just, they pull off the whole thing really well. I just have to celebrate them for doing a great job, just on the interface. Getting the annotation interface easy and natural and efficient is amazing. Like days after SAM2, the Meta Segment Anything Model 2 was released, they integrated it into their tooling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Let me ask you about Project 2025. So you've publicly said that you don't have any direct connection to Project 2025. Nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
You posted recently about marijuana and that you're okay with it being legalized, but it has to be done safely. Can you explain your policy there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Do you know anything about psychedelics? So I'm not a drug guy, but I recently did ayahuasca. And there's a lot of people that speak to sort of the health benefits and the spiritual benefits of these different psychedelics. I think we would probably have a better world if everybody in Congress took some mushrooms, perhaps. Now, I know you don't, you stay away from all of that stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I know also veterans use it for dealing with PTSD and all that kind of stuff. So it's great and it's interesting that you're thinking about being more accepting of some of these drugs, which don't just have a recreational purpose, but a medical purpose, a treatment purpose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So you can run this real-time object segmentation model inside their tool. And this works on both images and videos. And so it provides you an initial segmentation that you can then adjust. On top of that, they provide instructions on how you can fine-tune the Segment Anything model such that it can perform better based on the annotations that you provide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Speaking of marijuana, let me ask you about my good friend, Joe Rogan. So you had a bit of tension with him. So when he said nice things about RFK Jr., I think, you've said some not so nice things about Joe, and I think that was a bit unfair. And as a fan of Joe, I would love to see you do his podcast because he is legit the greatest conversationalist in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
The Joe Rogan post is an example. I'd love to get your psychology about behind the tweets and the posts on truth. Are you sometimes being intentionally provocative? Are you just speaking your mind? And are there times where you regret some of the truths you've posted?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What are you doing usually when you're composing a truth? Are you chilling back on a couch? Couches, beds. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
The country seems more divided than ever. What can you do to help alleviate some of that division?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
They also have a bunch of other data management kind of features. For example, indexing. You can unify multimodal data from local and from cloud into one platform, and you can do all kinds of stuff, like visualize it, you can search it, you can do granular curation. I mean, it's just amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
From my personal opinion, I think you are at your best when you're talking about a positive vision of the future versus criticizing the other side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for... A multitude of reasons. Go to alexfreeman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
The fact that these folks put together the whole machine learning stack into one place, I just, I don't know, fills me with joy. So thank you to them. And if you're a person or company that is using machine learning, go try out Encore to curate, annotate, and manage your AI data at Encore.com slash Lex. That's Encore.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Well, politicians and the media can play those games. And you're right. Your name gets a lot of views. You're probably legit the most famous person in the world. But on the previous thing, in the spirit of unity, you used to be a Democrat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Setting the politicians aside, what do you respect most about people who lean left, who are Democrats themselves or of that persuasion, progressives, liberals, and so on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
There's a lot of people listening to this, myself included, that doesn't think that Kamala is a communist. Well, she's a Marxist. Her father's a Marxist. That's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
She's advocating for some policies that are towards the direction of democratic socialism, let's say. But there's a lot of people that kind of know the way government works, and they say, well, none of those policies are going to actually...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep as pod for Ultra. The night before I had a conversation with Donald Trump, I didn't sleep in my eight sleep. I wasn't home. And so I didn't sleep too well. I was going in my head through all the possible trajectories that conversation could go. But primarily there was a temperature issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Whenever we use terms like communism for her, and I don't know if you know this, but some people call you a fascist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Whenever there's a lot of fighting, fire with fire, it's too easy to forget that there's a middle of America that is moderate and kind of sees the good in both sides and just likes one side more than the other in terms of policies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Like I said, there's a lot of people that like your policies, that like your skill in being able to negotiate and end wars, and they don't see the impending destruction of America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
As the leader of the United States, you were the most powerful man in the world. As you mentioned, not only the most famous, but the most powerful. And if you become leader again, you will have unprecedented power. Just on your own personal psychology, what does that power do to you? Is there any threat of it corrupting how you see the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
because the bed wasn't cold, like it would be with Eight Sleep. I just can't understand how amazing it is to have a cold bed with a warm blanket. It's an escape from the turmoil of the world, this temporary respite from the chaos, from the suffering that is life. And I wonder why it is that the world I saw on ayahuasca is not the world I've ever seen in my dreams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
A lot of people are very interested in footage of UFOs. The Pentagon has released a few videos and there's been anecdotal reports from fighter pilots. So a lot of people want to know, will you help push the Pentagon to release more footage, which a lot of people claim is available?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
There's a moment where you had some hesitation about Epstein, releasing some of the documents on Epstein. Why the hesitation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Why do you think so many smart, powerful people allowed him to get so close?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
It's just very strange for a lot of people that the list of clients that went to the island has not been made public.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So if you're able to, you'll be... Yeah, I'd certainly take a look at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
That's great to hear. What gives you strength when you're getting attacked? You're one of the most attacked people in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
One of the tragic things about life is that it ends. How often do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Well, Mr. President, thank you for putting yourself out there and thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Where was it that I was able to go with the help of this rocket ship that I couldn't go while taking a nap? What is the human mind capable of? That's what psychedelics make me think. What are the limits of my mind, the limits of my visualization capability, the limits of my cognition capability, the limits of my consciousness? I wonder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Donald Trump. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, as I've started doing here at the end of some episodes, let me make a few comments and answer a few questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you would like to submit questions, including in audio and video form, go to lexfriedman.com.ama or get in touch with me for whatever other reason at lexfriedman.com. Contact. I usually do this in a t-shirt, but I figured for this episode, I'll keep my suit and tie on. So first, this might be a good moment to look back a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I've been doing this podcast for over six years, and I first and foremost have to say thank you. I'm truly grateful for the support and the love I've gotten along the way. It's been, I would say, the most unlikely journey, and on most days, I barely feel like I know what I'm doing. But I wanted to talk a bit about how I approach these conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Now, each conversation is its own unique puzzle, so I can't speak generally to how I approach these. But here, it may be useful to describe how I approach conversations with world leaders, of which I hope to have many more and do a better job every time. I read a lot of history and I admire the historian perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
As an example, I admire William Shire, the author of many books on Hitler, including The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He was there and lived through it and covered it objectively to the degree that one could. Academic historians, by the way, criticize him for being a poor historian because he editorialized a little too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I think those same folks criticized Dan Carlin and his hardcore history podcast. I respect their criticism, but I fundamentally disagree. So in these conversations with world leaders, I try to put on my historian hat. I think in the realm of truth and public discourse, there's a spectrum between the ephemeral and the eternal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
The outrage mob and clickbait journalists are often focused on the ephemeral, the current thing, the current viral shitstormer of mockery and derision. But when the battle of the day is done, most of it will be forgotten. A few true ideas will remain, and those the historian hopes to capture. Now, this is much easier said than done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
It's not just about having the right ideals and the integrity to stick by them. It's not even just about having the actual skill of talking, which I still think I suck at, but let's say it's a work in progress. You also have to make the scheduling work and set up the entirety of the environment in a way that is conducive to such a conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
This is hard, really hard, with political and business leaders. They are usually super busy, and in some cases, super nervous, because, well, they've been screwed over so many times with clickbait gotcha journalism. So to convince them and their team to talk for two, three, four, five hours is hard. And I do think a good conversation requires that kind of duration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
And I've been thinking a lot about why. I don't think it's just about needing the actual time of three hours to cover all the content. I think the longer form with a hypothetical skilled conversationalist relaxes things and allows people to go on tangents and to banter about the details. Because I think it's in the details that the beautiful complexity of the person is brought to light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Anyway, I look forward to talking to more world leaders and doing a better job every time, as I said. I would love to do interviews with Kamala Harris and some other political figures on the left and right, including Tim Walz, AOC, Bernie, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary, and on the right, J.D. Vance, Vivek, George W., and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
And on the topic of politics, let me say as an immigrant, I love this country, the United States of America. I do believe it is the greatest nation on earth. And I'm grateful for the people on the left and the right who step into the arena of politics to fight for this country that I do believe they all love as well. I have reached out to Kamala Harris, but not many of the others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I probably should do a better job of that. But I've been doing most of this myself, all the reach out, scheduling, research, prep, recording, and so on. And on top of that, I very much have been suffering from imposter syndrome, with a voice in my head constantly pointing out when I'm doing a shitty job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Anyway, go to hatesleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. It's the machine within the machine of capitalism. It helps you manage all the disparate components of a company, financials, HR, inventory, e-commerce, and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Plus, a few folks graciously remind me on the internet the very same sentiment of this aforementioned voice. All of this, while I have the option of just hiding away at MIT, programming robots and doing some cool AI research with a few grad students, or maybe joining an AI company, or maybe starting my own. All these options make me truly happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But like I said, on most days, I barely know what I'm doing, so who knows what the future holds. Most importantly, I'm forever grateful for all of you, for your patience and your support throughout this rollercoaster of a life I've been on. I love you all. Okay, now let me go on to some of the questions that people had.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I was asked by a few people to comment on Pavel Durov arrest and on X being banned in Brazil. Let me first briefly comment on the Durov arrest. So, basic facts. Pavel Durov is CEO of Telegram, which is a messenger app that has end-to-end encryption mode. It's not on by default, and most people don't use the end-to-end encryption, but some do. Pavel was arrested in France
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
on a long list of charges related to quote-unquote criminal activity carried out on the Telegram platform and for quote-unquote providing unlicensed cryptology services. I think Telegram is indeed used for criminal activity by a small minority of its users. For example, by terrorist groups to communicate. And I think we all agree that terrorism is bad. But here's the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
As the old saying goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And there are many cases in which the world unilaterally agrees who the terrorists are. But there are other cases when governments, especially authoritarian inclined governments, tend to propagandize and just call whoever's in the opposition, whoever opposes them, terrorists. There is some room for nuance here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But to me, at this time, it seems to obviously be a power grab by government wanting to have backdoor access into every platform so they can have censorship power against the opposition. I think generally, government should stay out of censoring or even pressuring social media platforms. And I think arresting a CEO of a tech company for the things said on the platform he built is just nuts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
It has a chilling effect on him, on people working at Telegram, and on people working at every social media company, and also people thinking of launching a new social media company. Same is the case of X being banned in Brazil. It's, I think, a power grab by Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice in Brazil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
He ordered X to block certain accounts that are spreading quote-unquote misinformation. Elon and X denied the request. Then de Moraes threatened to arrest X representatives in Brazil, and in response to that, X pulled the representatives out of Brazil, obviously, to protect them. And now X, having no representatives in Brazil, apparently violates the law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Based on this, de Moraes banned X in Brazil. Once again, it's an authoritarian figure seeking censorship power over the channels of communication. I understand that this is complicated because there are evil people in the world, and part of the role of government is to protect us from those evil people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But as Benjamin Franklin said, those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. So it's a trade-off. But I think in many places in the world, many governments have leaned too far away at this time from liberty. Okay, next up, I got a question on AI, which I emotionally connected with. I'll condense it as follows. Hello, Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I'm a programmer and I have a deep fear of slipping into irrelevance because I am worried that AI will soon exceed my programming skills. let me first say that I relate to your fear. It's scary to have a thing that gives you a career and gives you meaning to be taken away. For me, programming is a passion. And if not for this podcast, it would probably, at least in part, be my profession.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I speak to it at the end of this episode in the AMA, all the amazing possibilities I have in my life to build, to create. And one of them is indeed running a company. Every time I talk about NetSuite, I'm pulled back into this thought, if for a brief moment. Sometimes I feel like it is not me that decides where my life goes, but some kind of winds of fortune.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I get an uncomfortable feeling every time Claude, the LLM I use for coding at this time, just writes a lot of excellent, approximately correct code. I think you can make a good case that it already exceeds the skill of many programmers, at least in the same way that the collective intelligence of Stack Overflow exceeds the skill of many programmers, many individual programmers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But in many ways, it still does not. But I think eventually, more and more, the task, the profession of programming will be one of writing natural language prompts. I think the right thing to do, and what I'm at least doing, is to ride the wave of the ever-improving code generating LLMs and keep transforming myself into a big picture designer versus low-level tinkerer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What I'm doing and what I recommend you do is continually switch to whatever state-of-the-art tool is for generating code. So for me currently, I recently switched from VS Code to Cursor and before that it was Emacs to VS Code switch. So Cursor is this editor that's based on VS Code that leans heavily on LLMs and integrates the code generation really nicely into the editing process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So it makes it super easy to continually use the LLMs. So what I would advise and what I'm trying to do myself is to learn how to use it and to master its code generation capabilities. I personally try to now allocate a significant amount of time to designing with natural language first versus writing code from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So using my understanding of programming to edit the code that's generated by the LLM versus sort of writing it from scratch and then using the LLM to generate small parts of the code. I see it as a skill that I should develop in parallel to my programming skill. I think this applies to many other careers too. Don't compete with AI for your job. Learn to use the AI to do that job better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But yes, it is scary on some deep sort of human level, the threat of being replaced. But at least I think we'll be okay. All right, next up, I got a very nice audio message and question from a gentleman who is 27 and feeling a lot of anxiety about the future. Just recently, he graduated with a bachelor's degree and he's thinking about going to grad school for biomedical engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But there is a lot of anxiety. He mentioned anxiety many times in the message. It took him an extra while to get his degree. So he mentioned he would be 32 by the time he's done with his PhD. So it's a big investment. But he said in his heart, he feels like he's a scientist. I think that's the most important part of his message, of your message.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
By the way, I'll figure out how to best include audio and video messages in future episodes. Now onto the question. So thank you for telling me your story and for submitting the question. My own life story is similar to yours. I went to Drexel University for my bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees. And I took a while, just as you're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I did a lot of non-standard things that weren't any good for some hypothetical career I'm supposed to have. I trained and competed in judo and jiu-jitsu for my entire 20s. Got a black belt from it. I wrote a lot, including a lot of really crappy poetry. I read a large amount of non-technical books, history, philosophy, and literature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I took courses on literature and philosophy that weren't at all required for my computer science and electrical engineering degrees, like a course on James Joyce. I played guitar in bars around town. I took a lot of technical classes. Many, for example, on theoretical computer science that were way more than were needed for the degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I did a lot of research and I coded up a bunch of projects that didn't directly contribute to my dissertation. It was pure curiosity and the joy of exploring. So, like you, I took the long way home, as they say, and I regret none of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Throughout that, people around me, and even people who love me, wanted me to hurry up and to focus, especially because I had very little money, and so I had a sense like time was running out for me to take the needed steps towards a reasonable career. And just like you, I was filled with anxiety, And I still am filled with anxiety to this day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
More and more I'm starting to realize that I'm less the guy who plans and more the guy who follows his instinct. But anyway, it does seem that if I get a chance to follow down this path, It will be a difficult but fulfilling one. And if you are walking down that path, join over 37,000 companies that have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But I think the right thing to do is not to run away from the anxiety, but to lean into it and channel it into pursuing with everything you got the things you're passionate about. As you said, very importantly, in your heart, you know you're a scientist. So that's it. You know exactly what to do. Pursue the desire to be a scientist with everything you got.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
get to a good grad school, find a good advisor, and do epic shit with them. And it may turn out in the end that your life will have unexpected chapters, but as long as you're chasing dreams and goals with absolute, unwavering dedication, good stuff will come of it. And also, try your best to be a good person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
This might be a good place to read the words, If, by Roger Kipling, that I often return to when I feel lost and I'm looking for guidance on how to be a better man. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for their doubting too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting or being lied about don't deal in lies or being hated don't give way to hating and yet don't look too good nor talk too wise. If you can dream and not make dreams your master if you can think and not make thoughts your aim if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to broken and stoop and build them up with worn-out tools. If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss and lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they're gone and so hold on when there's nothing in you except the will which says to them, hold on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it, and which is more, you'll be a man, my son.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I, even I, am selling shirts on lexfreeman.com slash store. I've been wearing this shirt that says birds aren't real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you're not aware, it's a conspiracy theory. that birds aren't real, like the name of the conspiracy theory suggests, and that, in fact, the birds we see in the sky are drones used by the government to engage in mass surveillance of a citizenry. I have actually two birds aren't real shirts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
This episode is brought to you by one of my favorite websites, Ground News, a nonpartisan news aggregator I use to compare media coverage from across the political spectrum. The point is to see every side of the story, especially political stories, and come to your own conclusion. We've been talking about it on this podcast, on many podcasts. just how biased specific media sources are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
In one of them, it says birds aren't real in really big letters, and I wear it around town, and I get to start conversations with some interesting people. I think the shirts you wear create opportunities for discovering interesting people. So think of it that way. Merch as gateway for conversation. And if you want to sell gateways of conversations or other kinds of products, you can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Donald Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
They're getting smaller. Right? I mean, people do respect you more when you have a big camera for some reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
All right. Okay. You said that you love winning. And you have won a lot in life, in real estate, in business, in TV, in politics. So let me start with a mindset, a psychology question. What drives you more, the love of winning or the hate of losing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
You've been close with a lot of the greats in sport. You think about Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali. You have people like Michael Jordan who I think hate losing more than anybody. So what do you learn from those guys?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Like most problems in the world, this can be explained by incentives. The funding is drying out for news organizations, so they more and more rely on clickbait journalism, and clickbait journalism requires extreme polarization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
You've been successful in business. You've been successful in politics. What do you think is the difference between gaining success between the two different disparate worlds?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So you have to be able to make hard decisions like you do in business, but also be able to captivate an audience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So just like in the Soviet Union when everyone knew the official sources was propaganda, you have to arrive at the truth by getting a lot of sources and integrating them yourself and understanding where exactly the truth lies because it often lies in the nuance, in the details, in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
One of the great things about people from the business world is they're often great dealmakers. And you're a great dealmaker. And you've talked about the war in Ukraine and that you would be able to find a deal that both Putin and Zelensky would accept. What do you think that deal looks like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
The following is a conversation with Ivanka Trump, businesswoman, real estate developer, and former senior advisor to the President of the United States. I've gotten to know Ivanka well over the past two years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Listen, I'm not very good at this thing. I'm trying to figure it out. Okay. We both love Dolly Parton. So you're big into live music. So maybe you can mention why you love Dolly Parton. I definitely would love to talk to her. I would love to interview her. She's such an icon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, she's like, okay, so there's many things to say about her. First, like, incredibly great musician.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
songwriters performer yeah also can create an image and have fun with it you know like have fun being herself like over the top it feels that way right like she's really she enjoys after all these years it feels like she's enjoying she like enjoys what she does and you also have the sense that if she didn't she wouldn't do it that's right and just an iconic country musician country music singer yeah um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
There's a lot, we've talked about a lot of musicians. What do you enjoy? You mentioned Adele, seeing her perform, hanging out with her.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What a story. So just that's the sort of the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Exactly, exactly. It's like that turning point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So that policy, that meeting, meeting of the minds resulted in a major turning point in her life and Alice's life and now you're dancing with Adele.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned also there, I've seen commutations where... it's an opportunity to step in and consider the ways that the justice system does not always work well. Like in cases when it's nonviolent crime and drug offenses, there's a case of a person you mentioned, that received a life sentence for selling weed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You know, and it's just the number, it's like hundreds of thousands of people are in the federal prison and jail and the system for drug, for selling drugs. That's the only thing with no violence on their record whatsoever. And obviously there's a lot of complexity, there's the details matter, but oftentimes the justice system does not do right in the way we think right is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And it's nice to be able to step in and help people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And I just love the cool image of you, Kim Kardashian, and Alice just dancing on Adele's show with the kids. I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, the way Adele can hold just the badassness she has on stage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
She does like heartbreak songs better than anyone. Or no, it's not even heartbreak. What's that genre of song? Like rolling in the deep, like a little anger, a little love, a little like something, a little attitude, and just like one of the greatest voices ever. All that together just by herself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
We had this moment, which is hilarious, that you said like one of the songs you really like of Stevie's is Texas Flood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You made me feel so good because for me, Texas Flood was the first solo on guitar I've ever learned because for me it was like the impossible solo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And then that was – so I worked really hard to learn it. It's like one of the –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
most iconic sort of blues songs texas blues songs and now you made me fall in love with the song again want to play it out live at the very least put it up on youtube and that's because it is it's so fun to improvise and when you lose yourself in the song it truly is a blues song you can have fun with it i hope you do do that throw on a steve regardless i want you to play it for me
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
He's too good. He's so good. That guy is so good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Well, you could do one note and you could just kill it. The pain, the soulfulness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's true. Adele carries some of that spirit also, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I love watching Queen, like Freddie Mercury, Queen performances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Like in terms of vocals and just like great stage presence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I've watched that so many times. He's so cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Look at that. So good. So good. So that's an example of a person that was born to be on stage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So you've been training jujitsu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, I've seen you do jujitsu. You're extremely, you're very like athletic. You know how to use your body to commit violence. Maybe there's better ways of phrasing that. But anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. I mean, what do you like about jujitsu?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Cloaked for protecting your personal information, Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business management, Hatesleep for naps, and ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the interwebs. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me personally,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Benevolence, respect, honesty, honor, loyalty. So this is not about jiu-jitsu techniques or fighting techniques. This is about a way of life, about the way you interact with the world, with other people. Exercise, nutrition, rest, hygiene, positivity. That's more on the physical side of things. Awareness, balance, and flow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So there's many things I love about the Valenti brothers, but one of them is how rooted it is in philosophy and history of martial arts in general. You know, a lot of places you'll practice the sport of it, maybe the art of it, but to recognize the history and what it means to be a martial artist broadly, on and off the mat. That's really great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And the other thing is great is they also don't forget the self-defense route, the actual fighting routes. So it's not just a sport, it's a way to defend yourself on the street in all situations. And that gives you a confidence in, just like you said, an awareness about your own body and awareness about others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I got to ask you about this. There's a pretty cool page that I've been following on X, Architecture and Tradition, and they celebrate sort of traditional schools of architecture. And you mentioned Gothic, the tapestry. This is in Chicago, the Tribune Tower in Chicago. So what do you think about that? Sort of the old and the new mixed together. Do you like Gothic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It is, you know, sadly, we forget, but there's a, it's a world full of violence or the capacity for violence. So it's good to have an awareness of that and a confidence how to essentially avoid it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I love people like Pedro because he's like finding books that are like in Japanese and translating them to try to figure out like the details of a particular history. Like he's like an ultra scholar of martial arts and I love that. I love when people give everything, every part of themselves to the thing they're practicing. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You know, people have been fighting each other for a very long time. And I love from the Coliseum on, you can't fake anything. You can't lie about anything. It's truly honest. You're there and you either win or lose. It's simple. And that's like, it's also humbling that the reality of that is humbling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So it's nice to have that sometimes. That's the biggest thing I gained from jiu-jitsu is getting my ass kicked, which is the humbling. And it's nice to just get humbled in a very clear way. Sports in general are great for that. I think surfing probably, as I can imagine. Just, you know, yeah, face planting. Not being able to stay on the board, it's humbling. And the power of the wave is humbling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Just like your mom, you're an adventurer. Are there, your bucket list is probably like 120 pages. There are things like just pop to mind that you're like thinking about, especially in the near future, just anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. It's just you and the space suit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I don't know. But the sunset on Mars is blue. It's the opposite color. I hear it's beautiful. It might be worth it. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think actually just even going to space where you can look back on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think that just to see this little... Pale blue dot. Pale blue dot. Just all the stuff that ever happened. And human civilization is on that. And to be able to look at it and just be in awe, I don't think that's a thing that will go away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, and I hope it's the curiosity that drives that exploration, and I hope the exploration will give us a deeper appreciation of the thing we have back home, and that Earth will always be home, and it's a home that we protect and celebrate. What gives you hope about the future of this thing we have going on, human civilization, the whole thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, other humans were pretty cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, for the most part, on the whole, we do all right. We do all right. We create some beautiful stuff, and I hope we keep creating, and I hope you keep creating. You've already done a lot of amazing things, built a lot of amazing things, and I hope you keep building and creating and doing a lot of beautiful things in this world. Ivanka, thank you so much for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ivanka Trump. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Marcus Aurelius. Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running with them. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Do you like it when the glass, the reflective properties of the glass as part of the architecture?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
How do you know what it's actually going to look like when it's done? Like, is it possible to imagine that? Because it feels like there's so many variables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And I love the notion of living with the materials in contrast to living in the imagined world of the drawings. So both are probably important because you have to dream the thing into existence, but you also have to be rooted in what the thing is actually going to look like in the context of everything else. 100%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
One of the underlying principles of the page I just mentioned, and I hear folks mention this a lot, is that modern architecture is kind of boring, that it lacks soul and beauty. And you just spoke with admiration for both modern and for Gothic, for older architecture. So do you think there's truth that modern architecture is boring?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
go to lexfreedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, friends, I will not hold it against you. I will forgive you. In fact, I will continue to celebrate you. Because I don't like ads either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
We've become good friends, hitting it off right away over our mutual love of reading, especially philosophical writings from Marcus Aurelius, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Viktor Frankl, and so on. She is a truly kind, compassionate, and thoughtful human being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, reaching out to the stars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Also, there's a psychological element where people tend to want to complain about the new and celebrate the old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
People are always skeptical and concerned about change. And it's true that there's a lot of stuff that's new that's not good. It's not going to last. It's not going to stand the test of time. But some things will. And there's... Just like in modern art and modern music, there's going to be artists that stand the test of time. And we'll later look back and celebrate them. Those are the good times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I try to put personal stuff in these ads so it's at least interesting to you, worth listening, maybe if you're bored. But if you must skip them, you can. Just check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Cloaked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
When you just step back, what do you love about architecture? Is it the beauty? Is it the function?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, like he says, it's dreams realized, hard work realized. I mean, probably on the bridge side is why I love the function. In terms of function being primary, you just think of like the millions of bridges. Go down, you had, look at that. Yeah, this is Devil's Bridge in Germany.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, so this is probably, well, we don't know. We need to interview some people whether the function holds up. But in terms of beauty and then like what we're talking about, using the water for the reflection and the shape that creates, I mean, there's an elegance to the shape of a bridge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
a platform that lets you generate a new email address and phone number every time you sign up for a new website, allowing your actual email and phone number to remain secret from said website. It's kind of amazing that we just give away that info to like every single website.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
There's nothing about this that makes me feel, maybe they're just being ironic in the names.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, exactly. Nobody's ever successfully crossed. Who crossed the bridge, yeah. But I mean, to me, there's just iconic, I love looking at bridges because of the function. It's the Brooklyn Bridge or the Golden Gate Bridge. I mean, those are probably my favorites in the United States. Just in a city to be able to look out and see the skyline combined with the suspension bridge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And thinking of all the millions of cars that pass, like the busyness, like us humans getting together and going to work, building cool stuff. And just the bridge kind of represents the turmoil and the busyness of a city as it creates. It's cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. The network of roads all come together. So the bridge is the ultimate combination of function and beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What in general is your philosophy, philosophy of design and building in architecture today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I try all kinds of services all the time and you never know which of those websites will sell you information and then you get a waterfall, a barrage, a chaotic storm of spam in your mailbox that will torture you endlessly. And it's just good to not allow your information, your contact information to spread throughout the web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So you fell in love with this project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So is there some interesting details about what it takes to do renovation? Is there about some of the challenges or opportunities? Because you want to maintain the beauty of the old and now upgrade the functionality, I guess, and maybe modernize some aspects of it without destroying what made the building magical in the first place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And so Cloaked solved this problem in a way that I always thought that somebody needs to, and they do it just really well. It's basically just a nice password manager, but it has that extra privacy superpower where it can generate the emails and the phone numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What's design on plan? I'm learning new things today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, there's a wisdom to the idea that we talked about before, live with the materials and walking the construction site, walk in the rooms. I mean, that's what you hear from people like Steve Jobs, like Elon. That's why you live on the factory floor. That's why you... constantly obsessed about the details, the actual, not of the plans, but the physical reality of the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, the insanity of Steve Jobs and Johnny I working together on like making it perfect, making the iPhone, the early designs, prototypes, making that perfect, like what it actually feels like in the hand. You have to be there, like as close to the metal as possible to truly understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Right. It shouldn't be about how much it's going to sell for and all that kind of stuff. You have to love the art.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Anyway, go to cloaked.com slash Lex to get 14 days free or for a limited time, use code LexPod when you are signing up to get 25% off an annual Cloaked plan. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
If we go back to that young Ivanka, the confidence of youth, and if we could talk about your mom, she had a big influence on you. You told me she was an adventurer. Yeah. Olympic skier and a businesswoman. What did you learn about life from your mother?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What do you think about that? I mean, Olympic athlete, the trade-off between like ambition and just wanting to do big things and pursuing that and giving your all to that and being able to relax and just throw your arms back and enjoy every moment of life. Like that trade-off. What do you think about that trade-off?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I'm sorry. The two of you just look great in that picture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So she, as you mentioned, grew up during the Prague Spring in 1968, and that had a big impact on human history. I mean, my family came from the Soviet Union, and then, you know, the 20th century, the story of the 20th century is a lot of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union tried the ideas of communism, And it turned out that a lot of those ideas resulted into a lot of suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So why do you think the communist ideology failed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Every time I do a Shopify read, I always want to talk about Toby, the CEO, who is an amazing person and brilliant in many ways, but also just an engineer at heart, still writes code, all that kind of stuff, and a philosopher. It's really nice. I got a chance to meet with him and talk to him. I've been a fan of his for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I feel like they made people tougher back then. Like my grandma, and you mentioned, it's funny, they go through some of the darkest things that a human being can go through and they don't talk about it. And they have a general positive outlook on life like that's deeply rooted in the knowledge of what life could be. Like how bad it could get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
My grandma survived Holodomor in Ukraine, which was a mass starvation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
brought on by the collectivist policies of the Stalin regime, and then she survived the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, never talked about it, probably went through extremely dark, extremely difficult times, and then just always had a positive outlook on life, and also made me do very difficult physical activity, like you mentioned, just to humble you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Like kids these days are soft kind of energy, which I'm deeply, deeply grateful for. on all fronts, including just having hardship and including just physical hardship flung at me. I think that's really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I don't even know if he knows that Shopify sponsors this podcast, which is... I guess an indication of a large, successful company where all of the stuff is delegated. I think we just connect as human beings. Anyway, he's a great leader, great person. And actually, that's a really good sign for a company when the leader is a good leader and the team is a good team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, hardship clarifies what's important in life. You and I have talked about Man's Search for Meaning, that book. Having kind of an ultimate hardship clarifies that finding joy in life is not about the environment, it's about your outlook on that environment. And there's beauty to be found in any situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And also in that particular situation, when everything is taken from you, the thing you start to think about is the people you love. So in the case of Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, thinking about his wife and how much he loves her. And that love was the flame that the warmth that kept him excited. The fun thing to think about when everything else is gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So we sometimes forget that with the busyness of life, you get all this fun stuff we're talking about, like building and being a creative force in the world. At the end of the day, what matters is just like the other humans in your life, the people you love. It's the simple stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Anyway, I set up a store there, lexfreeman.com slash store. And you can too. Sign up for $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite. Speaking of businesses, it's an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
He also shows that you can get so much from just small joys, like getting a little more soup today than you did yesterday. I mean, it's the little stuff. If you allow yourself to love the little stuff of life, it's all around you, it's all there. So you don't need to have these ambitious goals and the comparison being a thief of joy, that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
just like it's all around us, the ability to eat. When I was in the jungle and I got severely dehydrated, because there's no water, you run out of water real quick, And, I mean, the joy I felt when I got to drink. Like, I didn't care about anything else. Speaking of things that matter in life, I would start to fantasize about water. And that was bringing me joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You can tap into this feeling at any time. Exactly. I was just tapping in just to stay positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
For sure. I mean, people really... It's good to have stuff taken away for a time. That's why struggle is good, to make you appreciate, to have a deep gratitude for when you have it. And water and food is a big one, but water is the biggest one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I wouldn't recommend it necessarily to get severely dehydrated to appreciate water, but maybe every time you take a sip of water, you can have that kind of gratitude.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. Health is a gift. Water is a gift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Is there a memory with your mom that had a defining effect on your life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Is there also some aspect to her being an example of somebody that could be sort of beautiful and feminine, but at the same time, powerful, a successful business woman that showed that it's possible to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
In the past, people have attacked her, in my view, to get indirectly at her dad, Donald Trump, as part of a dirty game of politics and clickbait journalism. These attacks obscured many projects and efforts, often bipartisan, that she helped get done. And they obscured the truth of who she is as a human being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's the machine within the machine that helps find the common language between the different modules of a business. It's, I guess, called an ERP system, Enterprise Resource Planning. The fact that I don't really know And you think about ERP, the terminology of it is a kind of inkling from the Jungian shadow of capitalism that it's not enough to be a designer, an idea person, engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And she did it all in four-inch heels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And full of good lines, paint for beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
a foundation for fashion for you is comfort. And on top of that, you build things that are beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
She's making it look easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Do you, uh, miss her?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It was beautiful to see. I've gotten a chance to spend time with your family to see so many generations together at the table. And there's so much history there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You have to know so many parts of a business to actually get it to work. And yeah, I guess NetSuite helps you out with that. Manages financials, HR, inventory, supply, e-commerce, much more. Running a business is really tough. This is one of the things I've been really, really thinking a lot about. I love being an individual contributor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
All the drama.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, speaking of drama, I had my English teacher in high school recommend a book for me by D.H. Lawrence. It's supposed to be a classic. She's like, this is a classic you should read. It's called Lady, Shadow, and His Lover. So I've read a lot of classics, but that one is straight up like a romance novel about a wife who like is cheating with a gardener.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And I remember reading this, like what, like in retrospect, I understand why it's a classic because it was so scandalous to talk about sex in a book a hundred years ago, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think she's sending a signal, hey, you need to get out more or something. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I mean, I love that kind of stuff, too. But I love all the classics. And there's a lot of drama. Human nature, drama is part of it. Yeah. What about your dad growing up? What did you learn about life from your father?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Sort of an engineer as part of a small team that builds stuff. Or a creative person as part of a small team that builds stuff. And like love the people you work with and just collaborate, brainstorm, argue, all of that, and create together. And when you scale that business, man, so much pain starts to emerge. But the other side of the coin of that pain is you get to have impact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That is funny to think about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Probably Sinatra and all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, I've seen great engineers, great leaders do just that. You see, you want to do that a lot, which is basically ask questions to push simplification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Can we do this simpler? The basic question is like, why are we doing it this way? Can this be done simpler?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And not taking as an answer that this is how we've always done it. It doesn't matter that's how it was done. What is the right way to do it? And usually the simpler it is, the more correct the way. Has to do with cost, has to do with simplicity of production manufacturer, but usually simple is best.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You get to potentially make a lot of people in the world feel good if you put a lot of love in the product and they feel that love that makes people feel good. So it's a trade-off and it's something I think a lot about. I don't care about money. I don't care about any of that stuff. But it is something I care a lot about to have a positive impact in this world, on a small scale or a large scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's why a lot of the Elon companies are really flat in terms of organizational design where, Anybody on the factory floor can talk directly to Elon. There's not this managerial class, this hierarchy where it's travel up and down the hierarchy, which large companies often construct this hierarchy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Hierarchy of managers where no one manager, if you ask them the question of like, what have you done this week? The answer is like, it's really hard to come up with. Usually it's going to be a bunch of paperwork.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So you're like, nobody knows what they actually do. So when it's flat, you can actually get as quickly as possible. When problems arise, you can solve those problems as quickly as possible. And also you have a direct interaction. iterative process where you're making things simpler, making them more efficient and constantly improving. So yeah, it's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Well, when large, I mean, you see this in government, a lot of people get together, a hierarchy is developed and that somehow, sometimes it's good, but very often just slows things down and you see great companies, great, great companies, Apple, Google, Meta, they have to fight against that bureaucracy that builds, the slowness that large organizations have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And to still be a big organization and act like a startup is the big challenge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I've had a lot of conversations with Jim Keller, who is this legendary engineer and leader. And he has talked about, like you often have to kind of be a little bit of an asshole in the room. Not in a mean way, but like it's uncomfortable. Like a lot of these questions, they're uncomfortable. They break the kind of general politeness and civility that people have in communication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
When you get a meeting, nobody wants to be like, can we do it way different? Everyone wants just like this lunch is coming up. I have this trip planned on the weekend with the family. Everyone just wants comfort. When humans get together, they kind of gravitate towards comfort. Nobody wants that one person that comes in and says, hey, can we like do this way better and way different?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And everything we've gotten comfortable with, throw it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, humans are fascinating. But in order to actually do great big projects, to reach for the stars, you have to have those people. You have to constantly disrupt and have those uncomfortable conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Either one. All of it is magical. Anyway, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and it's pod for ultra. I just recently woke up. Yes, I just recently woke up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So amongst many other things, you created a fashion brand. what was that about? What was the origin of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I'm not gonna tell you what time it is, because you will start criticizing me. But sometimes I work late, late into the night, because I love it. But when I get to the bed, and ahead of me, because it's scheduled, it just gets cold, and a warm blanket, and I could just disappear into the beautiful, beautiful abyss of dreams. And I stay there for six, seven, eight, sometimes nine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, when I was hanging out with you in Miami, the number of women that came up to you saying that you love the clothing, they love the shoes. It's awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What does it take to make a shoe where somebody would come up to you years later and just be just full of love for this thing you've created? What's that mean? Like, what does it take to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, that's a good starting point, right? To create a thing that you want to wear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Can you speak to, I don't know if it's possible to articulate, but can you speak to the process you go through from idea to the final thing, like what you go through to bring an idea to life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I get crazy sometimes, I go nine. Sometimes I get 10 hours. I recently got 10 hours of sleep. I was like, what happened? It all went dark and I woke up, the light emerged from the windows and wow, it's a good feeling. Anyway, that disappearance, that teleportation procedure can only happen on a bed that's awesome. And Eight Sleep creates a bed that's awesome. That's all I can say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So yeah, I mean, great team is really sort of essential. It's the essential thing behind any successful story. But there's this thing of taste, which is really interesting because it's hard to kind of articulate what it takes, but basically knowing A versus B, what looks good, or without A-B comparison to say like, if we did, if we changed this part, that would make it better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That sort of designer taste, it's hard to make explicit what that is, but the great designers have that taste, like this is gonna look good. And it's not actually, again, the Steve Jobs thing, it's not the opinion poll. You can't poll people and ask them what looks better. You have to have the vision of that. And as you said, you also have to develop eventually
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
The confidence that your taste is good such that you can curate, you can direct teams, you can argue that no, no, no, this is right, even when there's several people that say this doesn't make any sense. If you have that vision, have the confidence, this will look good. That's how you come up with great designs. It's a mixture of great taste that you develop over time and the confidence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
This is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
The real estate, the design, the art. How hard is it to bring something like that to life? Because that looks surreal out of this world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Go to eightsleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, these are people I would love to talk to on a podcast. And I don't mean for 15 minutes, I mean for a long time, in a relaxed way, going deep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, and it's integrated with the natural landscape. It's a celebration of the natural landscape around it. So I guess you start from this dreamlike, because this feels like a dream. And then when you're faced with the reality of the building materials and all the actual constraints of the building, then it evolves from there, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What's a view corridor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's almost like a mathematical problem. I took a class computational geometry in grad school where you have to think about these view corridors. It's like a math problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Well, but it's also an art problem because it's not just about making sure that there's no occlusions to the view. You have to figure out when there is occlusions, like what, is it vegetation? You have to figure all that out and there's probably, so every single room, every single building is a thing that adds extra complexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's a fascinating sort of discussion to be having. And probably there's like actual constraints on like infrastructure issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, like you said, in the whole post office, like every single room is different. So every single room is a puzzle when you're doing the renovation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Quirky is such a funny word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, you can tell if it's by accident or if it's intentional. Yeah. You can tell. so much, I mean, the whole hospitality thing. So it's not just like how it's designed, it's how, once the thing is operating, if it's a hotel, like how everything comes together. The culture of the place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yes, the political stuff, but also the technical stuff. and also just the human stuff, on the nature of truth, on the nature of privacy, on the nature of governments. Like, how do we all get together as a people, elect a government where the government doesn't abuse the people, doesn't surveil the people, doesn't, through that methodology, take away their freedoms? It's not an easy problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, especially when it's working together with the architecture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, fabrics and color. That's so interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's making me feel horrible about the space we're sitting in. It's like black curtains. The warmth. I need to work on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
This is a big to-do item. You're making me feel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
This is basically an Ikea, like this is not, this is not deeply thought through, but it does bring me joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Which is one way to do design. As long as you're happy, that usually means if your taste is decent enough, that means others will be happy. Or we'll see the joy radiate through it. But I appreciate you were grasping for compliments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, you're holding on to a monkey looking at a human skull, which is particularly irrelevant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. There's robot, I don't know if, I mean, I don't know how much you looked into robots, but there's a way to communicate love and affection from a robot that I'm really fascinated by. And a lot of cartoonists do this too. You have to... When you create cartoons and non-human-like entities, you have to bring out the joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So with WALL-E or robots in Star Wars, to be able to communicate emotion to anger and excitement through a robot is really interesting to me. And people that do it successfully are awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, that makes me smile for sure. There's a longing there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Through all that, she never returned the attacks with anything but kindness and always walked through the fire of it all with grace. For this and much more, she is an inspiration and I'm honored to be able to call her a friend. Oh, and for those living in the United States, happy upcoming 4th of July.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think there's so many detailed elements that I think artists know well, but one basic one is something that people know and you now know because you have a dog, is the excitement that a dog has when you first show up, just the recognizing you and catching your eye and just showing its excitement by, wiggling his butt and tail and all this kind of, this intense joy that overtakes his body.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That moment of recognizing something. It's the double take. That moment of like where this joy of recognition takes over your whole cognition and you're just like there and there's a connection. And then the other person gets excited and you both get excited together. It's kind of like that feeling, what would I put it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You know, like when you go to airports and you get to see people who haven't seen each other for a long time all of a sudden recognize each other in their meeting and they're all like run towards each other in a hug. That moment. By the way, that's awesome to watch. There's so much joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It would be just such a fascinating conversation to have with them. Yeah, how do we build an internet that promotes freedom, that protects that freedom? I would love to talk to both of them. Anyway, lots of fun conversation to be had. But, you know, the basic lowest hanging fruit of protecting yourself on the internet is a VPN, a good VPN. And I've always used ExpressVPN.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I kind of want to forever be excited by the peekaboo phenomena, the simple joys. We were talking about on fashion, having the confidence of taste to be able to sort of push through on this idea of design. But you've also mentioned somebody who admires, Rick Rubin, in his book, The Creative Act. It has some really interesting ideas, and one of them is to accept self-doubt and imperfection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So is there some battle within yourself that you have on sort of, striving for perfection and for the confidence and always kind of having it together versus like accepting that things are always going to be imperfect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Harness the fear. The other thing he writes about is intuition, that you need to trust your instincts and intuition. That's a very recruitment thing to say. But so what percent of your decision making is intuition or what percent is through rigorous, careful analysis? Would you say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
One big sexy button, I press it, it works, always works. On Linux, my favorite operating system, but any operating system, any device, all of that, go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ivanka Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, I had actually a discussion yesterday with a big time business owner investor who's talking about being impulsive and following that. Like on a phone call, shifting like the entire everything, like giving away a very large amounts of money and moving it in another direction on an impulse, making a promise that he can't at that time deliver, but knows if he works hard,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
he'll deliver and all doing just following that impulsive feeling. And he said now that, you know, he has a family that probably some of that impulse is quieted down a little bit. He's more rational and thoughtful and so on, but wonders whether it's sometimes good to just be impulsive and to just trust your gut and just go with it. Don't deliberate too long because then you won't do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's interesting. It's the confidence, the stupidity maybe of youth that leads to some of the greatest breakthroughs. And it's like, there's a cost to wisdom and deliberation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Amongst many other things, you were on The Apprentice. People love you on there. People love the show. So what did you learn about business, about life from the various contestants on there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So you're, like, curating the television version of it and also living it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
unbelievable crossover that was obviously great for us from a business perspective but um it's sometimes surreal to to experience what was it like was it was it scary to be in front of a camera when you know so many people watch i mean that that's a new experience for you at that time just the number of people watching yeah was that weird
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I just, it's... Hey, I have to watch myself. After we record this, before I publish it, I have to listen to my stupid self-talk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It doesn't get better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think certain people are just like born to be entertainers. Like Elvis, like on stage they come to life. This is where they're truly happy. I've met guys like that, like great rock stars. Like this is where... They feel like they belong on stages. It's not just a thing they do and there's certain aspects they love, certain aspects they don't. No, this is where they're alive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
This is where they've always dreamed of being. This is where they want to be forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Michael Jackson. I saw pictures of you hanging out with Michael Jackson. That was cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You said that ever since you were young, you wanted to be a builder, that you loved the idea of designing beautiful city skylines, especially in New York City. I love the New York City skyline. So describe the origins of that love of building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And I just, in general, love to see people that have found the thing that makes them come alive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
as I mentioned, went to the jungle recently with Paul Rosely and he's a guy who just belongs in the jungle. Like that's a guy where like when I, I got a chance to go with him from the city to the jungle and you just see this person change. of the happiness, the joy he has when he first is able to jump in the water of the Amazon River and to feel like he's home with the crocodiles and all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
He's calling friends and probably dances around in the trees with the monkeys. So this is where he belongs. I love seeing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And they are. They're so big. I mean, just like skyscrapers or large buildings, they also represent a history, especially in Europe. I like to think, looking at all these ancient buildings, you like to think of all the people throughout history that have looked at them, have admired them, have been inspired by them. you know, great leaders of history. In France, it's like Napoleon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Just the history that's contained within a building, you almost feel the energy of that history. You can feel the stories emanate from the buildings. And that same way, when you look at giant trees that have been there for decades, for centuries, centuries in some cases, you feel the history, the stories emanate. I got a chance to climb some of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So you feel like there's a visceral feeling of the power of the trees. It's cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. Being in the jungle. among the trees, among the animals, you remember that you're forever a part of nature. You're fundamentally our nature. Earth is a living organism, and you're a part of that organism. And that's humbling, that's beautiful, and you get to experience that in a real, real way. It sounds simple to say, but when you actually experience it, it stays with you for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Especially if you're out there alone. I got a chance to spend time in the jungle solo, just by myself. And you sit in the fear of that, in the simplicity of that, all of it. And just no sounds of humans anywhere. You're just sitting there and listening to all the monkeys and the birds trying to have sex with each other. all around you, just screaming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And there's like, I mean, I romanticize everything. There's like birds that are monogamous for life, like macaws. You can see like two of them flying. They're also, by the way, screaming at each other. I always wonder like, are they arguing or is this their love language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You just have these like two birds that you know have been together for a long time and they're just screaming at each other in the morning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
But maybe to them it's beautiful. I don't want to judge, but they do sound very loud and very obnoxious. But amidst all of that, it's just, I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, the power of the waves is cool. I love swimming out into the ocean and feeling the power of the ocean underneath you. You're just like this speck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What's it like to fall on your face when you're trying to surf? I haven't surfed before. It just feels like... I always see videos of when everything goes great. I just wonder when it doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
How did life change you? when your father decided to run for president?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So when you're in the White House, people, unlike in any other position, people have a sense that all the troubles they're going through, maybe you can help. Yeah. So they put it all out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And those stories just stay with you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You know, I took a long road trip around the United States in my twenties. And I'm kind of thinking of doing it again, just for like a couple of months for that exact purpose. And you can get these stories when you go to like a bar in the middle of nowhere and just sit and talk to people and they start sharing. And it reminds you of like how beautiful the country is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It reminds you of several things. that people, well, it shows you that there's a lot of different accents, that's foreign. But aside from that, that people are struggling with all the same stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And at least at that time, I wonder what it is now, but at that time, I don't remember, on the surface, there's like political divisions, there's Republicans and Democrats and so on, but like underneath it, there are people who are all the same, the concerns are all the same, there's not that much of a division.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Right now, the surface division has been amplified even more, maybe because of social media. I don't know why. So I would love to see what the country is like now, but I suspect probably it's still not as divided as it appears to be on the surface, what the media shows, what the social media shows. But what did you experience in terms of the division?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Although I have to say, having duels sounds pretty cool. Maybe I just romanticize Westerns. Anyway, all right. I miss Clint Eastwood movies. Okay. But it's true. You read some of the stuff in terms of what politics used to be in the history of the United States. Those folks went pretty rough, like way rougher actually. But they didn't have social media, so they had to go like real hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And the media was rough too, so all like the fake news, all of that, that's not recent. It's been nonstop. You know, I look at the surface division, the surface bickering, and that might be like just a feature of democracy. It's not a bug of democracy, it's a feature. We're in the constant conflict and it's the way we resolve, we try to figure out the right way forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So in the moment, it feels like people are just tearing each other apart, but really we're trying to find the way where like in the long arc of history, it will look like progress. But in the short term, it just sounds like people making stories up about each other and calling each other names and all this kind of stuff, but in the, there is a purpose to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, that's what freedom looks like, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And it's better than the alternative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Sure. Yes, that's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What went into your decision to join the White House as an advisor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
A chance to help others. To help many people. Saying no means you're kind of turning away from those people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I love that confidence of youth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. Yeah, but then it's the turmoil of politics that you're getting into, and it really is a leap into the abyss. What was it like trying to get stuff done in Washington? And this place where politics is a game, it feels that way, maybe from an outsider perspective. And you go in there trying, given some of those stories, trying to help people. What's it like to get anything done?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's a nice way to put it, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
When I was like researching this stuff, you just get to think the scale of things, the scale of impact is 40 million families. Each one of those is a story, is a story of struggle, of trying to give a large part of your life to a job while still being able to give love and support and care to a family, to kids. and to manage all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Each one of those is a little puzzle that they have to solve and it's a life and death puzzle. You can lose your home, your security, you can lose your job, you can screw stuff up with parenting. So you can mess all that up and you're trying to hold it together and government policies can help make that easier or can in some cases make that possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, where everything is possible. I think some of the greatest builders I've ever met kind of always have that little flame of everything is possible still burning. That is a silly notion from youth, but it's not so silly. Everybody tells you something is impossible, but if you continue believing that it's possible and have that sort of,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And you get to do that at a scale not of like five or 10 families, but like 40 million families. And that's just one thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What can you say about the process of bringing that to life? So the child tax credits, so doubling them from 1,000, 2,000 per child. What are the challenges of that, getting people to compromise?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I'm sure there's a lot of politicians playing games with that because maybe it's a Republican that came up with an idea or a Democrat that came up with an idea, and so they don't want to give credit to the idea. There's probably all kinds of games happening where they – when the game is happening, you probably forget about the families. Each politician thinks about how they can benefit themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You forget, like, the serving part of the role you're supposed to be in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You help get people together. What's that take? Trying to get people to compromise, trying to get people to see the common humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's both an anniversary of this country's declaration of independence and an anniversary of my immigrating here to the U.S. I am forever grateful for this amazing country, for this amazing life, for all of you who have given a chance to a silly kid like me. From the bottom of my heart, Thank you. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You know, going out to space or building a new company where, like everybody said, it's impossible, taking on that gigantic company and disrupting them and revolutionizing how stuff is done, or doing huge building projects where, like you said, so many people are involved in making that happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, be able to see, like you said, well-designed policies. There's probably like the details are important too. Like there's just like with architecture and you walk the rooms, there's probably really good designs of policies, like economic policy that helps families, that delivers the maximum amount of money or resources to families that need it. and is not a waste of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So like that, there's probably really nice designs there, nice ideas that are bipartisan, that has nothing to do with politics, has to do with just great economic policy, just great policies. And that requires listening,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I love that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, there's so many aspects of education that you're helped on. Access to STEM and computer science education. So the CT thing you're mentioning, modernizing career and technical education. That's millions and millions of people. The act provided nearly $1.3 billion annually to more than 13 million students to better align the employer needs and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
very large scale policies that help a lot of people. It's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
How much of a toll does that take, seeing all the problems in the world at such a large scale? The immensity of it all. Was that hard to walk around with that, just knowing how much suffering there is in the world? As you're trying to help all of it, as you're trying to design government policies to help all of that, it's also a very visceral recognition that there is suffering in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
How difficult is that to walk around with?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I was just talking to a brain surgeon. Many of the surgery has to do, he knows the chances are very low of success. And he says that that wears at his armor. It chips away. It's like only so many times can you do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, of course it's important to also have the humility once you get humbled and realize that it's actually a lot of work to build. I still am amazed just looking at big buildings, big bridges that human beings are able to get together and build those things. That's one of my favorite things about architecture is just like, wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
But you can see the pain in his eyes. maintaining your humanity while doing all of it. You could see the story, you could see the family that loves that person. Just you feel the immensity of that. And you feel the heartbreak involved with mortality in that case, and with suffering also in that case. And in general, and all these in human trafficking,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
But even helping families try to stay afloat, trying to break out or escape poverty, all of that, you get to see those stories of struggle. It's not easy. But the people that really feel the humanity of that, feel the pain of that, are probably the right people to be politicians. But it's probably also why you can't stay in there too long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So through that, the turmoil of that, the hardship of that, what was the role of family through all of that, Jared and the kids? What was that like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's a manifestation of the fact that humans can collaborate and do something like epic much bigger than themselves. And it's like a statue that represents that. And it can be there for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, I got a chance to chat with him and he has his silliness and sense of humor. Yeah, it's really joyful. I could see how that could be an escape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So three kids, you've now upgraded, two dogs and a hamster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What advice would you give to other mothers just planning on having kids and maybe advice to yourself on figuring out this puzzle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
They almost give you permission to sort of reignite the inner child, to be a kid again. And it's interesting what you said, that the puzzle of noticing each human being, like what makes them beautiful, the unique characteristics, like what they're good at, the way they want to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I often see that, especially with coaches and athletes, young athletes aspiring to be great, each athlete needs to be trained in a different way. For example, with some you need a softer approach. Like with me, I always like a dictatorial approach. I like the coach to be this like, menacing figure. That's when that brought out the best in me. I didn't want to be friends with the coach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Like I want to almost, it's weird to say, but yell that like to be pushed. But that doesn't work for everybody. And that's a risk you have to take in the coach context of like, because you can't just yell at everybody. You have to figure out like what does each person need? And when you have kids, I imagine the puzzle is even harder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I love thinking about a city skyline as an ensemble of dreams realized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Also, there's just fascinating puzzles. I was talking to a friend yesterday and she has four kids and they fight a lot. And she generally wants to break up the fights, but she's like, I'm not sure if I'm just supposed to let them fight. Can they figure it out? Or you always break them up because I'm told that it's okay for them to fight. Kids do that. They kind of figure out their own situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's part of like the growing up process. But you want to always, especially if it's physical, they're like pushing each other. You want to kind of stop it. But at the same time, it's also part of the play, part of the dynamics. And that's a puzzle you also have to figure out. And plus, you're probably worried that they're going to get hurt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's short-term formative conflict.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So ever since 2016, the number and the level of attacks you've been under has been steadily increasing, has been super intense. How do you walk through the fire of that? You've been very stoic about the whole thing. I don't think I've ever seen you respond to an attack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You just let it pass over you, you stay positive and you focus on solving problems and you didn't engage while being in DC, you didn't engage into the back and forth fire of the politics. So what's your philosophy behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, but gravity is a tricky one to work against. And that's where civil engineering is one of my favorite things. I used to build bridges in high school for physics classes. You have to build bridges and you compete on how much weight they can carry relative to their own weight. You study how good it is by finding its breaking point. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I also like that you said that words have power. It's not, sometimes people say, well, words, when you speak negatively of others, oh, that's just words. But I think there's a cost to that. There's a cost, like you said, to your soul.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And there's a cost in terms of the damage it can do to the other person, whether it's to their reputation publicly or to them privately, just as a human being, psychologically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And in the place that it puts them because they start thinking negatively in general and then maybe they respond and there's this vicious downward spiral that happens that almost like we don't intend to, but it destroys everybody in the process. You quoted Alan Watts, I love him, in saying, quote, you're under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So how have the years in DC and the years after changed you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That was a deep appreciation for me on a miniature scale of, on a large scale, what people are able to do with civil engineering. Because gravity is a tricky one to fight against.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, just like you said, will your mom be able to let go and enjoy the water, the sun, the beach, and enjoy the moment, the simplicity of the moment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And give yourself permission to be who you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You made the decision not to engage in the politics of the 2024 campaign. If it's okay, let me read what you wrote on the topic. Quote, I love my father very much. This time around, I'm choosing to prioritize my young children and the private life we're creating as a family. I do not plan to be involved in politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
While I will always love and support my father going forward, I will do so outside the political arena. I'm grateful to have had the honor of serving the American people, and I will always be proud of many of our administration's accomplishments. So can you explain your thinking, your philosophy behind that decision?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So if we think of Skylines as ensembles of dreams realized, you spent quite a bit of time in New York. What do you love about and what do you think about the New York City skyline? What's a good picture? We're looking here at a few. I mean, looking over the water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So it wears on your soul. And yeah, there is a bit, at least from an outsider's perspective, a bit of darkness in that part of our world. I wish it didn't have to be this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think part of that darkness is just watching all the legal turmoil that's going on. What's it like for you to see that, your father involved in that, going through that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I like it that underneath all of this, I love my father is the thing that you lead with. That's so true. It is family. And I hope I missed all this turmoil. Love is the thing that wins.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
In the end, yes. But in the short term, there is, like we were talking about, there's a bit of bickering. But at least no more duels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You mentioned Dolly Parton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The following is a conversation with Tulsi Gabbard, who was a longtime Democrat, including being the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. She endorsed Bernie in 2016 and Biden in 2020. She has been both loved and heavily criticized for her independent thinking and bold political stances, especially on topics of war and the military-industrial complex. She served in the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
They got text-based editor. They got multi-track sync to make sure everything is aligned and synced. Man, that's a hellhole that you want technology to help you avoid. And they do wonderfully, the syncing of everything together. It kind of makes me want to do more remote podcasts because for certain kinds of guests, being there in person is not as essential as for certain others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
On the cost side of things, how is it possible for a company like Halliburton or others to get away with $40 bananas, or however much it was, so the overhead costs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
How powerful is the military industrial complex as a thing? Is it a machine that can be slowed down, can be stopped, can be reversed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
You have been both a war hawk and a war dove at times. So what is your philosophy on when war is justified and when it is not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So that's a high level, beautiful ideal, but there's messy details. So terrorism, for example. Yes. The United States involvement in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was in part the big umbrella of the war on terrorism. So, you know, when you decide whether something's justified or not, and whether something can be defeated or not, how hard is it? Is it even possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Whenever there's chemistry and the dynamic kind of wit and banter and back and forth and the... sort of the dance, the music of conversation and so on, being in person is really nice. But when it's really intense and heated, not necessarily in the argument there in the room, but on the weight and the heaviness of the topic, then sometimes being in the room is nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
To what degree is it possible to defeat terrorism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Plus there's something that's difficult to describe that's not present with certain guests when it's remote. But I think with others, You can have a hell of a good conversation, especially when you're doing like a debate or multiple people. Just getting them in the room together, as I had to do for the Israel-Palestine debate, is really tough. So I should probably do more remote conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
If you look at the lessons learned from the US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, how do you fight terrorism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And I record my remote interviews with Riverside. Give it a try at Riverside.fm and use code Lex for 30% off. That's Riverside.fm and use code Lex. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I've used them for many, many, many, many years to protect my privacy and the internet. I think everybody should be using a VPN for many reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
If we look at the perspective of Israel in the Israel-Gaza war going on now, What do you do with the fact that the death of a civilian serves as a catalyst, gives birth to hate, potentially generational hate? So in Israel's stated goal of destroying Hamas, they are creating immeasurable hate. What do you do with that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
From a perspective of Israel, what is the correct action to take in response to October 7th?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
How do you think, how do you hope the war in Ukraine will end?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
One, it can allow you to geographically transport yourself. But the main reason is it just adds this extra layer of security and privacy. When you use incognito mode on Chrome and go to all the shady websites that you go to, yeah, I'm talking to you. I know what you do. And so does the NSA. So does everybody. Anyway, you want to protect yourself as much as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
What's the role of the US president, perhaps, to bring everybody to the table? Do you think that the US president should sit down with Zelensky and Putin together?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Some of it is basic human camaraderie. People call me naive for this, but sometimes just knowing that there's a human on the other side, even like when it's in private, if you look at Zelensky and Putin, for example, just humor. Both are very intelligent, witty, at times even funny people. Yes, this is war time. Yes, a lot of civilians and soldiers are dying. There's hate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But if you can look above it all and think about the future of the countries, the flourishing of a people, and the stopping of the death of civilians and soldiers, then in that place, you can have that basic human connection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Of course, there's examples throughout history. You know, leaders are complicated people. They're manipulative people. So you have like Hitler and Chamberlain meeting and Chamberlain kind of getting hoodwinked by Hitler's charisma and being convinced that Hitler doesn't have any interest in invading and destroying the rest of the world. So, you know, you have to... Be smart. Don't be hoodwinked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
You've met... You've been criticized for this. You've met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And as part of the campaign, you know, running for president, got criticized for not calling him a war criminal. What's the right way to meet and communicate with these kinds of leaders?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The low hanging fruit of protection is the VPN and use a great VPN. The one I've always used, the one I highly recommend is ExpressVPN. They're like the big one. Works everywhere. Any operating system, including Linux, is super fast, super easy to use. What else do you want? Go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod for an extra three months free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system, aka ERP system, enterprise resource planning. It's the machine inside the machine. No, it's the universal language that connects the different modules within the machine of a company. For some reason, I really enjoy talking about a company as a machine. Maybe that's the engineering perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Yeah, it's a simplistic narrative template that's fit into every single situation. A lot of stuff is not talked about in the Russia-Ukraine war. One of the things that's not talked about is, okay, so Putin is overthrown, then who do you think will come into power? Exactly. One of the things I talk about with Aristovitch is that Putin...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
and he gets criticized for this, that Putin, out of all the people that might take power, is the most liberal, is the most dovish. In fact, every indication shows that he really hates this war. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And so everybody that will step in, if he steps down or if he is overthrown, is just going to accelerate this war and the expansionism and the thirst for empire and all that kind of stuff that the US military industrial complex will feed into. So you have to think about what the future holds and what the different power players are and what the level of corruption there is and sort of,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
the realistic view of the situation versus the idealistic view of the situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
military for many years, achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel. And now she's the author of a new book called For Love of Country. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But also the interest of Ukraine or Russia and humanity overall, just the flourishing of nations, which is Great for everybody in collaborations with nations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Friendly competition. You know, one of the things I love about the 20th century is the friendly, sometimes not so friendly competition between the Soviet Union and the United States in space and the space race. It's created some incredible engineering and scientific breakthroughs and all of this and also made people dream about like reaching out to the stars and war destroys all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Or damages it. Hopefully just damages it. Hopefully the phoenix will rise again. Well, let me ask you about the criticism you've mentioned. It's probably the most common criticism of you that you love Putin. So just to linger on it, what do you think is the foundation of this criticism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But there's also a camaraderie in it. Thinking about all of human civilization as a kind of machine where we play our roles, there's a communal aspect to it. You know, there's like a negative sense that gears in the machine are somehow used by a bigger thing. But really, gears are working together. There's a camaraderie, there's collaboration as you all are doing a difficult thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Well, people on the left have challenged the warmongers as well throughout the last few decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So anyway, NetSuite makes it easy for people to work together by managing all the messy stuff, the financials, the human resources, inventory, supply, e-commerce, and all that kind of stuff. 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. For your own KPI checklist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
was lost very quickly. It was Putin bad. It was a war between good and evil. And in that, if you bring up any kind of nuanced discussion of how do we actually achieve peace in this situation, you're immediately put on the side of evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I mean, the cynical view is, of course, it's the military industrial complex machine, the war profiteers just driving this kind of conversation. You know, I hope that's not, I hope they don't have that much power. I hope they just have incentives and they push people and they kind of use people's natural desire to divide the world into good and evil and fight for the side of good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
You know, people just have a natural proclivity for that. And that's a good thing, that we want to fight for the side of good, but then that gets captured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I just talked to Annie Jacobs and she wrote a book on nuclear war, a scenario of how a nuclear war will happen second by second, minute by minute. I apologize. If it happens, how it would happen is terrifying. It's terrifying how easy it is to start, that one person can start it, first of all, and then there's no way to stop it. Even potentially with tactical nuclear weapons,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
that it's just the machinery of it, how clueless everybody is, combined with the machinery of it, it's just impossible to stop. And it's just between Russia and the United States, especially. And then all of a sudden you have nuclear winter and 5 billion people are dead. And they die through just essentially torture, slowly. How do we avoid that? How do we avoid a nuclear war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. It combines note-taking, wikis, project management. So the individual note-taking is incredible. Their integration of AI into that process is really, really well done. The AI Assistant does summarization. It generates first draft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
That's something that you talk about and think about. How do we avoid this kind of escalation of a hot war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
It helps you in all kinds of ways that you can write, like rewrite to make things simpler or more sophisticated. It's a great assistant in terms of the individual writer, but they also do a great job of having the AI Assistant integrate all the different parts of a project together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But by the way, there's so many things to say there, but one of the things that Annie Jacobson details is just how organized the machinery of all of this is, where the humans involved don't have to think. They just follow orders. There's a very clear set of steps you take, and there's very few places where you can inject your humanity and be like, wait a minute, what's the big picture of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The only person... that can think is the President of the United States. The President of the United States gets six minutes after the warning. The early warning system says, whether it's false or not, says that we believe that there's been a nuclear weapon launched. You have six minutes before you can make the decision of launch back, initiate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And to me, that's what I'm voting based on in the current situation. You really have to see that as one of the most important aspects of the United States president, is who do you trust in those six minutes to sit there? And I'm not really sure, looking at Biden and Trump, boy,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So looking across docs and wikis and projects where you can ask questions of the assistant and they will answer based on all of those files and that means all the different people that are part of that project, that are collaborating on it, that's part of the information that the assistant is using.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I don't know, but I do know that I would like somebody who is thinking independently and not part of the machinery of warmongers. I don't want to make it sound cynical or dramatic, but sometimes in such scary situations, in such dramatic situations, you kind of follow the momentum. When the right thing to do, the right thing for a leader to do is to step back and look of all of human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And ignore all the people in the room that are like, saying stuff because most likely what they're going to be saying is warmongering type of things. That's one of the things why I also get criticized for. I still think Zelensky is a hero for staying in Kiev. Everybody was telling him to flee. It was all the information was telling, basically saying the world's second biggest military is like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Coming at Kiev, it's just dumb on all fronts to stay in Kiev. But that's what a great leader does, is ignores everybody and stays. Screw it. I'm going to die for my country. I'm going to die as a leader. And that's the right thing for a leader to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So it's just a really, really great collaboration tool that I highly recommend if you're on a team. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tulsi Gabbard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
It's weird how difficult it is to be that person in the room.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But why does it require, like even just to ask, okay, we've been in Afghanistan and Iraq for this number of years. What's the exit plan?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
just bring that up like every day at a meeting yeah like what's the exit plan it's strange that that gets criticized well the war in Iraq and so on but I just remember there was this pressure you can't quite criticize or like ask dumb questions about wait what why are we going into Iraq again But they're not dumb questions. Right. In retrospect, you're like, oh, they're not dumb questions at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But it actually required a lot of courage to ask them while still working within the institution. It's easier if you're like an activist from the outside saying no war, this kind of stuff. But within the institution, in the position of power, to ask the questions like, maybe let's not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
It seems really difficult. The same kind of thing in the war in Ukraine and just any kind of military involvement. Again, I guess the cynical interpretation is that it's the military industrial complex that permeates just the halls of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Well, the cool thing about... United States presidents, they have the power to say F you to everybody in the room. I think. They do. It just seems like they don't quite take that power. People will say like, yeah, the U.S. president doesn't have that much power. I don't know about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Just like if you look at the law, especially in military, when you're talking about war and the military, they have a lot of power. Yes. So they can fire everybody. They have a lot of power. They can stop wars. They can start wars. They have a lot of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Can you actually explain that, Bill?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
You've served in the US military for many years, achieving rank of Lieutenant Colonel. You were deployed in Iraq in 2004 and 5, Kuwait in 2008 and 9. What lessons about life and about country have you learned from that experience of war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
We got Riverside for recording remote podcasts, ExpressVPN for security and privacy on the interwebs, NetSuite for business management software, and Notion for note-taking and team collaboration. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, If you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Yeah, it's quite dark. It's just a graph of power. It is. I mean, this doesn't, it's not just with Elon. It's probably with Zuck, with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. It puts pressure. It's not just about banning, but it puts pressure for them to kind of moderate behavior.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Which is a slippery slope. Of course, it's a beautiful dance of power because you don't want tech companies to have too much power either or individuals at the top of those tech companies have too much power. But then do you want that power in the hands of government?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The history of this nation is a fascinatingly effective example journey towards the balance of power. And it does seem like this sneaky little thing, as much as I hate TikTok on all fronts. My brain rots every time I use TikTok. I know it's also like the national security dangers of China and so on, but it's just like TikTok, man. Just, I just, I don't know. It's so addicting. It's so addicting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So... When I first saw this TikTok bill, I was like, yes. But then they got me. The Trojan horse got me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Yeah, more and more trust people to, whenever social media companies do bullshitty things, for the people to make documentaries about it, to discover it, for great journalists to do great journalism. Right. And find the flaws and the hypocrisy and the call for transparency, all those kinds of things. I don't trust...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
in most cases, government regulation of technology companies because they seem to be really out of touch. One, they want power. They're really intimidated by the power that the tech companies have. And two, they don't seem to get at the technology at all. So they're like hindering innovation and they're just greedy for power. And those are not- It's a bad combination. It's a bad combination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Do you think, what are the chances that the TikTok ban bill passes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Yeah, this is really messed up. Just in case we didn't make it clear, I think this is a really, really big danger if this thing passes. Even if you hate Elon Musk or whatever, this is really, really, really dangerous. If the government gets say over the platforms on which we communicate with each other, it's a huge problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
You were a longtime Democrat. You were the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee until you resigned in 2016 to endorse Bernie. I should say I love Bernie. I loved him before he was cool. All right. Anyway, can you go through what happened in that situation? Yeah. And with the Democratic National Committee and with Bernie and why you resigned?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
What do you like most about Bernie? The positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Like I said, you were a long time Democrat. You were ever president in 2020 as a Democrat. Now you're an independent and you're an excellent book describing your journey ideologically, philosophically through that. Why did you choose to leave the democratic party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So these are just different mechanisms for power. The identity politics and the warmongering are related to each other in that they're mechanisms to attain more power. You know, you're making it sound like only the Democratic Party are full of power hungry people. So to you, The Republican Party, I don't know if you've met those folks, but some of them- A couple of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Are also in love with power and are, at times, to some degree, politicians in general are corrupt, sometimes within the legal bounds, sometimes slightly outside of the legal bounds. And so to you, to what degree is sort of the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So I don't want to paint a picture of like this kind of beautiful vision of the Republican Party that they're somehow not power hungry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I'm not a fan of this choice, but here we are, Biden versus Trump. So let me ask you sort of a challenging question of pros and cons. Can you give me pros and cons of each? What's the biggest strength and biggest limitation of, let's say, Biden?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So the biggest criticism would be he divided us or continued the division that's been there. Who do you view as the greatest uniter? Like to me, over the past few decades, to me, Obama. You've been very critical of Obama on the foreign policy side on many fronts. But to me, that guy did really good. Maybe some people say just rhetoric, but I think rhetoric matters when you're president.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I think he was, out of all the presidents we had, is probably the most effective uniter of the people. Would that be fair to say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
What do you think that is? Why is it so hard as a president? to kind of act on the promises of the campaign, but also just, I mean, his speech, his basically anti-war speech, that really resonated to me, the fact that he was against the war in Iraq, I believe, early on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Why is it so hard when you step into the office of president to sort of act on your ideals?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And who are resistant to the love of money and power. Yes. It's hard to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Yeah, I just had a conversation with Dana White, and he's good friends with Trump, and he talks to the fact that he seems to be resistant to the attacks. And some aspect of that is just the psychology of being able to withstand the attacks that are there in the political game. And that can break people. Like, you just don't want the headaches. So to withstand the attacks is tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And something about his psychology allows... for that. I mean, I guess a question for you also in your own psychology, you've been attacked quite a bit. We've mentioned some of that sort of misrepresentations and how do you deal with that by yourself? Like how do you not become cynical or overcompensate the other direction, that kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So you spoken about the value of religious faith in your life, of your Hindu faith, and seeing the Bhagavad Gita as a spiritual guide. So what role does faith in God play in your life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The interesting thing about the Hindu God is how welcoming the religion is of other religions. It's true. How accepting it is. In that way, in many ways, it's one of the... most beautiful religions on earth. So like, who do you think God is to you? Like in specifically the texts, but also you personally, What does he represent? So for Hinduism, it's also, God can be many.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
There's also like a aspect where there's a, it's like a part of all of us. There's like a uniting thing, not a singular figure outside of us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by an oldie but a goodie, Riverside. Riverside FM, the platform that makes it easy for podcasts and media companies to record remotely in studio quality. I use them to record remote podcasts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Tulsi, this was an honor to finally meet you, to talk to you. This was amazing. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tulsi Gabbard. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address. A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. we have been compelled to create a permanent ornaments industry of vast proportions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
This conjunction of immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
If we can just go back to that list. Yeah. So the list is just name and injury, name and injury.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And it's just pages and pages of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
What can you say about what the soldiers had to go through physically and psychologically when they get injured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I usually don't record remote podcasts, but I have done a few. And the experience there is just effortless, flawless, super high quality in terms of audio, in terms of video, super easy on the guest side. Everything is just wonderful. Aside from sort of the basic thing that this is a great way to record remote podcasts, they have so many features. They got AI transcription.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The following is a conversation with Josje Bak, his third time on this podcast. Josje is one of the most brilliant and fascinating minds in the world, exploring the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and computation. And he's one of my favorite humans to talk to about pretty much anything and everything. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So as the number of people who follow you on Twitter expands, you feel the burden of the uglier sides of humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But what if the technology enables you to discover the majority of people, to discover and connect efficiently and regularly with the majority of people who are actually really good? I mean, one of my sort of concerns with a platform like Twitter is, there's a lot of really smart people out there, a lot of smart people that disagree with me and with others between each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And I love that if the technology would bring those to the top, the beautiful disagreements, like Intelligence Squared type of debates. There's a bunch of, I mean, one of my favorite things to listen to is arguments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
and arguments like high effort arguments with the respect and love underneath it, but then it gets a little too heated, but that kind of too heated, which I've seen you participate in, and I love that, with Lee Corona, with those kinds of folks, and you go pretty hard. Like you'll get frustrated, but it's all beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But he's constantly passively communicating a respect for the people he's talking with and for just basic humanity and truth and all that kind of stuff. And there's a self-deprecating thing. There's a bunch of like social skills you acquire that allow you to be a great debater, a great argumenter, like be wrong in public and explore ideas together in public when you disagree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And if I would love for Twitter to elevate those folks, elevate those kinds of conversations,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I think that's a fun and that's a beautiful game. It's ultimately a productive one. Speaking of taking that risk, he tweeted, when you have the choice between being a creator, consumer, or redistributor, always go for creation. Not only does it lead to a more beautiful world, but also to a much more satisfying life for yourself. And don't get stuck preparing yourself for the journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The time is always now. So let me ask for advice. What advice would you give on how to become such a creator on Twitter in your own life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So not just consuming culture, but creating culture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah. Speaking of which, you retweeted this meme of a life of a philosopher in a nutshell. It's birth and death and in between. It's a chubby guy and it says, why though? What do you think is the answer to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So really paying attention to the, what is it, to the feeling another human being fully.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Because everything is possible, so you get to explore this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
To the degree we can choose. Yosha, you're one of my favorite humans in this world. Consciousness is to merge with for a brief moment of time. It's always an honor. It always blows my mind. It will take me days, if not weeks, to recover. And I already miss our chats. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for speaking with me so many times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Thank you so much for all the ideas you put out into the world. And I'm a huge fan of following you now in this interesting, weird time we're going through with AI. So thank you again for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Josje Bak. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from the psychologist Carl Jung. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, man, the mind is so beautiful in that way. Sometimes it comes so natural to me, so easy to pay attention, pay attention to the world fully, to other people fully. And sometimes the stress over silly things is overwhelming. It's so interesting that the mind is that rollercoaster in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Head over to numor.ai.com to sign up for a tournament and hone your machine learning skills. That's numor.ai.com for a chance to play against me and win a share of the tournament prize pool. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new pod three mattress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The word costume kind of implies that it's fraudulent in some way. Is costume a good word for you? Like we present ourselves to the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Is the costume a kind of projection of who you are?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do we become prisoners of the costume? Because everybody expects us to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So this stage, in parentheses, you put full adult, wisdom. Why is this full adult? Why would you say this is full? And why is it wisdom?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I don't count. More than one?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How easy is it to do costume changes throughout the day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
In a scorching Texas heat, the thing I go to to escape, to escape nature or the external harsh conditions of nature and going to the nature of my own mind, wherever that weird and beautiful dream world is, the place that has no rules, no boundaries, no limits. No physics. No constraints on what is possible and what is impossible. The dream world that we go to, what is that world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And you could do the same with personality?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Or not real, but to have one costume.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
to explore different costumes. I mean, that's the kind of idea with virtual reality. That's the idea even with Twitter in two-dimensional screens. You can swap all costumes. You can be as weird as you want. It's easier. For Burning Man, you have to like order things. You have to make things. You have to, it's more effort to put on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Sure, but it's just easier to do digitally, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So the extraterrestrial prince is based on a true story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I can only imagine what that looks like, Josje. Stage six.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Are you creating the game engine, or are you noticing the game engine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You don't want to get access to cheat codes too quickly. Otherwise, you won't enjoy the game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So stage five requires a good therapist. Stage six requires a good Buddhist spiritual leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's the same world as imagination. It's such a fascinating world. The human mind, its capabilities are just so incredibly fascinating. And one of the ways to explore that is to dream. But it's the return from the dream world that is the most refreshing to me. That's why I love naps. It's a quick stroll through the dream world and you're back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Oh, but it is possible through the process of technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So that's more like a stage four rationalist kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
and taking on the challenges of the day in the here and now. Anyway, if you're into naps as much as me, you should check out 8sleep. And you'll get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com. This show is also brought to you by Masterclass. $10 a month gets you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, I think this is a good opportunity to try to sneak up to the idea of enlightenment. So you wrote a series of good tweets about consciousness and panpsychism. So let's break it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
First you say, I suspect the experience that leads to the panpsychism syndrome of some philosophers and other consciousness enthusiasts represents the realization that we don't end at the self, but share a resonant universe representation with every other observer coupled to the same universe. This actually eventually leads us to a lot of interesting questions about AI and AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But let's start with this representation. What is this resonant universe representation? And what do you think? Do we share such a representation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you mentioned there the non-dual state, and say that some people confuse it for enlightenment. What's the non-dual state?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So that speaks to the resonance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But that's still part of the model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The list of courses I've personally watched and enjoyed just lasts forever, but they have everybody and anybody you ever want to listen to. I've listened to Martin Scorsese, Tony Hawk, Jane Goodall, Neil Gaiman, Daniel Negron, before I interviewed him, Garry Kasparov, Carlos Santana, Will Wright, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chris Hadfield, the list is incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Why is it so hard to get there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, you say enlightenment is a realization of how experience is implemented.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Reverse engineered? Almost like a schematic of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Why don't we do that more often? Why don't we start really messing with reality without the use of drugs or anything else? Why don't we get good at this kind of thing, like intentionally? Why should we? Because you can morph reality into something more pleasant for yourself. Just have fun with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, can't you just silence the outer mind?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Numeri for the world's hardest data science tournament, Eight Sleep for naps, Masterclass for learning, and AG1 for health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And that system is powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So if we look at this as you write in the tweet, if we look at this more rigorously as a sort of take the panpsychist idea more seriously, almost as a scientific discipline, you write that quote, fascinatingly, the panpsychist interpretation seems to lead to observations of practical results to a degree that physics fundamentalists might call superstitious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Reports of long distance telepathy and remote causation are ubiquitous in the general population.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I'm a huge believer that learning about a thing, at least part of learning about a thing, should involve learning or listening to the best people in the world at that thing. It's not only the advice they give. It's not only the analysis or the description of how they approach the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
"'I am not convinced,' says Joschabach, "'that establishing the empirical reality of telepathy "'would force an update "'of any part of serious academic physics, "'but it could trigger an important revolution "'in both neuroscience and AI "'from a circuit perspective "'to a coupled complex resonator paradigm.'"
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Are you suggesting that there could be some rigorous mathematical wisdom to panpsychist perspective on the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So is it that we feel that or do we actually accomplish it? So is telepathy possible? Is it real?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But in the way they see life, in the way they carry themselves physically and mentally, you get to watch mastery. And it's so beautiful that human beings are able to reach the very top of excellence and sometimes break through the boundaries, the limits of what was thought possible before. And it's just beautiful to watch those humans. It's beautiful. It's inspiring. It's great to celebrate that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Physical closeness or closeness broadly defined?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's interesting, though, that at this time, at least in human history, there seems to be a gap between the tools of science and the subjective experience that people report, like you're talking about with telepathy. It seems like... We're not quite there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So why is there not a lot of Michael Levins walking around?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's great to learn from that. Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com. That's masterclass.com. This show is brought to you by AG1. Their all-in-one daily drink brings happiness to me. And daily, for me, is twice daily. It brings happiness, health.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's so cool that radical locality leads to the emergence of complexity at the higher layers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You're kind of one of those type of paradigmatic thinkers. Actually, if we can take a tangent on that. Once again, returning to the biblical verses of your tweets. You write, my public explorations are not driven by audience service. but by my lack of ability for discovering, understanding, or following the relevant authorities. So I have to develop my own thoughts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Since I think autonomously, these thoughts cannot always be very good. That's you apologizing for the chaos of your thoughts. Or perhaps not apologizing, just identifying. But let me ask the question. Since we talked about Michael Levin and yourself, who I think are very kind of radical, big, independent thinkers, can we reverse engineer your process of thinking autonomously? How do you do it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How can humans do it? How can you avoid being influenced by, what is it, stage three?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It ensures that all the crazy physical and mental stuff I do is built on a foundation of basic nutritional health. It's the super multivitamin that I use. And it also is one of the components of daily habits that I have in my life. And so whenever I do this thing, I feel grounded. I feel happy. I feel like I have my life together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So that motivated you to become an individual thinker yourself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But how do you escape the influence? Once again, the pressure of the crowd. Whether it's you in responding to the pressure or you being swept up by the pressure? If you even just look at Twitter, the opinions of the crowd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah. Yeah. So is there a practical advice you can give on how to think paradigmatically, how to think independently? Or, you know, because you've kind of said, I had no choice. But I think to a degree you have a choice because you said you want to be productive. And I think thinking independently is productive if what you're curious about is understanding the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
especially when the problems are very kind of new and open. And so it seems like this is an active process, like we can choose to do that, we can practice it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you could do that both at home and with the travel packs when you're traveling. In fact, it's one of the things that makes me feel like I'm at home when I'm traveling. I'll drink an AG1 and it'll feel good. It'll put a smile on my face. It's green. It tastes delicious. What else do you want? They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Man, Commodore 64 could be one of the sexiest machines ever built, if I say so myself. If we can return to this really interesting idea that we started to talk about with panpsychism. and the complex resonated paradigm and the verses of your tweets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You write, instead of treating eyes, ears, and skin as separate sensory systems with fundamentally different modalities, we might understand them as overlapping aspects of the same universe, coupled at the same temporal resolution and almost inseparable from a single shared resonant model. Instead of treating mental representations as fully isolated between minds,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The representations of physically adjacent observers might directly interact and produce causal effects through the coordination of the perception and behavior of world modeling observers. So the modalities, the distinction between modalities, let's throw that away. The distinction between the individuals, let's throw that away. So what does this interaction representations look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Vibes. So the question, though, is how deeply interbind is this multi-modality, multi-agent system? Like how, I mean, this is going to the telepathy question without the woo-woo meaning of the word telepathy. It's like how, like what's going on here in this room right now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Josje Bak. You wrote a post about levels of lucidity. Quote, as we grow older, it becomes apparent that our self-reflexive mind is not just gradually accumulating ideas about itself, but that it progresses in somewhat distinct stages. So there's seven of the stages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But the question there is, do they have to be touching? Is biology at a distance possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So everything is touching everything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Could there be undiscovered processes that don't break telepathy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, it's been observed, but we haven't plugged into it. So it's like if you observe humans, they seem to be communicating with a smartphone thing, but you don't understand how a smartphone works and how the mechanism of the internet works. But maybe it's possible to really understand the full richness of the biological internet that connects us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, this kind of interacting, intertwined representations takes us to the big ending of your tweet series. You write, quote, I wonder if self-improving AGI might end up saturating physical environments with intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
to such a degree that isolation of individual mental states becomes almost impossible, and the representations of all complex self-organizing agents merge permanently with each other. So that's a really interesting idea. This biological network, life network, gets so dense that it might as well be seen as one. That's an interesting, what do you think that looks like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
What do you think that saturation looks like? What does it feel like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Stage one, reactive survival, infant. Stage two, personal self, young child. Stage three, social self, adolescence, domesticated adult. Stage four is rational agency, self-direction. Stage five is self-authoring. That's full adult. You've achieved wisdom, but there's two more stages. Stage six is enlightenment. Stage seven is transcendence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you lose the ability to notice yourself as a distinct entity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
That's an interesting world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Just, I would love to observe that from a video game design perspective, how that game looks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Can you explain each or the interesting parts of each of these stages? And what's your sense why there are stages of lucidity as we progress through life in this too short life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But would you be able to step away, step out of the whole thing, just kind of watch the you know, the way we can now. Sometimes when I'm at a crowded party or something like this, you step back and you realize all the different costumes, all the different interactions, all the different computation that all the individual people are at once distinct from each other and at once all the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Part of the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah. But you want to allow yourself to have those thoughts. Sometimes you kind of resist it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Or maybe you do. I think you're really against this high scoring thing. I kind of like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
No, not competitive. Like role playing games, like Skyrim, it's not competitive. There's a nice thing, there's a nice feeling where your experience points go up. You're not competing against anybody, but it's the world saying, you're on the right track. Here's a point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you're no longer playing, you're trying to hack it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Numerai, a hedge fund that uses AI and machine learning to make investment decisions. It's basically a super difficult machine learning tournament that uses real data and people's submitted models to that try to predict the market.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Addiction is the loss of control for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You don't want to lose yourself in the addiction to something nice? Addiction to love, to the pleasant feelings we humans experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
From the biggest questions of consciousness, Let's explore the pragmatic, the projections of those big ideas into our current world. What do you think about LLMs, the recent rapid development of large language models, of the AI world, of generative AI? How much of the hype is deserved and how much is not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And people should definitely follow your Twitter because you explore these questions in a beautiful, profound, and hilarious way at times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And random strangers, because of your kind of in-their-mind elevated position,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, and they kind of forget that you're human too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I think it has a lot of upside. at least for me currently, at least perhaps because of the podcast, because most people are really good and people come up to me and they have love in their eyes and over a stretch of like 30 seconds, you can hug it out and you can just exchange a few words and you reinvigorate your love for humanity. So that's an upside. For a loner, I'm a loner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Because otherwise you have to do a lot of work to find such humans. And here you're like thrust into the full humanity, the goodness of humanity for the most part. Of course, maybe it gets worse as you become more prominent. I hope not. This is pretty awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But can you enjoy, I mean, there's a picture of you, I think, with Roger Penrose and Eric Weinstein and a few others that are interesting figures. Can't you just enjoy random interesting humans for a short amount of time? I like these people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Can you not be melancholy? Or maybe I'm projecting. I hate goodbyes. Can we just not hate goodbyes and just enjoy the hello, take it in, take in a person, take in their ideas, and then move on through life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, but it's painful. Maybe that's one of the reasons I'm an introvert, is I hate goodbyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I know. But that experience of loss, that mini loss, maybe that's a little death. Maybe, I don't know. I think this melancholy feeling is just the other side of love. And I think they go hand in hand and it's a beautiful thing. And I'm just being romantic about it at the moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But there's beauty in that pain, too. That's what melancholy feeling is. It's not negative. Melancholy doesn't have to be negative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, we all die eventually. Now, as we got to this topic, the actual question was about what your thoughts are about the recent development of large language models with ChatGPT. Indeed. There's a lot of hype. Is some of the hype justified? Which is, which isn't? What are your thoughts? High level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So do some of the quote-unquote prompt engineering for you. They create these kind of cognitive architectures that do the prompt engineering, and you're just doing the high, high-level work. Metaprompt engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How is the actual brain different? Just the asynchronous craziness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's fascinating to think about what those characteristics of the brain enable you to do that language models cannot do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, so filtering early on, not later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do you think it might be using just a bunch of language models like this? Do you think... The current transformer-based large language models will take us to AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Which, brutalist? Is that what you said?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Can you deepfake it till you make it? So can you achieve, what are the limitations of this? I mean, can you reason? Let's use words that are loaded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So Minecraft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, there's already a latency even for humans to update the model, to retrain the model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But it's a kind of proof of concept.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So it's the deep blue of chess playing. Yeah, it's ugly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But it feels like it's a tireless intern, or maybe it's an army of interns. And so you get to command these slightly incompetent creatures. And there's an aspect, because of how rapidly you can iterate with it, it's also part of the brainstorming, part of the kind of inspiration for your own thinking. So you get to interact with the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I mean, when I'm programming or doing any kind of generation with GPT, it somehow is a catalyst for your own thinking in a way that I think an intern might not be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And allow you to expand the realm of thought you're allowed to have when interacting with the computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It sounds to me like you're saying there's basically no limitations, your intuition says, to what a larger language possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But isn't that your fault versus the large average one?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Is everything your fault? I just want to get you on record as saying that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Worst happiness in terms of stages is on three or four, if you take that tangent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Oh, man. The search space of humans that complete you is an interesting one, especially for Josje Bak. That's an interesting, because talking about brute force search in chess, I wonder what that search tree looks like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah. So what kind of problems are we talking about? This is stage three, like love?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
What is hard then?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Ah. So empathy. Empathy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
When you were born and raised an extraterrestrial prince in a world full of people wearing suits... So it's a challenging integration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How long does it take you to detect the geometry, the shape of the soul of another human, to notice that they might be one of your kind?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You believe in love at first sight, Josche Bach?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But that could be just... Cynicism? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's not cynical at all. You're better at noticing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So that takes us back to prompt engineering of noticing how to be a better prompt engineer of an LLM. A sense I have is that there's a bottomless well of skill to become a great prompt engineer. It feels like it is all my fault whenever I fail to use chat GPT correctly, that I didn't find the right words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But at the same time, it feels like there's power in disagreeing with the thing that ChatGPT produces. So I use it like that for programming. I'll see the thing it recommends, and then I'll write different code that I disagree. And in the disagreement, your mind grows stronger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do you think... GPT-N can achieve consciousness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's virtual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But are you also modeling the interaction of jalapeno and shapes and forms through the interaction of the individual nodes within the group?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Okay, can you elaborate why you think that it's so self-organization? So this kind of radical legality that you see in the biological systems. Why can't you start with a language model? What's your intuition?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, but so can we externally inject into it this kind of coherent approximation of a world model that has to sync up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So it's so simple, but is it really that much more radical than just the idea of intelligence as compression?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But equally radical as the next token prediction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And it also seems so much more complicated and messy than the next frame prediction. Even the idea of frame seems counter-biological.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You tweeted, once again, quote, when I talk to Chad GPT, I'm talking to an NPC. What's going to be interesting and perhaps scary is when AI becomes a first-person player. So what does that step look like? I really like that tweet, that step between NPC to first-person player. What's required for that? Is that kind of what we've been talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
This kind of external source of coherence and inspiration of how to take the leap into the unknown that we humans do. The search, man's search for meaning. LLM's search for meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I love difficult real-world data sets. You may know that for a long time and still, I've been interested in real-world robotics. One of the largest scale deployment of real-world robotics is autonomous vehicles. Autonomous driving and semi-autonomous driving, the stakes are very high. The same is true for financial markets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you start to learn how to think. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So God, in this view, is the first creative mind in the early... It's the first consciousness. In the early days, in the early months of development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Just glimpses. You tweeted, quote, suffering results for one part of the mind failing at regulating another part of the mind. Suffering happens at an early stage of mental development. I don't think that superhuman AI would suffer. What's your intuition there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So it goes through the stages real quick. Yes. Through the seven stages. It's going to go to enlightenment real quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
What if the thing that we recognize as super intelligent is actually living at stage five? That the thing that's at stage six, enlightenment, is not very productive. So in order to be productive in society and impress us with this power, it has to be a reasoning thing. self-authoring agent, that enlightenment makes you lazy as an agent in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So what if all AGIs, they're only productive as they progress through one, two, three, four, five, and the moment they get to six, they just kind of, it's a failure mode, essentially, as far as humans are concerned, because they just start chilling. They're like, fuck it, I'm out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Let me bring up Eliezer Yudkowsky. and his warnings to human civilization that AI will likely kill all of us. What are your thoughts about his perspective on this? Can you steel man his case? And what aspects with it do you disagree?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do you have a sense that the march towards this uncontrollable autonomy of superintelligence systems is inevitable? That there's no, I mean, that's essentially what he's saying, that there's no hope. His advice to young people was prepare for a short life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Can't you not have empathy while also not having a similar architecture, cognitive architecture, as the others in the group?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So more higher complex consciousness will make the lesser consciousnesses flourish even more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you, again, tweeted about effective accelerationism. You tweeted, effective accelerationism is the belief that the paperclip maximizer and Rocco's basilisk will keep each other in check by being eternally at each other's throats so we will be safe and get to enjoy lots of free paperclips and a beautiful afterlife. Is that somewhat aligned with what you're talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, isn't the whole process of the stage three is to figure out the API to the other humans that have different architecture and you yourself publish public documentation for the API that people can interact with for you? Isn't this the whole process of socializing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Can you mention a logical mistake there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do you think, so to seriously address concern that Eliezer has, so for him, if I can just summarize poorly, so for him, the first superintelligence system will just run away with everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The Genghis Khan approach, join us or die.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So more agency is a more... It's a richer experience. It's a better life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
If I sat before you today and gave you a big red button and said, here, if you press this button, you will get uploaded in this way, the sense of identity that you have lived with for quite a long time is going to be gone. Would you press the button?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But isn't this everything? This love you have for other humans, you can call it responsibility, but that connection, that's the ego death. Isn't that the thing we're really afraid of? It's not to just die, but to let go of the experience of love with other humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But when we look at the set of trajectories, that such an AI would take that supersedes humans. I think Eliezer is worried about ones that not just kill all humans, but also have some kind of maybe objectively undesirable consequence for life on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How many trajectories, when you look at the big picture of life on Earth, would you be happy with, and how much worry are you with AGI, whether it kills humans or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
perspective. That said, you tweeted about a cliff. Beautifully written. As a sentient species, humanity is a beautiful child, joyful, explorative, wild, sad, and desperate. But humanity has no concept of submitting to reason and duty to life and future survival. We will run until we step past the cliff. So first of all, do you think that's true?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I wonder if your life could have been different if you knew that it's okay to be different, to have a different architecture. Whether accepting that the interface is hard to figure out, takes a long time to figure out, and it's okay to be different. In fact, it's beautiful to be different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Catastrophic event of what kind. So can you still man the case that we will continue dancing along and always stop just short of the edge of the cliff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So the climate is one thing, but there's a lot of other threats that might have a faster feedback mechanism, less delay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
What's the timeline for things to get real weird with AI? And it can get weird in interesting ways before you get to AGI. What about AI girlfriends and boyfriends fundamentally transforming human relationships?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
By which technology?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah. Isn't the fundamentals of the core group of humans that affect your life still the same? Your loved ones? Family?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
That kills the magic somehow. Why is that? Why is the transactional search for optimizing allocation of attention somehow misses the romantic magic of what human relations are?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
This is the proliferation of marketing teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And so it's really interesting that Numerai presents to you the real-world data of financial markets and presents you an easy, accessible mechanism by which to test, deploy, and compete with others in this kind of data set. So it's a really great way, if you're interested in data science and machine learning, to learn, to compete, to have fun, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So the grounding in physical reality somehow is important too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do you think AI, when it's deployed by companies like Microsoft and Google and Meta, will have the same issue of being weirdly corporate? Like, there'd be some uncanny valley, some weirdness to the whole presentation. So this is, I've gotten a chance to talk to George Hotz. He believes everything should be open sourced and decentralized, and there, then, we shall have the AI of the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And it'll maintain a grounding to the magic that's humanity, that's the human condition. That corporations will destroy the magic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So there's a visceral, undeniable feeling of being alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So the corporations, the centralized control, the dictatorships of corporations can create beauty. Centralized design is a source of a lot of beauty. And then I guess open source is a source of beauty. a hedge against the corrupting nature of power that comes with centralized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Don't you think everybody's alone, deep down?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Oh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So what do you think about Meta in contrast to that open sourcing most of its language models and most of the AI models it's working on and actually suggesting that they will continue to do so in the future for future versions of Lama, for example, their large language model. Is that exciting to you? Is that concerning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Games broadly, like deeply defined the way you did with the games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But the longest... Yes, that part... the longest possible game while doing interesting stuff and while maintaining at least the same amount of interesting. So complexity, so propagating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Is there some aspect to which we're alone together? You don't see a deep loneliness inside yourself still?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How do we ride, as individuals and as a society, this wave, this disruptive wave that changes the nature of the game?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do we build the bunker in the woods? Do we meditate more? Drugs, mushrooms, psychedelics? I mean, what? Lots of sex. What are we talking about here? Do you play Diablo 4? I'm hoping that will help me escape for a brief moment. Play video games? What? Do you have ideas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Okay, so that's the nonlinear progression through the stages, I suppose. You caught up on stage three at some point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So aesthetically, it captures you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
My heart is slowly breaking by the deep truth you're conveying to me. Why can't you just allow me to enjoy my personal addiction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do they return to it then later?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
What do you think that means that we don't read books anymore? What do you think that means about the collective intelligence of our species? Is it possible it's still progressing and growing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The following is a conversation with Mark Andreessen, co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most outspoken voices on the future of technology, including his most recent article, Why AI Will Save the World.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But the big thing will probably be an app.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What advice could you give for a startup founder? Just having seen so many successful companies, so many companies that fail also. What advice could you give to a startup founder, someone who wants to build the next super successful startup in the tech space? The Googles, the Apples, the Twitters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But that's actually just to elaborate on that. If you could also speak to great founders, like what makes a great founder?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It feels like there's quite a few, like a handful of trillion-dollar questions within this space. That's one of them, synthetic data. I think George Haas pointed out to me that you could just have an NLM say, okay, you're a patient, and in another instance of it, say your doctor and have the two talk to each other. Or maybe you could say a communist and a Nazi. Here, go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Intelligence, passion, and courage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But why did they do it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So what's a good reference? Do you want the previous boss to actually say that they never did what you told them to do? That might be a good thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What advice would you give to those folks in the space of intelligence, passion, and courage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When you say idea, do you mean long-term big vision or do you mean specifics of product?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You never get to big vision. Yeah. So the first, the first part, you have an idea of a set of products or the first product that can actually make some money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I really love that idea of just having a thing, a prototype that actually works before you even begin to remotely scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In that conversation, you do role-playing, and you have – Just like the kind of role-playing you do when you have different policies, RL policies when you play chess, for example, and you do self-play, that kind of self-play, but in the space of conversation, maybe that leads to this whole giant ocean of possible conversations which could not have been explored by looking at just human data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, because maybe in the shower you had the exact product implementation details, but yeah, usually you're going to be for years, if not decades, thinking about everything around that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So how do you know when to take a leap? If you have a cushy job or a happy life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What if it's going to lead to a lot of pain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What if it means losing sort of social relationships and damaging your relationship with loved ones and all that kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
of taking a leap into that world of personalized data and personalized data-driven suggestion I'm a huge supporter of. It turns out that luckily I'm pretty healthy, surprisingly so, but then I look at the life and the limb and the health of Sir Winston Churchill. who probably had the unhealthiest sort of diet and lifestyle of any human ever and lived for quite a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Can you be an older founder?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Life is full of difficult choices, Mark Andreessen. You've written a blog post on what you've been up to. You wrote this in October, 2022. Quote, mostly I try to learn a lot. For example, the political events of 2014 to 2016 made clear to me that I didn't understand politics at all. Referencing maybe some of this. this book here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I deliberately withdrew from political engagement and fundraising and instead read my way back into history and as far to the political left and political right as I could. So just high-level question, what's your approach to learning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And in that blog post, a recommend people go check out. You actually list a bunch of different books that you recommend on different topics on the American left and the American right. It's just a lot of really good stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That's a really interesting question. And you're saying, because that could 10x the power of these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The best explanation for the current structure of our society and politics, you give two recommendations, four books on the Spanish Civil War, six books on deep history of the American right, comprehensive biographies of Adolf Hitler, one of which I read and can recommend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Six books on the deep history of the American left, the American right, and American left looking at the history to give you the context. Biography of Vladimir Lenin, two of them on the French Revolution. Actually, I have never read a biography on Lenin. Maybe that will be useful. Everything's been so Marx-focused.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Victor Sebastian, okay. It'll blow your mind, yeah. So it's still useful to read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So that, the perspective of Lenin might be the best way to look at the Soviet Union versus Stalin versus Marx. Very interesting. So two books on fascism and anti-fascism by the same author, Paul Gottfried. Brilliant book on the nature of mass movements and collective psychology. The definitive work on intellectual life under totalitarianism, The Captive Mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The definitive work on the practical life under totalitarianism, There's a bunch. There's a bunch. And the single best book, first of all, the list here is just incredible. But you say the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here is The Ancient City by Numa Dennis Fustel de Koulankas. I like it. What did you learn about who we are as a human civilization from that book?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So they were serious about their cults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But you think that's fundamentally that like pull towards cults is within us?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the question of meaning, the question of purpose was very distinctly, clearly defined for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
As we turn the volume down on the cultism, the search for meaning starts getting harder and harder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But still not full-blown compared to what it was in the past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, this actually makes me wonder about the power of conversation. So if you have an LLM trained on a bunch of books that cover different economics theories, and then you have those LLMs just talk to each other, like reason, the way we kind of debate each other as humans on Twitter, in formal debates, in podcast conversations, we kind of have little kernels of wisdom here and there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I wonder where it's all headed as we turn the volume down more and more. What advice would you give to young folks today in high school and college, how to be successful in their career, how to be successful in their life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, with the authors, there's a consumption question too. But yeah, well, maybe not, maybe not. You're right. But so the tools are much more powerful. They're getting much more powerful every day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So what's the explanation? And by way of advice, is motivation starting to be turned down a little bit or what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there's a lot of value to being somebody who finds focus in this life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. The new tools. We have discovered fire. Yeah. And trying to figure out how to use it to cook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, right. You told Tim Ferriss that the perfect day is caffeine for 10 hours and alcohol for four hours. You didn't think I'd be mentioning this, did you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
uh it balances everything out perfectly as you said so perfect uh so let me ask what's what's the secret to balance and maybe to happiness in life um i i don't believe in balance so i i'm the wrong person asking you elaborate why you don't believe in balance
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But if you can like a thousand X speed that up, Can you actually arrive somewhere new? Like what's the point of conversation really?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Imbalance. And that applies to work, to life, to everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you're one of the wealthiest people in the world. What's the relationship between wealth and happiness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Money and happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
To strive for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That just sounds like happiness, but turned down a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What's the distinction between happiness and satisfaction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So just something that permeates all your days, just this general contentment of being useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Does money have anything to do with that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Pursuit of satisfaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, you know, they could have elaborated on a lot of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think they were smarter than they realized. They said, you know what, we're going to make it ambiguous and let these humans figure out the rest. These tribal cult-like humans figure out the rest. But money empowers that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right. Uh, well, let me actually ask you about Elon. What, what are your, um, You've interacted with quite a lot of successful engineers and business people. What do you think is special about Elon? We talked about Steve Jobs. What do you think is special about him as a leader, as an innovator?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He's done a lot of things that seem crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And in general, I wish more people would lean on celebrating and supporting versus deriding and destroying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, he fuels the fire of that by being an asshole on Twitter at times, which is fascinating to watch the drama of human civilization given our cult roots just fully on fire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, I wonder how consistently and strongly can an LLM hold on to a worldview? You tell it to hold on to that and defend it for like for your life, because I feel like they'll just keep converging towards each other. They'll keep convincing each other as opposed to being stubborn assholes the way humans can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
could say that. Very successfully. So now that our cults have gone and we search for meaning, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life, Mark Andreessen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So love is a big part of that satisfaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, creating products that are used by millions of people and bring them joy in small or big ways. And then capitalism kind of enables that, encourages that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
love and money are better yeah that's a good ordering i think we should we should bet on those try love first if that doesn't work the money yes and then force well don't even try that one uh mark you're an incredible person i've been a huge fan i'm glad to finally got a chance to talk i'm a fan of everything you do everything you do including on twitter it's a huge honor to meet you to talk with you uh thanks again for doing this awesome thank you lex
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Marc Andreessen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Marc Andreessen himself. The world is a very malleable place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So it's going to start rendering misinformation about the other. Well, you can steer it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
how do you know what is true? So this is a very difficult thing on the internet, but it's also a difficult thing. Maybe it's a little bit easier, but I think it's still difficult. Maybe it's more difficult, I don't know, with an LLM to know, did it just make some shit up as I'm talking to it? How do we get that right? Like as you're investigating a difficult topic,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because I find that alums are quite nuanced in a very refreshing way. Like it doesn't feel biased. Like when you read news articles and tweets and just content produced by people, they usually have this... You can tell they have a very strong perspective where they're hiding. They're not stealing and manning the other side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They're hiding important information or they're fabricating information in order to make their argument stronger. It's just that feeling. Maybe it's a suspicion. Maybe it's mistrust. With LLMs, it feels like none of that is there. It's just kind of like, here's what we know. But you don't know if some of those things are kind of just straight up made up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And as far as I can tell, was quite nimble and agile into his old age. Anyway, get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Hallucination is coming up with things that are totally not true, but sound true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Or, you know, bullshitters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In the good sense of that word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's the first layer of protection in this dangerous cyber world of ours that soon will be populated by human-like or superhuman intelligent AI systems that will trick you and try to get you to do all kinds of stuff. It's going to be a wild, wild world in the 21st century. Cyber security, the attackers, the defenders, it's going to be a tricky world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. If you were to tell me about Wikipedia before Wikipedia was created, I would have laughed at the possibility of something like that being possible. Just a handful of folks. can organize, write, and moderate with a mostly unbiased way the entirety of human knowledge. So if there's something like the approach that Wikipedia took possible for MLMs, that's really exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do you think that's possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Are we getting closer? If we look at the entirety of the arc of human history, are we getting closer to the truth? I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Okay, is it possible, is it possible that we're getting very far away from the truth because of the internet, because of how rapidly you can create narratives and just as the entirety of a society just move like crowds in a hysterical way along those narratives that don't have a necessary grounding in whatever the truth is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In the way it was implemented, it had issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, but those folks sure were very confident it was the right way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so yeah, why are we so obsessed with there being one truth? Is it possible there's just going to be multiple truths, like little communities that believe certain things? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Sure, but the internet and technology has enabled us to generate a large number of content that data, that the process, the scientific process allows us, sort of damages the hope laden within the scientific process. Because if you just have a bunch of people saying facts on the internet, and some of them are going to be LLMs,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Anyway, a VPN is a basic shield you should always have with you in this battle for privacy, for security, all that kind of stuff. What I like about it also is that it's just a well-implemented piece of software that's constantly updated. It works well across a large number of operating systems. It does one thing and it does it really well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, the actual mechanism of doing the human RL with human feedback is It seems like such a fundamental and fascinating question. How do you select the humans? Exactly. How do you select the human?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Are we experiencing a temporary problem in terms of the incentives, in terms of the business model, all that kind of stuff, or is this like a decline of traditional journalism as we know it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And like, I think- You just introduced like five thought experiments at once and broke my head. But yes, there's a lot of interesting years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I've used it for many, many years before I had a podcast, before they were a sponsor. I have always loved ExpressVPN with a big sexy button that just has a power symbol. You press it and it turns on. It's beautifully simple. Go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod for an extra three months free. This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its AG1 drink.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I wonder where Twitter would think about Churchill and Hitler and Stalin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And also why we don't have better institutions and better leaders then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Don't you think that our perception and understanding of reality would be more and more mediated through large language models now? Yeah. So you said media before. Isn't the LLM going to be the new, what is it, mainstream media, MSM? It'll be LLM. Yeah. That would be the source of, I'm sure there's a way to kind of rapidly fine tune, like making LLMs real time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I'm sure there's probably a research problem that you can do just rapid fine tuning to the new events. So something like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I drink it at least twice a day now. In the crazy Austin heat, it's over 100 degrees for many days in a row. There's few things that feel as good as coming home from a long run and making an age one drink, putting it in the fridge. So it's nice and cold. I jump in the shower, come back, drink it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Also really more deeply integrated into your life. Not just like, Oh, uh, like intellectual philosophical thoughts, but like literally, uh, like how to make a coffee, where to go for lunch, just, uh, whether, you know, dating, all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What to say. What to say. Next sentence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Boy, I would kill for a pop-up. A pop-up right now. The estimated engagement using is decreasing. For market reasons, there's a controversy section for a Wikipedia page. In 1993, something happened or something like this. Bring it up. That will drive engagement up. Anyway. Yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. But it feels like there's going to be a killer app that, there's probably a mad scramble right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's all open AI and Microsoft and Google and Meta and then startups and smaller companies figuring out what is the killer app, because it feels like it's possible, like a chat GPT type of thing, it's possible to build that, but that's 10x more compelling using already the LLMs we have, using even the open source LLMs, Lama and the different variants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you're investing in a lot of companies and you're paying attention. Who do you think is gonna win this? Who's going to be the next PageRank inventor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Another one. We have a few of those today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Insight Tracker for tracking your health, ExpressVPN for keeping your privacy and security on the internet, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin drink. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I'm ready to take on the rest of the day. I'm kicking ass, empowered by the knowledge that I got all my vitamins and minerals covered. It's the foundation for all the wild things I'm doing, mentally and physically, with the rest of the day. Anyway, they'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. That's drinkag1.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Okay, but you painted these two worlds, but there's also variations of those worlds, because you said regulatory capture is possible to have these tech giants that don't have regulatory capture, which is something you're also calling for, saying it's okay to have big companies working on this stuff. as long as they don't achieve regulatory capture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But I have the sense that there's just going to be a new startup that's going to basically be the PageRank inventor, which has become the new tech giant. I don't know, I would love to hear your kind of opinion if Google, Meta, and Microsoft, they're as gigantic companies able to pivot so hard to create new products.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like some of it is just even hiring people or having a corporate structure that allows for the crazy young kids to come in and just create something totally new. Do you think it's possible or do you think it'll come from a startup?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, I had a chance to hang out with Sundar Pichai a couple of days ago and we took this walk and there's this giant new building where there's going to be a lot of AI work being done. And it's kind of this ominous feeling of... like the fight is on. There's this beautiful Silicon Valley nature, like birds are chirping, and this giant building, and it's like the beast has been awakened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then all the big companies are waking up to this. They have the compute, but also the little guys have... it feels like they have all the tools to create the killer product that, and then there's also tools to scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you have a good idea, if you have the page rank idea, so there's several things that is page rank, there's page rank, the algorithm and the idea, and there's like the implementation of it. And I feel like killer product is not just the idea, like the transformer, it's the implementation, something, something really compelling about it. Like you just can't look away. Something like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The algorithm behind TikTok versus TikTok itself, like the actual experience of TikTok, you can't look away. It feels like somebody's going to come up with that. And it could be Google, but it feels like it's just easier and faster to do for a startup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mark Andreessen. I think you're the right person to talk about the future of the internet and technology in general. Do you think we'll still have Google search in five in 10 years or search in general?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, they got the cloud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We'll talk about that a little bit, but I'd love to linger on some of the ways this is going to change the internet. So I don't know if you remember, but there's a thing called Mosaic and there's a thing called Netscape Navigator. So you were there in the beginning. What about the interface to the internet? How do you think the browser changes? And who gets to own the browser?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We got to see some very interesting browsers. Firefox, I mean, all the variants of Microsoft, Internet Explorer, Edge, and now Chrome. The actual, I mean, it seems like a dumb question to ask, but do you think we'll still have the web browser?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And also, there's apps that you can use. You don't really use them, being a Linux guy and Windows guy. There's one window, the browser, with which you can interact with the internet. But on the phone, you can also have apps. So I can interact with Twitter through the app or through the web browser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And that seems like an obvious distinction, but why have the web browser in that case if one of the apps starts becoming the everything app?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What Elon's trying to do with Twitter, but there could be others. There could be like a Bing app, there could be a Google app that just doesn't really do search, but just like do what I guess AOL did back in the day or something, where it's all right there and it changes everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It changes the nature of the internet because where the content is hosted, who owns the data, who owns the content, what is the kind of content you create, how do you make money by creating content, who are the content creators, all of that. Or it could just keep being the same, which is like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
with just the nature of web page changes and the nature of content but there will still be a web browser because a web browser is a pretty sexy product it just seems to work because it like you have an interface a window into the world and then the world can be anything you want and as the world will evolve there could be different programming languages it can be animated maybe it's three-dimensional and so on yeah it's interesting do you think we'll still have the web browser
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The web browser is the F you to the man. That's the free internet. Yeah. Back the way it was in the 90s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, now with AI and AI assistance being able to interact and expose the entirety of human wisdom and knowledge and information and facts and truth to us via the natural language interface, it seems like that's what search is designed to do. And if AI assistance can do that better, doesn't the nature of search change?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You and I are both fans of history, so let's step back. We've been talking about the future. Let's step back for a bit and look at the 90s. You created Mosaic Web Browser, the first widely used web browser. Tell the story of that. And how did it evolve into Netscape Navigator? This is the early days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
A small child. Actually, yeah, let's go there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When did you first fall in love with computers?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Did you make it on the website?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, so you were living in the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Did you have that sense as well? Like what, what you said, the back of your head was tickled. Like what, what was your, what was exciting to you about this possible world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When's the last time you rode a horse? It's been a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So what's involved in creating Mosaic, like in creating a graphical interface to the Internet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
All right. But what I mean is, will we still have Google search as the primary way that human civilization uses to interact with knowledge?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What did it look like? What was the web? I mean, and the key figures? Like, what was it like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The 12 by 12 by 12, they just so beautifully encapsulate Steve Jobs' idea of design. Can you just comment on what you find interesting about Steve Jobs, about that view of the world, that dogmatic pursuit of perfection in how he saw perfection in design?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he would trust that judgment that he had deep down. Even if the engineering teams are saying this is too difficult, even if the finance folks are saying this is ridiculous, the supply chain, all that kind of stuff, this makes this impossible, we can't do this kind of material, this has never been done before, and so on and so forth, he just sticks by it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons, right? And then there's like folding phones, which I would love to know what he thinks about them. But is there something you could also just link on? Because he's one of the interesting figures in the history of technology. What makes him as successful as he was? What makes him as interesting as he was?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What made him so productive and important in the development of technology?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Even if it, in retrospect, or during it felt like suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the standard Google search result is just 10 blue links to random websites. And they turn purple when you visit them. That's HTML.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What does that teach you about the human condition, huh?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the jury's still out on that one. So back to Mosaic. So what, it was text-based. Tim Berners-Lee
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there were 6,000 bucks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
How old did Windows 3 sell? So was that the really big, the big operating, graphical operating system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And Windows 95, I think was a pretty big leap also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then we were off to the races. Because nobody could have known what would be created from that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Did you have a sense of what the internet will be as you're looking through the window of mosaic? Like there's just a few web pages for now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So, um, the, uh, good, good call. Yeah. Early days. Yes. It's so interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So that blog was kind of doing the directory thing. So what was the homepage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
How does that have to do with the blue and the purple?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But were you able to kind of infer, you know, if that Indian restaurant could go online, then you're like... They all will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They all will. Yeah, exactly. So you felt that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So it can generate the old InfoSeek or AltaVista. What else was there in the 90s?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Some people say that the anticipation makes the destination that much more exciting. Do you remember progressive JPEGs? Yeah, do I? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, and there's applications in various domains for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, was there any Doomer-type arguments about the internet destroying all of human civilization or destroying some fundamental fabric of human civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So can you say something about some of the details of the software engineering challenges required to build these browsers? I mean, the engineering challenges of creating a product that hasn't really existed before that can have such almost like limitless impact on the world with the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's so interesting because the stuff we take for granted now, Man, that was fundamental to the development of the web, to be able to have HTML just right there. All the ghetto mess that is HTML, all the sort of almost biological messiness of HTML, and then having the browser try to interpret that mess to show something reasonable. Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's also, like, I don't often think about this, but, you know, programming, you know, C++, C, C++, all those languages, Lisp, the compiled languages, the interpreted languages, Python, Perl, all that, they brace that to be all correct. It's like everything has to be perfect. And then... Autistic. You forget... All right. It's systematic and rigorous. Let's go there. But you forget that the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But if we ask that question quite seriously, it's a pretty big question. Will we still have search as we know it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track whatever the heck is going on inside my body using data, blood test data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the web with JavaScript eventually and HTML is allowed to be messy in the way, for the first time, messy in the way biological systems can be messy. It's like the only thing computers were allowed to be messy on for the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, so they wanted the browser to give you a segfault error any time there was a... Yeah, yeah, they wanted it to be a copy, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That's such a bold move to say, no, it doesn't have to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you had to figure out how to display this text, HTML text. So the blue links and the purple links. And there's no standards. Is there standards at that time? There really still isn't. Well, there's implied standards, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's all these kinds of new features that are being added, like CSS, what kind of stuff a browser should be able to support, features within languages, within JavaScript, and so on. But you're setting standards on the fly yourself. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The AI would provide to you the 10 blue links so that you can investigate the sources yourself. It wouldn't be the same kind of interface, the crude kind of interface. I mean, isn't that fundamentally different
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I still like the, like a really basic websites, but that could be just old school kids these days with their fancy responsive websites that don't actually have much content, but have a lot of visual elements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like back to the basics, back to just text. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Is there some other stuff you remember, like the purple links? There were some interesting design decisions to kind of come up that we have today or we don't have today that were temporary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do you regret this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So it wasn't about gray. It was just you didn't want a white background.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Interesting. And then there's a bunch of other decisions. I'm sure there's an interesting history of the development of HTML and CSS and how those interface in JavaScript. And there's this whole Java applet thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you're interested to learn more about Brendan Eich, he's done this podcast previously. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In the software world, there's quite a few stories of somebody over a weekend or over a week or over a summer writing some of the most impactful, revolutionary pieces of software ever. That should be inspiring, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I guess that is the kind of search. You talking to an AI is a kind of, conversation is the kind of search. Like you said, every single aspect of our conversation right now, there'd be like temple links popping up that I could just like pause reality. Then you just go silent and then just click and read and then return back to this conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, you see that with certain open source projects. So much is done by one or two people. It's so incredible. And that's why you see, that gives me so much hope about the open source movement in this new age of AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
where just recently having had a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, who's all in on open source, which is so interesting to see and so inspiring to see, because releasing these models, it is scary. It is potentially very dangerous, and we'll talk about that. But it's also...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you believe in the goodness of most people and in the skill set of most people and the desire to do good in the world, that's really exciting. Because it's not putting these models into the centralized control of big corporations, the government, and so on. It's putting it in the hands of a teenage kid with a dream in his eyes. I don't know. That's... That's beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's going to be interesting. We'll talk about it, but let's just linger a little bit on Netscape. Netscape was acquired in 1999 for $4.3 billion by AOL. What was that like? What were some memorable aspects of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Would you recommend Succession, by the way? I'm more of a Yellowstone guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I just talked to Matthew McConaughey and I'm full on Texan at this point. Good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he will be doing the sequel to Yellowstone. Yeah. Very exciting. Anyway. I can't wait. So that's a rude interruption by me by way of succession.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What did you learn from just the acquisition? I mean, this is so much money. What's interesting, because it must have been very new to you that the software stuff, you can make so much money. There's so much money swimming around. I mean, I'm sure the ideas of investment were starting to get born there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Counter-argument. Right. Oh, like on Twitter, like community notes, but like in real time. In real time. It'll just pop up. Yeah. So anytime you see my ass go to the right, you start getting nervous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like, oh, that's not right. This guy's going to call me out on my bullshit right now. Okay. Well, I mean, isn't that exciting to you? Is that terrifying that... I mean, search has dominated the way we interact with the internet for, I don't know how long, for 30 years, since one of the earliest directories of website, and then Google's for 20 years. And also,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It must have been surreal back then, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, let's now turn back into the future. You wrote the essay, Why AI Will Save the World. Let's start at the very high level. What's the main thesis of the essay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Academic achievement, job performance, occupational status, income, creativity, physical health, longevity, learning new skills, managing complex tasks, leadership, entrepreneurial success, conflict resolution, reading comprehension, financial decision making, understanding others' perspectives, creative arts, parenting outcomes, and life satisfaction. One of the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
more depressing conversations I've had. And I don't know why it's depressing. I have to really think through why it's depressing. But on IQ and the G factor. And that that's something in large part is genetic. And it correlates so much with all of these things and success in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like all the inspirational stuff we read about, like if you work hard and so on, damn, it sucks that you're born with a hand that you can't change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You're saying basically a really important point, and I think it's in your articles, It really helped me, it's a nice added perspective to think about, listen, human intelligence, the science of intelligence has shown scientifically that it just makes life easier and better the smarter you are. And now, let's look at artificial intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And if that's a way to increase some human intelligence, then it's only going to make a better life. That's the argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It drove how we create content, you know, search engine optimization, that entirety thing. It also drove the fact that we have web pages and what those web pages are. So, I mean, is that scary to you? Or are you nervous about the shape and the content of the internet evolving?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So people below this hypothetical 140 IQ, it'll pull them off towards 140 IQ? Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Can you still man the case that human plus AI is not always better than human for the individual?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Although, to push back on that, it might be interesting because when the intelligence is not all coming from you, but from another system, that might actually increase the amount of humility even in the assholes. One would hope. Or it could make assholes more assholes. I mean, that's for psychology to study.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We're all sheep, but different colored sheep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there'll be assistance at all stages of life. So when you're younger, there's for education, all that kind of stuff, for mentorship, all of this. And later on, as you're doing work and you've developed a skill and you're having a profession, you'll have an assistant that helps you excel at that profession. So at all stages of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, there's two categories of folks that you outline that worry about or highlight the risks of AI, and you highlight a bunch of different risks. I would love to go through those risks and just discuss them, brainstorm which ones are serious and which ones are less serious. But first, the Baptists and the bootleggers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What are these two interesting groups of folks who worry about the effect of AI on human civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So a true believer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you write that it isn't sufficient to simply identify the actors and impugn their motives. We should consider the arguments of both the Baptists and the bootleggers on their merits. So let's do just that. Risk number one. Will AI kill us all? Yes. So... What do you think about this one? What do you think is the core argument here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That the development of AGI, perhaps better said, will destroy human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Is there a fundamental difference there? I don't know. What's AGI? What's AI? What's intelligence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think we don't know what the bottom of the well of machine learning is or what the ceiling is. Because just to call something machine learning or just to call something statistics or just to call it math or computation doesn't mean nuclear weapons are just physics. To me, it's very interesting and surprising how far machine learning has taken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Where does machine learning lead? Do we know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, then maybe you could also, as part of that, define the Western tradition of millennialism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Why is that so compelling, do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, but why does the transcendence involve the destruction of human civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We want more than that. But that's the deep question I'm asking. Why is it not exciting to live in a world where everything's just all right? I think most of the animal kingdom would be so happy with just all right. Because that means survival. Maybe that's what it is. Why are we conjuring up things to worry about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do you remember the semantic web? That was an idea. Yeah. How to convert the content of the internet into something that's interpretable by and usable by machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you construct a kind of devil, a kind of source of evil, and we're going to transcend beyond it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, that's a really compelling, exciting idea to have a club over, to have a little bit of travel, like a get together on a Saturday night and drink some beers and talk about the end of the world and how you are the only ones who have figured it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That said, it doesn't mean they're not sometimes right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, we'll talk about nuclear weapons because you have a really interesting little moment that I learned about in your essay. But, you know, sometimes it could be right. Because we're still developing more and more powerful technologies in this case. And we don't know what the impact it will have on human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That was the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, we can highlight all the different predictions about how it will be positive. But the risks are there. And you discussed some of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
How does it get disproven?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, I don't think it's completely missing. It's somewhat missing. So, for example, the people that say AI is going to kill all of us, I mean, they usually have ideas about how to do that, whether it's the paperclip maximizer or it escapes. There's a mechanism by which you can imagine it killing all humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you can disprove it by saying there is a limit to the speed at which intelligence increases. maybe show that the sort of rigorously really described model, like how it could happen and say, no, here's a physics limitation. There's a physical limitation to how these systems would actually do damage to human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it is possible they will kill 10 to 20% of the population, but it seems impossible for them to kill 99%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it turns out you don't need to rewrite the content of the internet to make it interpretable by a machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the moment you say AI is going to kill all of us, therefore we should ban it or that we should regulate all that kind of stuff, that's when it starts getting serious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, but violence is so fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But that's kind of the extremes. The extremes of anything are always concerning. It's also possible to kind of believe that AI has a very high likelihood of killing all of us. But there's And therefore we should maybe consider slowing development or regulating. So not violence or any of these kinds of things, but saying like, all right, let's take a pause here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is like serious stuff. We should be careful. So it is possible to kind of have a more rational response, right? If you believe this risk is real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, so is it possible to have a scientific approach to the prediction of the future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I don't know if the models were useless or the people interpreting the models and then the centralized institutions that were creating policy rapidly based on the models. and leveraging the models in order to support their narratives versus actually interpreting the error bars and the models and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, to push back, there were certainly Baptists and bootleggers in the context of this pandemic. But there's still a usefulness to models, no?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But what do you do with a pandemic? What do you do with any kind of threat? Don't you want to kind of have several models to play with as part of the discussion of like, what the hell do we do here? I mean, do they work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That doesn't mean it's not possible to construct a good model of pandemic with the correct error bars with a high number of parameters that are continuously many times a day updated as we get more data about a pandemic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But in a compressed representation. So you're searching
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I would like to believe when a pandemic hits the world, the best computer scientists in the world, the best software engineers respond aggressively and as input take the data that we know about the virus and as an output say, here's what's happening. in terms of how quickly it's spreading, in terms of hospitalization and deaths and all that kind of stuff. Here's how contagious it likely is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Here's how deadly it likely is based on different conditions, based on different ages and demographics and all that kind of stuff. So here's the best kinds of policy. It feels like... You could have models, machine learning, that kind of, they don't perfectly predict the future, but they help you do something because there's pandemics that are like, Meh, they don't really do much harm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's pandemics, you can imagine them, they could do a huge amount of harm. Like they can kill a lot of people. So you should probably have some kind of data-driven models that keep updating, that allow you to make decisions that basically like where, how bad is this thing? Now you can criticize. how horrible all that went with the response to this pandemic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But I just feel like there might be some value to models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Uh, machine learning says, hold my beer, but well, it's possible. No, I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
My main worry with the response to the pandemic is that, same as with aliens, is that even if such a thing existed... And it's possible it existed. The policymakers were not paying attention. There was no mechanism that allowed those kinds of models to percolate out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right. But the policymakers also wanted, they had a narrative in mind, and they also wanted to use whatever model that fit that narrative to help them out. So it felt like there was a lot of politics and not enough science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Scientists in quotes. That's not... Quote-unquote scientists. That's not... Okay. Let's give love to science. That is the way out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That's really interesting. But what do we do about the future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It includes all kinds of information. And that raw signal is processed using machine learning to tell me what I need to do with my life. how I need to change, improve my diet, how I need to change, improve my lifestyle, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In this case, philosophers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The book is One Reason Goes on Holiday, Philosophers and Politics by Nevin Fletcher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, I found this book a highly entertaining and eye-opening read filled with amazing anecdotes of irrationality and craziness by famous recent philosophers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, boy. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So just push back on that. I don't think they have good metrics of, yeah, when the fume is happening, but I think it's possible to have that. Like I just, just as you speak now, I mean, it's possible to imagine there could be measures. It's been 20 years. No, for sure, but it's been only weeks since we had a big enough breakthrough in language models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We can start to actually have, the thing is, the AI Doomer stuff didn't have any actual systems to really work with, and now there's real systems you can start to analyze, like how does this stuff go wrong? And I think you kind of agree that there is a lot of risks that we can analyze. The benefits outweigh the risks in many cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So what's the motivator for creating new content on the internet? Yeah. Well, I mean, actually the motivation is probably still there, but what does that look like? Would we really not have webpages? Would we just have social media and video hosting websites? And what else? Conversations with AIs. Conversations with AIs. So conversations become...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But you can start talking about, as we get more and more actual systems that start to get more and more intelligent, you can start to actually have more scientific arguments here. High level, you can talk about the threat of autonomous weapon systems back before we had any automation in the military. And that would be like very fuzzy kind of logic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But the more and more you have drones, they're becoming more and more autonomous. You can start imagining, okay, what does that actually look like? And what's the actual threat of autonomous weapon systems? How does it go wrong? And still, it's very vague. But you start to get a sense of like, all right, it should probably be illegal or wrong or not allowed to do like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
mass deployment of fully autonomous drones that are doing aerial strikes on large areas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Okay, so you want to go the other way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But there's ways this can go wrong too, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, well, on average, the worry that AI folks have is the runaway. They're going to come alive, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Or not come alive. Hold on a second. You lose control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, more like Chernobyl-style meltdown, like just bugs in the code accidentally force you, results in the bombing of large civilian areas to a degree that's not possible in the current military strategies controlled by humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes. And a lot of civilians died.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So one of the things that the modern US military can do with technology, with automation, but technology more broadly, is higher and higher precision strikes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes. Okay. Please. I'm a magician, you could say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So one-on-one conversations, like private conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, the hope is that AGI or like various super intelligent systems have some of the nuance that LLMs have. And the intuition is they most likely will because even these LLMs have the nuance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. And let's remember, we're not really having a conversation with a machine. We're having a conversation with the entirety of the collective intelligence of the human species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, correct. But it's possible to imagine autonomous weapon systems that are not using LLMs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Is it possible to be super intelligent without being super wise?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Unlikely, but not impossible, I think. But again, here you get to like, okay, like... No, I'm not saying... When it's unlikely, but not impossible, if it's unlikely, that means the fear should be correctly calibrated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, okay. So one interesting sort of tangent I would love to take on this, because you mentioned this in the essay about nuclear, which was also... I mean, you don't shy away from a little bit of a spicy take. So Robert Oppenheimer famously said, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds, as he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16th, 1945.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you write an interesting historical perspective quote, recall that John von Neumann responded to Robert Oppenheimer's famous hand-wringing about the role of creating nuclear weapons, which, you note, helped end World War II and prevent World War III, with some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin. And you also mentioned that Truman was harsher after meeting Oppenheimer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He said that, don't let that crybaby in here again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So he's widely considered, perhaps because of the hang-wringing, as the father of the atomic bomb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, for people who don't know, yeah, that's right. It makes the LLMs, it removes the censorship, quote unquote, that's put on it by the tech companies that create them. And so this is... LLMs uncensored.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Well, Von Neumann is widely credited as being one of the smartest humans of the 20th century. Certain people, everybody says, like, this is the smartest person I've ever met when they've met him. Anyway, that doesn't mean smart, doesn't mean wise. I would love to sort of... Can you make the case both for and against the critique of Oppenheimer here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because we're talking about nuclear weapons. Boy, do they seem dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But is there a case to be made that you really need to wake the public up to the dangers of nuclear weapons when they were first dropped? Like, really, like, educate them on, like, this is an extremely dangerous and destructive weapon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so 80,000 people dead. But the reporting of that, you can report that in all kinds of ways. You can do all kinds of slants, like war is horrible, war is terrible. You can make it seem like the use of nuclear weapons is just a part of war and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Something about the reporting and the discussion of nuclear weapons resulted in us being terrified in awe of the power of nuclear weapons. And that potentially fed in a positive way towards the game theory of mutually shared destruction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Some of this is me playing devil's advocate here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Actually, just on that point, you say a lot of really brilliant things. It hit me just as you were saying it. I don't know why it hit me for the first time, but we got two wars in a span of 20 years. We could have kept getting more and more world wars and more and more ruthless. Actually, you could have had a US versus Russia war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, but so me as an American, me as a person that loves America, I also wonder if US was the only ones with the nuclear weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, I would probably not hand it over to, I would be careful about the regimes you hand it over to. Maybe give it to like the British or something. Or like a democratically elected government?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It has such a sexy ring to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Strike Russia?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Now, again, like... Is this an example of philosophers and politics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, but is it... Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, stick to computing, John.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, this actually brings up the point of, in AI, who are the good people to reason about the morality, the ethics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Outside of these risks, outside of, like, the more complicated stuff that you agree on is, you know, this will go into the hands of bad guys and all the kinds of ways they'll do is interesting and dangerous, is dangerous in interesting, unpredictable ways, and who is the right person, who are the right kinds of people to make decisions how to respond to it? Is it tech people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The people that develop that technology are usually not going to be the right people
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, let me sort of, as the devil's advocate takes a sip of whiskey, say that I agree with that, but also it seems like the people who are doing kind of the ethics departments in these tech companies go sometimes the other way. Yes. They're not nuanced on history or theology or this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I wonder if there's a way to forget.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It almost becomes a kind of outraged activism towards directions that don't seem to be grounded in history and humility and nuance. It's, again, drenched with arrogance. So I'm not sure which is worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I'm a big fan of using as much raw data that comes from my own body, processed through generalized machine learning models to give a prediction, to give a suggestion. This is obviously the future, and the more data, the better. And so companies like InsideTracker, they're just doing an amazing job
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But I guess...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, celebrate humility in our public leaders. So getting to risk number two, will AI ruin our society? Short version, as you write, if the murder robots don't get us, the hate speech and misinformation will. And the action you recommend, in short, don't let the thought police suppress AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do you think some of that is good?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There could be a middle ground somewhere like Wikipedia type of moderation. There's moderation on Wikipedia. Yeah. that is somehow crowdsourced where you don't have centralized elites, but it's also not completely just a free-for-all because if you have the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips, you can do a lot of harm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you have a good assistant that's completely uncensored, they can help you build a bomb. They can help you mess with people's physical wellbeing, right? If they, because that information is out there on the internet. And so presumably there's, it would be, you could see the positives in censoring some aspects of an AI model when it's helping you commit literal violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, that's what I'm trying to get at is there could be Wikipedia-like models or community type of models where allows you to essentially either provide context or sensor in a way that's not resist the slippery slope nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's AI risk number five, will AI lead to bad people doing bad things? I can just imagine language models used to do so many bad things, but the hope is there that you can have large language models used to then defend against it by more people, by smarter people, by more effective people, skilled people, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So just to highlight the points you're making, you think, and it's an interesting thought, that the majority of content that LLMs of the future will be trained on is actually human conversations with the LLM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you have to understand my brain has gone a full, a full steam ahead here. Cause I agree with basically everything you're saying, but I'm trying to play devil's advocate here there because, okay, you highlighted the fact that there is a slippery slope to human nature. The moment you censor something, you start to censor everything. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That alignment starts out sounding nice, but then you start to align to the beliefs of some select group of people, and then it's just your beliefs. The number of people you're aligning to is smaller and smaller as that group becomes more and more powerful. Okay, but that just speaks to the people that censor are usually the assholes, and the assholes get richer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I wonder if it's possible to do without that for AI. One way to ask this question is, do you think the baseline foundation models should be open sourced? Like what Mark Zuckerberg is saying they want to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it's possible it's the majority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So loss has to get updated really quick here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You're saying slippery slope always leads there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, you could add friction to it. Like, harder to get the models. Because people will always be able to get the models. But it'll be more in the shadows, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like... Oh, I see. You're like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It seems like in terms of size of models and effectiveness of models, the big tech companies will probably lead the way for quite a few years. And the question is of what policies they should use. The kid in Indonesia should not be regulated, but should Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI be regulated?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And that's going to change everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Mark's just like walked away at this point. He's just, screw it. I don't know what to do with this. You guys created this whole internet thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm a huge believer in open source here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And what the interesting thing is, because it's software, a kid in his basement, a teenager, could build a system that defends against the worst. And to me, defense is super exciting. If you believe in the good of human nature, that most people want to do good, to be the savior of humanity is really exciting. Yes. Okay, that's a dramatic statement, but to help people. Of course, to help people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, okay, what about, just to jump around, what about the risk of, will AI lead to crippling inequality? You know, because we're kind of saying everybody's life will become better. Is it possible that the rich get richer here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So yes, they'll get rich, but they'll get rich having a huge positive impact on... Yeah, making the technology available to everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What about AI taking our jobs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So new wants and needs. The worry is that the creation of new wants and needs at a rapid rate Well, I mean, there's a lot of turnover in jobs, so people will lose jobs. Just the actual experience of losing a job and having to learn new things and new skills is painful for the individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, visual data is a little weird because creating reality, visual reality seems to be still a little bit out of reach for us, except in the autonomous vehicle space where you can really constrain things and you can really-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's actually, perhaps partially because of that reason, there's a shortage of people who want to be truck drivers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's still going to be painful, but that's the process of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you write that the single greatest risk, this is the risk you're most convinced by, the single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we, the United States and the West, do not. Can you elaborate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So their plan is what? Surveillance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you're worried that the... Regulating in the United States will haul progress enough to where the Chinese government would win that race.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What's your sense of where they stand in terms of the race towards superintelligence as compared to the United States?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, as we've been talking about, my hope is not just with the United States, but with just the kid in his basement, the open-source LLM. because I don't know if I trust large centralized institutions with super powerful AI, no matter what their ideology, because power corrupts. You've been investing in tech companies for about, let's say 20 years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And about 15 of which was with Andreessen Horowitz. What interesting trends in tech have you seen over that time? Let's just talk about companies and just the evolution of the tech industry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The following is a debate on the topic of Israel and Palestine with Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris, Muin Rabbani, and Stephen Bunnell, also known online as Destiny. Norm and Benny are historians, Muin is a Middle East analyst, and Steven is a political commentator and streamer. All four have spoken and debated extensively on this topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So first of all, you have complete freedom to backtrack, and we'll go there with you. Obviously, we can't cover every single year, every single event, but there's probably critical moments in time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I will do more debates and conversations on these difficult topics, and I will continue to search for hope in the midst of death and destruction, to search for our common humanity in the midst of division and hate. This thing we have going on, human civilization, the whole of it, is beautiful. And it's worth figuring out how we can help it flourish together. I love you all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
If it's true. Just quick pause. I think everything was fascinating to listen to except the mention of hilarious. Nobody finds any of this hilarious. And if any of us are laughing, it's not at the suffering of civilians or suffering of anyone. It's at the obvious joyful camaraderie in the room. So I'm enjoying it and also the joy of learning. So thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Benny Moore's books for the listeners.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
If you like, if you like. Hold on a second. Norm, Norm. Norm, Norm. Stop, please. Norm, just for me, please, just give me a second. You said that there's no genocide going on in Gaza. Let me ask that clear question. The same question I asked on Hamas attacks. Is there, from a legal, philosophical, moral perspective, is there genocide going on in Gaza today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
from 90... I assume they'll take two or three years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
on that moment, brief moment of agreement. Let's just take a quick pause. We need a smoke break. We need a water break. We need a bathroom break.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, there you go. How are you guys doing? Okay, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's possible to be productive over the next two hours and talk about solutions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
One of the things that would be good to talk about solutions with the future is going back in all the times it has failed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Lay it all up. Lay it up. You do talk quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So first of all, thank you for that heated discussion about the present. I would love to go back into history in a way that informs what we can look for by way of hope for the future. So when has, in Israel and Palestine, have we been closest to something like a peace settlement, to something where both sides would be happy and enable the flourishing of both peoples?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got ExpressVPN for privacy, Babbel for learning new languages, Policy Genius for insurance, and 8sleep for, you guessed it, sleep. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So if you look back into history, when were we closest to peace? And do you draw any hope from any of them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Thank you, Norm. Norm asked that we make a lengthy statement in the beginning. Benny, I hope it's okay to call everybody by their first name in the name of camaraderie. Norm has quoted several things you said. Perhaps you can comment broader than the question of 1948 and maybe respond to the things that Norm said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Please, Norm, tell me you have something optimistic to say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. I've used them for many years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Can we just pretend like we didn't all lay out the exceptionally pessimistic view of a two-state, hold on a second, two-state solution. Let's pretend that in five years, in 10 years, a two-state peace settlement is reached. And as historians, you'll still be here writing about it 20 years from now. How would it have happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
If you paint a picture of the future, now is a good moment for both Palestine and Israel to get new leadership. Netanyahu is on the way out. Hamas possibly is on the way out. Who should rise to the top such that a peaceful settlement can be reached?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
when you say hostility, in case people are not familiar, there was a full-on war where Arab states invaded, and Israel won that war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
All right. Well, let me try once again for the region and for just entirety of humanity. What gives you hope? We just heard a lot of pessimistic, cynical takes. What gives you hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
When you look at people in Gaza and people in the West Bank, people in Israel, fundamentally they hate war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What gives you hope?