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
#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
#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.