Lex Fridman: Ask Me Anything - AMA January 2021 | Lex Fridman Podcast
the following is an ama episode where i answer a few questions that folks asked on patreon youtube and other social networks i'll try to do these episodes on occasion if it's of interest to anyone at all quick mention of our sponsors brooklyn sheets indeed hiring website expressvpn and theragun muscle recovery device so the choice is sleep employment privacy or muscle recovery choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast and now on to the questions and the answers the question is lex i'm a young man that has battled with depression do you think when trying to develop a human-like ai we will reach a stumbling point where the ai themselves suffer from depression and other complex mental issues do you think it will be a simple fix like rewriting a piece of code or a new patch or update or maybe when trying to create something human-like with high fidelity you need to leave in the possibility of the ai suffering from such complex mental issues that a human can what are your thoughts generally and philosophically about ai suffering from depression i think that suffering is a deep fundamental property of consciousness i would like to probably say quite a bit about depression i have friends who suffer from depression but that's for another time that's for when we talk about depression in humans i think depression is just one flavor of suffering that is part of the human condition i see it as a kind of dark side street on the path to intelligence so in terms of robot suffering if we are to create systems that are truly intelligent in the way that they're able to interact in intelligent and deeply meaningful ways with other humans is going to have many of the properties many of the characteristics of the human condition of the full human experience and i think depression is part of that there's of course a part in us humans that longs to remove all that is cruel in this world you know that's why people that believe in god often the biggest question is of why does god allow there to be suffering in the world there's this longing to understand why is there so much unfairness in this world and so building on that there's an inclination to then in our systems engineers something that is void of those things that we cannot understand why that's part of the human condition but i think it is intricately part of the experience that is to be human and i think if we were to build intelligence systems that are interacting with humans there has to be in some ways properties of consciousness baked in and if we were to have properties of consciousness baked in we have to have the full mystery and uncertainty of the human experience which yes includes all the different flavors of suffering of which uh depression is part i think the yin and the yang in all of its versions the ups and downs of moods but also the more sort of rational intellectual interpretations of different concepts that are less sort of dramatic all have to oscillate back and forth i think that's where the interesting aspect of interactions happens just like when i have conversations in the podcast the interesting stuff happens when there's disagreements when there's a bit of turmoil when there's a push and pull when there's a changing of minds or even just a morphing of your own opinions about something your own thoughts i think that's part of it so i really do think all of that mess of humanity has to be engineered in into ai systems that are interacting with humans and are trying to create meaningful interactions with those humans there's of course a huge amount of ai systems that are going to be uh more intelligent than humans at particular tasks those do not need to have those properties of the human experience like suffering and all those kinds of things but for the ones that move among us i think unfortunately depression has to be part of the experience or the possibility of depression has to be part of the experience of course i tend to focus on the positive aspects of the human experience like like love beauty joy all all those kinds of things but uh it's the ying and the yang they they go together they're a lifelong partners unfortunately i think now of course all this is just hypothesis and most my answers to all these questions are going to be just my own thoughts but i am thinking about all this from an engineering perspective and maybe i'll have more to say in the future about how we actually build these kinds of things into our ai systems that interact with humans thanks for the great question it's a tough one question is lex i was wondering if you would be willing to talk about your immigrant experience i myself started off as an international student studying working in america not from russia i'm from india but there was a constant push and pull that i experienced given my life circumstance i would be curious to hear how you assimilated do you feel like you belong etc thank you for the ama okay your statements about do you feel like you belong hit hard for some reason maybe it's because late at night maybe because i'm a bit over caffeinated maybe what pops to mind to focus on is the aspect of loneliness the aspect of belonging i think a lot of us in the early teenage years go through that process of feeling like an outsider an outcast of different kinds i think it hit me the hardest personally because i was a popular kid in russia and when we moved here i went to the opposite of being popular or feeling like that i felt like an outcast the the place i moved to in america had more of an emphasis maybe it's a cultural thing of uh emphasizing material possessions over two things that were deeply meaningful to me which is human connection like friendship and also knowledge like uh mathematics and scientific discovery all those kinds of things it's just the emphasis of what was valued was different and that for me was a catalyst to feel like a total outcast as opposed to being this person who looks out into the world and enjoys the beauty of the world i kind of went to this brooding phase of first of all learning the english language but starting to read books more philosophical books the first one i remember reading in english was the giver that sort of helped me start thinking about this world i was so fortunate to be so in love with people for so long and have close friends in in russia that i didn't notice in my childhood how deeply alone we all are so for me the immigrant experience involved in a small way at least the first realizing that hard human truth that we all are born alone live alone die alone even when we're in the arms of somebody we love we're still somehow fundamentally alone with our thoughts with their hopes with our fears trapped in this uh conscious meat vessel between our ears i think the immigrant experience for me was the catalyst to realizing uh and being terrified and also liberated by the idea that i'm alone in this world and at the same time was the realization that this beautiful feeling i felt from the connection to other humans was this gift that uh took me away from this dark realization so it's almost that love is kind of escape from the reality of life from the muck of life and so the journey began in that way to think about this world in this way both the burden of being alone coupled with the frequent escape from that feeling by being lost in the company of friends loved ones so early on coupled with this love of the human mind and curiosity about the human mind was the love of programming and actually building little programs and engineering systems of course building robots in college and so on i think the gift of the immigrant experience of feeling like the outcast was the love of experiencing the deep connection with others like a deep appreciation of it when it's there i guess because it was taken away because i was ripped out of it through moving here i got to really appreciate it and start becoming cognizant of it to where i can start looking for it and being more grateful when i do have it and at the same time a kind of curiosity started boiling up of the perspective on artificial intelligence systems from that kind of longing for a connection so as opposed to looking at robots or ai systems or even just programs that accomplish a particular task can these programs accomplish the same richness of task and richness of experience that i came to appreciate as a human being you know so when i talk about kind of love it's there's echoes of that in my longing of the kind of experiences i would like to create in artificial intelligence systems that was born out of the immigrant experience of the loss of child-like innocence experience of all of it combined of starting to read books and thinking deeply about this world experience all that coupled in i really think sometimes unfortunately the first step of deep gratitude is loss so for me i lost quite a bit during that time and through that loss i was able to discover the things that i truly appreciate about life so let me leave it at that question is if you were able to ask an alien some questions what would they be this is a really good question and uh i find it to be actually a really good thought experiment let me put out some candidate questions out there and see what sticks so first i'll probably ask for advice for the human species as a whole for our civilization of what we might do to survive and prosper for a long time to come assuming the alien is uh from a civilization that's far older than ours or far wiser i think there could be some really interesting clear statements about the things we're doing here on earth that are getting us into trouble from an alien perspective so i think that's the number one thing and maybe i'll bring up like along those lines bring up questions of great filters like you know if you look at the history of your civilization when did you almost destroy the entirety of your species uh it would be like informative from a historical perspective to see like you know for us it's currently what the nuclear age and the few moments in the history that could have resulted in an all-out nuclear war it'd be interesting to see if they mentioned something about agi something about uh viruses or wars or just things that don't we don't even think about so i guess question number one would be like some basic life advice hoping that this alien is like a naval type character who can like in a crisp short way give some profound advice second i would probably ask this is a very selfish conversation because it's just following along the things on top of my head that follow my curiosity i would ask about the difference between their civilization and ours i would ask whether they have some of these things that make us human like love like do you guys have love where you come from do you have death mortality you know i suspect it's possible to have mortality not even be a concept that makes any sense to an alien species that of course everybody's immortal and there might be some kind of enforced selection mechanism like evolution in general i would ask about consciousness try to like tease apart the question of like this thing of subjective experience is is this some kind of uh self-centered weird over-dramatized quirk of evolution that we have that's not actually special at all and then we make a kind of big deal about it that's some kind of useful feature of our brain to think of ourselves as individuals that's completely silly it'd be interesting to try to tease apart whether they have consciousness and what form their intelligence takes that is distinct from consciousness in the way that we think of humans as being conscious entities that are also able to do intelligent things are those intricately connected they're those separate it'd be interesting to sort of tease that apart of how their alien minds work so that includes intelligence consciousness love and death all the greatest hits okay then i will probably go to physics of course you got to ask about physics i would look into the aliens eyes if they have eyes and try to determine if if we can actually even find the same language of mathematics and physics or sciences in general probably ask about the big mysteries of physics and science of what's outside our universe why is there something rather than nothing why is there stuff and what's outside the stuff we think of as stuff so like what's outside the universe i'd be hesitant to ask the why questions but you know i'll try a few out to see maybe there is a good answer to the why questions of like why did it start like why is there something rather than nothing then i would probably ask slightly more detailed about what's the universe made of like what's up with this dark matter and dark energy stuff like what are the basic building blocks of reality and what are the laws of physics that govern that reality so i would of course ask kind of sneak in there just like casually can you maybe give a few hints of how to unify first of all we're on the right track in terms of quantum mechanics and general relativity and then how do you unify all the laws of physics maybe sneak in there in a different angle trying to ask about the singularity in the black hole or maybe what happens at the very beginning of the big bang like where those laws are all unified maybe trying to get a sense of what are the kind of physics required to fully describe these events i think the physics discussion would be a good time to ask is there a god maybe not use the g word but instead say is there a kind of a centralized designer or team of designers that have like launched the universe and are actively managing the universe and of course another version of asking that i would uh probably talk about the simulation of looking at the universe as we see it as a computation as a computer that's doing information processing see if that rings a bell to the alien if there's a connection to that in general would ask about what kind of computers you have and also kind of computer games that'd be really useful like what do you do for fun you come here often but that's like usual ice breakers of course i'm not mentioning those that's just like chatter at the bar so i guess outside the big physics questions i would ask the more engineering-centric questions first my interest ai about super intelligence how do we build super intelligent systems ones that are far more intelligent than humans how do we travel close to the speed of light or faster than the speed of light like how did the aliens get to where we're at that we're meeting and talking related to that would be a question of energy how do we harness the energy of a sun or multiple suns or all of the suns in our galaxy and then also kind of an engineering question can we travel through time and if we can how do we build a time traveling machine and is it a good idea i think a lot of these questions will be appended with a sort of caveat of like if you know the answer to this question will i be better off if you told me this answer sometimes knowledge is not power sometimes uh knowledge is a burden that leads to self-destruction so we want to be careful about that of course as the alien gets tired of talking to me at this intergalactic bar probably gets up sort of politely starts walking away i'll um i would definitely ask some questions you know for my own personal knowledge bank is p equals np good question theoretical computer science one of the big questions all mathematics would be i just need to know the answer just give me the answer i'll work from there okay we'll figure out the rest just the answer so yes or no i probably won't ask him for investment advice he probably thinks that the whole concept of money is silly but i might ask about uh bitcoin good long-term investment or bad what do you think the digital currency in general and of course would probably ask is elon musk one of you guys or a different species do you know which uh galaxy which group of planets they came from it'd be nice to sort of localize things is there others like it that visit and build companies just get some of the details the cma has suddenly become ridiculous but i think this is a really nice thought experiment and i'll think about this a little bit more i'm sure there is a list of really precise questions that could most efficiently unlock the mysteries before the human race that are both useful for our progress and useful for our survival question is what advice would you give an intermediate life stage 36 year old who wants to career pivot from medical technology and research to computer science so first by computer science i think you mean the broad field that includes software engineering machine learning robotics just computing in general maybe with less emphasis on the mathematical side like theoretical computer science i think the best advice on this that i could give is find a simple project to get excited about and allow yourself to get really excited by it have fun fall in love with it be proud of the thing you create and i should say there's a big emphasis on the simple don't go super ambitious i believe that most people if they allow themselves can derive a huge amount of joy for creating some simple little things even if it's following a tutorial if you just allow yourself to experience the joy of creation it's there for you that's that's one of the magical things about computer science is it allows you to create things that are almost like entities on their own that's what programs are so i i think a career in computer science starts first with allowing yourself to be passionate and getting that stoking that flame and allowing it to build so it's not about any other practical like which job do i get what thing i work on is just really giving yourself over to the simple passion of creating stuff i think there's just a quick set of steps that i think i followed early on that i would also recommend you at least consider following is first is basic software engineering so finding maybe python or javascript like super popular accessible programming language and build just like a hello world program or something just a little bit more complicated but not much more beyond that is using that newly acquired set of tools of programming build something that automates something you do on the computer maybe another way to phrase that is just like scripts that are helping you in your interaction with the computer so maybe finding different files in your computer that you try to look for often or reorganizing things in an automated way like folder structures or maybe renaming files like i have a script that finds all the files that have spaces in the file name and it renames them after confirmation to underscores all those kinds of things there's a bunch of little helpless scripts i have all over the place and those are just really joyful because you get to use them every day and it's something that you've created that made your life a little bit easier i for me at least that's a source of joy that helps feed that like love of programming of just being a part of the computing of the computer science world and i've been doing that really my whole life it started with c and c plus but now it's a lot of other languages primarily python and yes javascript next is a branching into two separate little worlds in computer science of algorithms and then like data science i think both are full of beautiful things to fall in love with the thing you can really enjoy with algorithms is learning how to build more and more efficient algorithms on the data side is learning how to process different data sets how to clean them up how to reorganize them and do different kind of statistics on them processing on them so we're not even talking about machine learning yet it's just being able to visualize those datasets all those kinds of stuff just working with data and now we're starting to talk about career because there's a lot of jobs that have to do with the use of computing techniques to process visualize and interpret aggregate analyze data so that's i guess you would call that field data science so that's a really cool career trajectory and there's so many cool things to get into with i think a very reasonable small learning curve that you can really if you push yourself do within weeks maybe months not years and once you become comfortable with the data science world you can start building on on top of that quite naturally doing some boilerplate machine learning supervised learning projects and then building out into more specific more useful more novel cutting edge applications of machine learning reinforcement learning that whole world maybe even taking that into physical systems of actually building robots as you backtrack it it sounds like i'm building towards something super complicated but it's not all these can be really small projects even robotics projects you can build a little robot that does some basic tasks maybe does some basic computer vision and it's a nice way to learn on the robotic side and better systems programming so it's just getting more comfortable with hardware and seeing like if that's something you're interested in or on the data science side where you're sticking much more to the software both of those you now start to figure out what is the exciting career possibility i think two things even i would even see them as skills are important here passion and google i see passion as a skill because it's allowing yourself to be excited it's finding things you could be excited about and allowing yourself to be excited and seeing that as an actually essential part of progress is along yourself to be excited and the reason i mentioned google is because i find that in a lot of fields but especially in computer science so software engineering or machine learning there's so many amazing resources out there that the key skill actually ends up being is how good are you at discovering the exact page and resources that is allowing you to take the next step in your journey of exploration of learning and that's fundamentally a skill of how do i google the right thing what pages do i click on and all those kinds of things i think it sounds almost kind of ridiculous to say that that's a skill but that is one of the most essential skills of the modern day student lifelong student is how to google so yeah passion and google allow yourself to fall in love with the project and keep taking the next step the next step next up with the help of a good search engine and a bit of curiosity question is what form factor of robots are you most excited about for the future bipeds quads arms humanoids maybe something else more obscure this is a really tough question because i really like robots i think that love is born in software and uh the hardware stuff just makes it a little more fun so i think the things i'm really excited about even in terms of form factors is in the software i think much of the exciting developments in robotics is actually in simulated worlds currently and i think that will be true for quite a while to come and so i think in terms of human robot interaction the robots that will be really exciting are the ones that live in virtual worlds like in virtual reality or even just on a screen so i think what we would see more and more is entities human-like entities or entities that allow us to anthropomorphize a consciousness a spirit onto them living in the digital world i think that's what i'm really excited about and of course slowly those entities taking a form in the physical space in terms of uh i think probably the humanoid form unfortunately though very difficult to engineer and create a uh realistic and natural fulfilling experience with i think it's still probably the most to me exciting form although i do really like uh boston dynamic spot the robot dog from uh kind of having a pet perspective is a really exciting form again very difficult to do stuff in the physical space it's uh it's a huge engineering challenge that as far as i can tell is several orders of magnitude more difficult than the same challenge in the digital space so i just see the digital simulated robotics advancing much quicker and having a much larger scale impact on the world especially if we start seeing more and more virtual worlds being created and that that doesn't necessarily mean virtual reality or like augmented reality it just means ability and mediums within which you can interact with artificial intelligence systems in the digital space and i do see that as a form factor which is entities in digital space having a humanoid or a semi-humanoid form something that we can anthropomorphize something we can connect with on a human level question is on the topic of suffering and growth is happiness a healthy pursuit or do you agree with einstein's view on happiness as the aspiration of a pig okay let me quickly look up the einstein quote here that you reference about a pig and happiness okay einstein writes i have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves this critical basis i call the ideal of a pigsty the ideals that have lighted my way and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully have been kindness beauty and truth without the sense of kinship with men of like mind without the occupation with the objective world the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors life would have seemed empty to me the trite objects of human efforts possessions outward success luxury have always seemed to me contemptible okay where do i start with this i think i usually agree with einstein especially when he talks philosophy on most things and i do hear as well in terms of material possessions and all those kinds of things but i think he unfairly attacks the word happiness and also pigs so let me uh disagree with einstein and try to defend the word happiness and also maybe defend pigs if i can somehow figure that out so the word happiness i think is one of those words that could mean a lot of things to a lot of people and i think in this case einstein is using it as almost uh or the pursuit of happiness as a kind of synonym for hedonism so kind of very narrow definition of what happiness is i think i see happiness as a indicator that is much bigger than than direct pleasures but as a word that includes those pleasures but also includes more meaningful deep fulfillment in life and so i'd like to reclaim the word happiness as a good thing which is slightly applied in this discussion that happiness is a kind of uh distraction that shouldn't be thought about i do think that happiness is a side effect of a life well lived not a goal i think the moment it becomes a goal in itself i think it's easy to lose your way and perhaps that's what impart einstein means but i do think it's a really good signal of progress happiness so in losing yourself in the focus of battle of just focusing on excellence and progress and improving and challenging yourself and growing all the time i think a kind of a running average measure of your happiness day-to-day happiness you like average that over a period of weeks and months is a good measure of how you're doing and i think a more like actionable process of collecting that signal is the process of just gratitude of sitting back and thinking how grateful i am how grateful you are for uh for how it started how it's going for the progress uh that you've made so i do think it's a good signal not momentary happiness but over a period of time several weeks several months if there's not happiness that you've probably lost your way as well so it's a useful signal not a goal in itself but a useful signal and you know kindness beauty and truth as einstein puts it are good ideals but they're a bit ambiguous in a practical day-to-day sense i i share them of course but i think practically if i were to put it into words at least for myself struggle is the process and happiness is the measure so day-to-day life actually looks like a constant struggle to improve yourself and then the flip side of that is the gratitude of how amazing life is the progress you've made but also just the opportunity to struggle as uh you know you have to imagine this was happy and uh ultimately when i look back at my life most days i spent truly happy to be alive so in that sense the pursuit of happiness is a good one so not hedonistic in the moment local optima of kind of pleasure but more like stepping back looking at the running average over the past few weeks and months and making sure you're at a good level so that's a bit of a disagreement with einstein and i also have to say that i think pigs are one of the most intelligent animals so i'm still holding out for the possibility that pigs or maybe dolphins have life figured out quite a bit better than us humans so on those two things the pursuit of happiness and on the brilliance of pigs me and einstein part ways for a brief moment question is hey lex i was curious how you pick people to come on to the podcast i think this process is actually quite difficult and it evolved over time so let me mention a few factors i think first and foremost it's important that a a person is really passionate about what they do and that passion can take all kinds of different forms i know i sometimes or all the time completely lack emotion in my face but i truly am passionate about the things i do and so that passion can express itself in different ways and so coupled with that passion i look for people who are sort of not only passionate but they appreciate enjoy are drawn to the long-form conversation format as a way to express that passion which is not everybody some people love to express their passion their interests their expertise their ideas in written form maybe that's more kind of edited over several passes of editing versus a conversation format especially long-form conversation where there's very little editing in addition to that i'm also try to make sure the person actually wants to come on to this particular podcast you know there's so many amazing podcasts out there and it's also just surprising to see how much better they are than me at talking conversations explaining stuff it's uh humbling it's also inspiring because it pushes me to kind of improve seeing what's possible so i don't know if people don't actually listen to this particular podcast or at least have listened a little bit and are not drawn to the particular flavor of weirdness that is me like some kid who wears a suit all the time and like mumbles speaks slowly asks these weird questions i mean if if they're not drawn to whatever the hell that weird mystery is of this particular human then there's no reason to to talk if they're drawn i think there's a possibility of something magical happening me with my weirdness and them with their weirdness kind of colliding in interesting ways that create something new that both of us are surprised by and on that topic more and more i'm looking for people that are different than me and that means the full spectrum of diversity so it could be different backgrounds different world views different personalities like you can tell there'll be a clash of flavors it's like chocolate and salt but it can also turn out to be uh like a pineapple pizza that actually some people love but i don't understand it it doesn't even it doesn't make any sense why it doesn't make any sense so it could be you know taking that risk of embracing that clash and the chemistry can sometimes result in a pineapple pizza so uh there's a cost to that risk but i i seek it out more because i think that's the possibility of some magical experience of a magical conversation and on that topic i should mention there's this kind of idea of platforming which is um i've been fortunate enough to have sort of enough listeners and viewers that the question of platforming even comes up meaning if you have this kind of uh guest with these kind of controversial viewpoints why give them a platform that's further spreads their viewpoints and i understand i empathize with this kind of uh view but i don't like it because to me if i'm successful now that's the problem i'm not very good at this thing especially in challenging conversations so but if i'm successful that the tension and world views the tension and personalities the clash will create wisdom so i really want to talk to very challenging people i want to have really difficult conversations and that means talking to people that are at the outskirts of society i think it's something that i'm thinking about a lot it's important to say that i'm not afraid of being canceled i do think i'm afraid or perhaps the better word is concerned about doing a terrible job on a important difficult conversation where as a result of me doing a terrible job i don't add love or knowledge or inspiration to the world but fuel further division not because of the guest i have on but because of my failure to [Music] catalyze and like steer an inspiring conversation i see my skill in conversations not i mean i don't know how to put it nicely but not very good i'm striving to improve constantly so some of the guest selection has to do with the difficulty of the conversation and how prepared i am for that level of difficulty i think the way i think about difficult conversations is some of them might take years to prepare for just intellectually there's there's certain people and certain spaces of ideas that takes a lot of time you have to remember that i'm just uh an engineer i have a set of things that preoccupied my mind for years and there's a lot of difficult topics that i just won't do a good job of so part of it is i have to work hard to learn more to kind of constantly look outside the overton window to try to explore difficult ideas and at the same time build enough sort of reputation driven freedom to take risks and make mistakes or try to inspire people in the community to allow me to allow each other all of us to make mistakes in conversation so it's the coupling of extreme thorough preparation and allowing yourself to make mistakes it's like excellence and not giving a damn combined but overall the thing i'm concerned about and i take back the fear i'm not afraid of it i'm just concerned of doing a bad job of conversation i'm not concerned of being cancelled or derided or criticized after having done a reasonably good job i'm concerned i'm on myself it doesn't matter if i'm cancer or not just when i look in the mirror when i look at the results of the conversation being a failure something that doesn't add love to the world but something that has derision and also this is the problem with words i don't even like how i'm expressing myself currently i really try not to have some kind of agenda or strategy going into a conversation i really want to be fragile open-minded almost boring and naive and just giving my trust to a person even when i challenge or play devil's advocate all those kinds of things i really want to place trust in the mutual respect and the love that the other person gives and i trust that they won't take advantage of that and so some of the guest selection has to do with do i have enough trust yet that this person won't take advantage of my open-mindedness of my childlike curiosity all those kinds of things so but all of this is just a giant learning experience i do want to be careful not to let my curiosity run what should i say too far ahead of me where my preparation doesn't meet the level of curiosity i exhibit so again like i said i'm willing and i'm trying to be more and more willing to take risks and make mistakes in conversations but i'm also not letting myself off the hook in terms of the level of preparation i put and i really hope that we give each other the freedom and are patient with each other in nuanced conversation that's what seems to be really missing in public discourse is this kind of patience and allowing each other to make statements that we later change our mind on and not putting that statement on us as a kind of scarlet letter that forever puts us in a bin of red or blue or some other bin so i'm trying to navigate all of this while still being naive and open-minded as best i can question is hey lex i was wondering how you managed to remain optimistic in the face of adversity when you encounter hostile people that don't want to even consider offering constructive criticism and would rather try to tear you down and force their ideology i find pieces of hope for short periods of time and then they fade after i see the arguments surrounding whatever brought about hope to begin with i guess to put it simply how do you hold on to hope and optimism thank you for the question there's probably a lot to be said about this but i'll try to keep it brief and simple try to ignore the noise of the world the the bickering of the moment i find that if you give yourself a chance to see how amazing people are that those people will reveal themselves to be amazing that uh you will see it that if you give yourself a chance to see it you will see it i see it and i see gratitude for how amazing things are and optimism for how much even better things could be as a kind of superpower it makes life exciting in a way that first is just fun to live and two from just a productivity perspective as an engineer or anybody who creates anything it's fuel to create i believe that to create new things and especially for things that others will say is not possible to create i find that optimism is a necessary precondition to give you the energy the fuel the drive the inspiration to go for months for years to carry the fire of belief that uh that's where that optimism truly is a superpower that enables that kind of perseverance so i think the most important thing is it makes life more exciting and fun and uh it's a good productivity hack it's the second thing you also asked how so i tried to my personal life and the influences i take in the books i read and and the people i talk to i try to surround myself with people that are also full of optimism in general i'm uh unapologetically a fan of a lot of people especially sort of big thinkers wild engineers and scientists and creators of all walks of life people that shine in ways that surprise me or excite me there's really thousands to be honest just off the top of my head even people i talked on this podcast chris lattner always brings a smile to my face one of the greatest engineers of the world jim kellers from that ilk as well though slightly different personalities but also inspires me makes me smile such a deep and kind and brilliant human being along that line of engineers elon musk of course also the embodiment of optimism about this world uh is an inspiration and then uh maybe down the dimension of more wild even george hotz with a chaotic style of thinking that's very different than my own but one that i find just inspiring of course joe rogan for me has been for many years a kind of example of somebody who doesn't take themselves too seriously like he's been for a lot of people he has been for me a uh role model for a successful life that's not full of jealousy and kind of derision but it's more being supportive of others being a fan of all this all those kinds of things i mean on the darker side dan carlin of course you know often think of him as optimistic but i truly think he's optimistic he's just been so deeply soaking in the muck the darkness of human history that i think sometimes the thing he talks about come off as um as deeply cynical about the future of human civilization but they're not there's a shining optimism to him and um i wasn't in my conversation with him even though his words were saying that he's not always optimistic i think his heart his spirit was clearly optimistic there's a hope for us in him and uh at least to me and that's that's what i see and i to me that hope glows pretty bright in in the stuff that he creates and the passion that he has for human history of course the scientist stephen will from uh on the computer science side i can't tell you how much i love cellular automata sean carroll the way he loves everything about physics is incredible communicator eric weinstein the way he loves everything geometrical shapes of all things whether they're mathematical or whether they're connected to physics just his loves for symmetry asymmetry for topology for the weird curvature of things in the visible dimensions of space-time or the invisible ones and that's just sticking to people i've talked to on this uh podcast of course joshua bach whose flow of consciousness is full of so much brilliance it breaks my brain anytime i try to process it my commodore 64 brain takes in his uh pentium i don't know what the analogy is but it always breaks my brain i'm especially inspired by the creations of software engineers for example because there's an inherent optimism to the creative process a lot of people in the cryptocurrency space like vitalik buterin is a constant inspiration he just goes on and on and of course the hundreds probably thousands of dead folks from nietzsche dostoevsky freud young kamu hasse kerouac everybody i mean i just kind of feel like i exist in this world of people that are excited about the future and then of course the noise of the world that is lost in the bickering of the moment can seep in and that's where a kind of meditation comes in i don't fully ignore it i think that's kind of running away from the world in a way that i don't find constructive at least at this time in my life i i just take it in but i don't let it linger if there is any kind of harshness or trolling or just maybe destructive criticism i try to pick from it pieces that i can use to grow to inspire me and let the rest go and that's the kind of muscle you have to build and every once in a while just disconnect from it all and and recharge the mind in a way from just simple silence of nature the question is what is something you changed your opinion about in the past few years thank you for everything you're doing love from brussels i love belgium thank you for that question and the kind words i changed my mind on a lot of things and i changed my mind all the time i'm in a constant flux i'm constantly learning i guess my mind is the quantum mechanical system but i can mention a few things that have been um stable big shifts in my thinking at least over the past year or two especially related to the podcast so on the topic of uh psychedelics i've always found those fascinating what i've changed my mind over the past couple years is a hopeful message i think that uh psychedelics can actually enter the realm of science and that there's a bunch of places that are starting to conduct large-scale research studies on psychedelics and that's really exciting to me because i have a sense that that's just another perspective into the world of neuroscience that will help us understand the way the mind works and potentially how to engineer different aspects of what makes the human mind so special in our artificial intelligence systems on the topic of social media i've changed my mind over the past two years i always felt that it had a bunch of complicated bad influences on society but they were balanced with a lot of positive effects that build community they give people a voice all those kinds of things more and more i'm starting to think that the the possible set of destructive trajectories that social media can take human civilization is uh much wider much more destructive than i accounted for so it's something that i worry about you know in the space of existential risk of artificial intelligence that people talk about i think my mind more and more over the past two years has been focused on social media as the greatest threat of artificial intelligence i also think it's the greatest set of possibilities so what i want to say is it's the set of trajectories is wider than i expected the set of possible trajectories then society might go as driven by managed by directed by our platforms hence it's been something that i've been working on to see if i can the biggest thing i probably changed my mind on is that extraterrestrial life intelligence consciousness is worthy of serious scientific investigation it's similar how i felt before about consciousness human consciousness is that we lack the tools and we're very early in our ability to explore to understand to engineer consciousness and the same with extraterrestrial life the tools are very crude in terms of the study efforts of trying to communicate with far away civilizations also the the listening then there's the detection and faraway exoplanets and whether they're habitable in life forms on those planets also the hundreds of thousands of reports of ufo sightings actually getting some high resolution sensory data around that so we're in the very early days of any of that kind of understanding but what i've changed my mind on or rather what i've come to understand is closing my mind closing the mind of other scientists to these fields of consciousness and extraterrestrial life prevents us from actually discovering new things basically what happens when you close your mind to these fascinating inspiring mysterious spaces of exploration you leave the exploration of these topics the people that are not well equipped to explore them they're just curious minds and by the way those curious minds are magical and they're inspiring and i'm one such curious mind but the rigors of science the tools of science the funding of science can uh can crack these wide open and give us better data better understanding inspire totally new ways of thinking about consciousness about extraterrestrial life have entire paradigm shifts of the way we approach our understanding of intelligence of life forms in general and there's a lot of things that kind of opened my eyes to this fascinating world the david favor conversation of the pilot that uh saw the tic tac ufo the it was just recent a more more conversation but that was in 2017 i remember seeing avi loeb's thoughts about moa when it first came out and even just thinking about the drake equation more seriously and thinking about the different possibilities built into the uncertainty of the parameters just open my eyes to the mystery and the wander of the amazing universe we're in and how little we know about it and so i've definitely kind of become much more intellectually open to the exploration of what extraterrestrial life might look like what are the ways we might be able to communicate with it how we might be able to understand it what does it teach us about ourselves and also importantly this very fascinating psychological effect of being open to these mysteries that we know very little about what does that do to the actual productivity the the creative output of an engineering mind that opening your mind in this way to think outside of the little box of things we understand well what does that do in terms of the things you might be able to build the ideas that might visit you and result in you being able to build something totally new i think all of that changed my mind about aliens that's why i've been having conversations about extraterrestrial life i'm of course very careful walking down this line because i am first and foremost a scientist an engineer and i want to stay in that world but i really do want to cultivate an open mind and a childlike curiosity and i generally hope to see that in other scientists as well that's what science is all about i think incremental progress is essential for science but it has to be coupled to that childlike wonder about the world and an open-minded out-of-the-box thinking the results and major paradigm shift that throw all those silly citations out the window and build totally new sciences totally new approaches that uh make everything we did in the decades past meaningless or actually counterproductive so they have to be coupled together incremental progress and first principles deep thinking that results in paradigm shifts question is what was your decision behind going on the keto diet mainly meat based and how has it helped you so the decision or rather process of discovering the diets that work for me has to do with the fact that i wrestled the combat sports my whole life that has weight classes so you're constantly figuring out how to perform optimally physically and mentally while you know going to school and so on while also cutting weight so grounded in that i've developed a fascination with different diets i've never thought about diet as a prescriptive thing for others i've always thought of myself as a kind of a nutritional scientist running a study of n of one so just studying myself and not trying to extrapolate to others just understanding what makes me happy what makes me perform the best and that's where that journey took i've tried everything i think about 15 or more years ago i discovered the power of intermittent fasting or fasting in general and i can talk about that forever i used to do a lot of weight lifting sort of power lifting all that kind of stuff in in the world of like men's health or rather uh men's muscle and fitness kind of where you eat six seven times a day small meals chicken and broccoli all that kind of stuff in that kind of world to realize you can eat once a day and still train two three times that day and actually have more energy more focus and perform better than you ever have was mind-blowing so i think fasting was the biggest like paradigm shift for me because it made me realize that i really need to study myself better try new things all the time to allow myself the opportunity to discover something that's totally transformative on my life makes my life easier makes my body my mind work better all that kind of stuff i discovered intermittent fasting and fasting in general from the ultra endurance athletes world and that's where also i came across the ideas of fat adapted athlete which is this kind of idea that you can use fat as an energy source and then quickly you discover that there is diets similar to like a keto diet that are extremely low carb that could allow you to perform well physically and mentally all those kinds of things i think it all sounded a little bit crazy to me i grew up thinking low fat is good high fat is bad so it's always weird to eat something with fat in it and for it not to be like a cheat meal or something but to be something that's part of the diet so it was strange but once i gave it a chance and did it properly with all the electrolytes and water and all those kinds of things you can look it up when you do it properly it just felt great and there was just a huge number of benefits i felt immediately and i've been doing it ever since so let me maybe quickly comment on some pros and cons of the keto diet and again this is all personal experience i don't want to extrapolate this to others but i do encourage people to try to explore to be their own scientists of their own body so for me prose is the physical energy first of all the energy levels are more stable but also i just feel more energized for exercise this is both for like explosive movements you know heavy lifts or jiu jitsu grappling judo wrestling all those kinds of things and also for prolonged endurance exercise i find both a really benefit for me i think for explosive exercise the biggest benefit for me is the mental focus at least the way i approach like the grappling sports but even lifting it's certainly very important how my body feels but it's also important that the mind is really focused on the technique and i find that the biggest benefit of keto combined with the fasting is that my mind can achieve a greater level of stable prolonged focus which is useful for exercise funny enough for me obviously it's really useful for work for deep work sessions for thinking deeply for prolonged periods of times whether that's programming whether that's writing or whether that's sitting behind a sheet of paper and designing new systems it's both the energy of mental focus and the kind of clarity i don't know how else to put it but there's just a cleanness to the focus that i really enjoy also when you acclimate to it i find that the sort of number of hours in the day that i have a positive mood is just larger i can be cranky sometimes especially when i'm sleep deprived or especially when stuff is just not working now so there will always be parts of the day when i'm cranky but it just feels i haven't quantify it but i'm pretty sure sort of anecdotally speaking that the number of hours i feel just good about the day just grateful to be alive is higher with um with keto other benefits are better sleep i fall asleep easier that might have to do with just a lower volume of food i don't know but i enjoy naps and sleep better there's also just in general like small aches and pains from joints when you're exercising all that kinds of stuff seems to be less on keto so that's just my own personal experience also when you're doing fasting and keto because of the stable energy you find that you can actually skip meals quite easily and so that gives you a nice gateway into fasting for longer periods of times if you like there's a lot of benefits to fasting they could talk about that's fine another time but in general it gives you this freedom to live life to enjoy life and not be so obsessed about food i think that's the biggest liberating thing about keto is that if you do the keto diet while that food ceases to be a kind of um habitual obsession that drives the progress of the day you more of the day is spent kind of lost in the passions and the things you love doing i just found that when i was doing the kind of many meals a day i i would find myself thinking about food a lot like it it drove the structure of the day it uh influenced a lot of the things i would talk about and think about you don't really think of it that way until it's gone and you notice like with uh keto and fasting that you can spend really long hours of the day just doing some cool stuff that you love and food doesn't come into play in your in your mind and your actual activity so my personal sort of cons of the keto diet is uh i enjoy eating like higher volume it gives you a feeling of fullness and i think with the keto diet is a lower volume of food in general you're still full in terms of your body not saying you're hungry but there's not a feeling of real fullness now that's also a benefit because you just feel better you feel lighter less bloated and so on i find this is actually changing a lot but keto used to be a little bit less socially friendly most of the fun foods fuji associated with kind of just like going crazy at parties or restaurants and so on have a ton of carbs and so in social settings it's it often feel like you're being restrictive and not partaking in the fun if you're doing a keto diet i think that's changing a lot people are becoming much more accepting of it for example mcdonald's you can uh order just the beef patties for a dollar fifty as i've talked about and people don't look at you weird at least in my experience if you just get the burger without a bun another con is keto and carnivore just doesn't sound healthy so i usually try not to talk about it too much because it just makes me feel really good my mind focused my body performs well but i don't know if i want to sort of prescribe it to others it's definitely something i recommend you try but i just don't feel like conclusively saying this diet is great for everybody i really don't i certainly don't know enough to be able to say that and also it just doesn't sound right to say that and while i've loved meat my whole life i feel the best when i eat a lot of meat i do think about the ethical side of veganism it's something i'm reading about now i'm thinking a lot about it's an ongoing journey perhaps i'll have more to say more of my mind to be changed in the future we'll see but for now for many years now i've been uh really enjoying the keto diet a mix of keto and carnivore diets we'll see what the future holds what was the darkest time in your life and what did your road to recovery look like in general i love life so it's difficult for me to talk about these kinds of things but let me briefly say that i think the darkest times have been when i've put my faith in people when i opened my heart to them and they turned out not to be the best versions of themselves or maybe the kind of amazing people that i'd hope i thought they might be so my heart has been broken in small ways in my life as i'm sure it has been for many people but the fire of hope still burns bright perhaps even brighter you mentioned road to recovery i think with the people i mentioned i focus on the positive moments and there always are and uh just have gratitude for those and just don't linger on the negative i just remember the good times that's how i recover that's how i keep my optimism and that's how i keep my heart open for future amazing people to take the risk and i'm sure my heart will be broken again perhaps many times in the future but um i think it's always worth the risk uh i like the i wrote this down uh the marcus aurelius quote love the people with whom fate brings you together and do so with all of your heart i think that's all we can do i hope some of these answers were at least somewhat interesting or useful if so i'll try to do it again in the future it is currently 4 2 oh it's 4 21. when i started saying that sentence it was 4 20 am a good time to end as any perhaps the best good night i love you all thanks for listening to this ama episode and thank you to our sponsors brooklyn and sheetz indeed hiring website expressvpn and theragun muscle recovery device so the choice is sleep employment privacy or muscle recovery choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast and now since we talked about einstein's thoughts about happiness and pigs let me leave you with some words from winston churchill i'm fond of pigs dogs look up to us cats look down on us pigs treat us as equals thank you for listening and hope to see you next time