#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
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The following is a conversation with Sean Carroll, his third time in this podcast. He is a theoretical physicist at John Hopkins, host of the Mindscape podcast that I personally love and highly recommend, and author of many books, including the most recent book series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. The first book of which is titled Space, Time, and Motion, and it's on the topic of general relativity. And the second, coming out on May 14th, so you should definitely pre-order it, is titled Quanta and Fields, and that one is on the topic of quantum mechanics. Sean is a legit active theoretical physicist, and at the same time, is one of the greatest communicators of physics ever. I highly encourage you listen to his podcast, read his books, and pre-order the new book to support his work. This was, as always, a big honor and a pleasure for me. And now, a quick few second mention of these sponsors. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
We got Hidden Layer for securing your AI models, Cloaked for protecting your personal information, Notion for team collaboration and amazing note-taking, Shopify, for, well, selling stuff on the internet and NetSuite for business management software. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Hidden Layer, a platform that provides security for your machine learning models. Boy, is this a fascinating space.
The very fabric of truth is being torn apart by increasingly powerful systems that we consult about what is true and what is not. It's really fascinating if you take all the security attacks away how difficult it is to make sure that threats to truth-seeking mechanisms do not sort of rise above a certain threshold where we no longer know what to trust and not. I'm talking of course about machine learning models that are trained on a lot of data that comes from the internet, from all the different news sources, to Wikipedia, to Reddit, to all those places that they're trained on, and integrate and compress into a representation that we can then consult through natural language and ask questions about politics, about geopolitics, about wars, about history, all of that, and we turn to those models for truth, or at least to take steps towards understanding something about the world. basically engaging in a truth-seeking process.
Now, if you add on top of that bad actors that want to mess with those models so that for the most part, they appear perfectly rational and perfectly safe to use as truth-seeking mechanisms, but on certain topics, they're not. This is a real security threat as we depend on these models more and more for general conversation than if you're a company for very specific kind of analysis of the data that the company's focused on. So considering security of machine learning models is really, really important for companies, for people, and it's such a fascinating problem. So I'm really happy that Hidden Layer is working on this problem. And if you're a company that uses machine learning models, you should take this problem very seriously. Visit hiddenlayer.com to learn more about how Hidden Layer can accelerate your AI adoption in a secure way. This episode is also brought to you by Cloaked, a platform that lets you generate a new email and phone number every time you sign up for a new website.
It's amazing. Like I said, it's the thing that I always hoped existed. And now that I know it exists, I'm a happier human being. So anytime you sign up to a website, this experience is taking for granted just how privacy violating it is. Because for really big websites, you kind of have this social contract, you have this trust that they're not going to steal your email and sell it to somebody else or steal your phone number and sell it to somebody else. And that's for the most part true for large companies because they have so much to lose
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