This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #455 with Adam Frank.
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Therefore, you could put a probability, we called it the Pessimism Line. We don’t really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, but we could set a limit using this. We could say, look, if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus-22, one in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we’re alone. If it’s anywhere larger than that, then we’re not the first. It’s happened somewhere else. To me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn’t tell me there’s anybody nearby, the galaxy could be sterile. It just told me that unless nature’s really has some bias against civilizations, we’re not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.
The one answer I can tell you, which was an important part of the problem, is how many planets are there? Just like people have been arguing about the existence of life elsewhere for 2500 years, people have been arguing about planets for the exact same amount of time. You can see Aristotle yelling at Democritus about this. You can see they had very wildly different opinions about how common planets were going to be, and how unique Earth was. And that question got answered. Which is pretty remarkable, that in a lifetime, you can have a 2500-year-old question. The answer is they’re everywhere. There are planets everywhere.
It was possible that planets were really rare. We didn’t really understand how planets formed. If you go back to, say the turn of the 20th Century, there was a theory that said planets formed when two stars passed by each other closely, and then material was gravitationally squeezed out. In which case, those kinds of collisions are so rare that you would expect one in a trillion stars to have planets. Instead, every star in the night sky has planets.
A proto-star is basically the young star, this ball of gas where nuclear reactions are getting started. But it’s also a disc. As material falls inward because everything’s rotating, as it falls inward, it’ll spin up and then it’ll form a disc. The material will collect in what’s called an accretion disc or a proto-planetary disc. You can simulate all of that.
Once you get into the disc itself and you want to do planets, things get a little bit more complicated because the physics gets more complicated. Now you got to start worrying about dust, because actually dust … Dust is the wrong word. It’s smoke, really. These are the tiniest bits of solids. They will coagulate in the disc to form pebbles, and then the pebbles will collide to form rocks. And then the rocks will form boulders, et cetera, et cetera. That process is super complicated. But we’ve been able to simulate enough of it to begin to get a handle on how planets form. How you accrete enough material to get the first proto-planets, or planetary embryos as we call them.
The next step is those things start slamming into each other to form planetary-sized bodies. Then the planetary bodies slam into each other. Earth, the Moon came about because there was a Mars-sized body that slammed into the Earth and basically blew off all the material. Then eventually formed the Moon.
There’s a really interesting point. Close to the star, temperatures are really high. The only thing that can condense, that can freeze out, is going to be stuff like metals. That’s why you find Mercury is this giant ball of iron, basically. Then as you go further out, stuff, the gas gets cooler. And now you can start getting things like water to freeze. There’s something we call the Snow Line, which is somewhere in our solar system, out around between Mars and Jupiter. That’s the reason why the giant planets in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all have huge amounts of ice in them, or water and ice.
Actually, Jupiter and Saturn don’t have so much, but the moons do. The moons have so much water in them that there’s oceans. We’ve got a number of those moons have got more water on them than there’s water on Earth.
Once you get up to a planet-sized body, then you have to switch over to almost a different kind of simulation. Often what you’re doing is you’re assuming the planet this this spherical ball, and then you’re doing a 1D, a radial calculation. You’re just asking, “All right, what is the structure of it going to be? Am I going to have a solid iron core, or am I going to get a solid iron core with a liquid iron core out around it?” Like we have on Earth. Then you get a silicate, rocky mantle, and then a crust. All those details, those are beyond being able to do full 3D simulations from Ab Initio, from scratch. We’re not there yet.
This is what’s wild. The most common kind of planet in the universe, we don’t have in our solar system. Which is amazing, right? We’ve been able to study or observe enough planets now to get a census. We have an idea of whose average, whose weird. Our solar system’s weird, because the average planet has a mass somewhere between a few times the mass of the Earth, to maybe 10 times the mass of the Earth. That’s exactly where there are no planets in our solar system.
The smaller ones of those we call Super-Earths, the larger ones we call Sub-Neptunes. They’re anybody’s guess. We don’t really know what happens to material when you’re squeezed to those pressures, which is millions, tens of millions of times the pressure on the surface of the Earth. Those details really will matter of what’s on in there, because that will determine whether or not you have, say for example, plate tectonics.
We think plate tectonics may have been really important for life on Earth, for the evolution of complex life on Earth. It turns out, and this is the next generation where we’re going with the understanding the evolution of planets and life. It turns out that you actually have to think hard about the planetary context for life. You can just be like, “Oh, there’s a warm pond,” and then some interesting chemistry happens in the warm pond. You actually have to think about the planet as a whole and what it’s gone through in order to really understand whether a planet is a good place for life or not.
Early on in Earth’s history, there was barely any land. We were actually a water world, with just a couple of Australia-sized cratons they called them, proto-continents.
We went through these snowball Earth phases. If it wasn’t for the fact that we had an active plate tectonics, which had a lot of vulcanism on it, we could have been locked in that forever. Once you get into a snowball state, a planet can be trapped there forever. Which is maybe you already had life formed, but then because it’s so cold, you may never get anything more than just microbes.
What plate tectonics does, because it fosters more vulcanism, is that you’re going to get carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, which warms the planet up and gets you out of the snowball Earth phase. But even more, there’s even more really important things.
I just finished a paper where we were looking at something called the Hard Steps Model, which is this model that’s been out there for a long time that purports to say intelligent life in the universe will be really rare. It made all these assumptions about the Earth’s history, particularly about the history of life and the history of the planet have nothing to do with each other. It turns out, and as I was doing the reading for this, that Earth probably, early on, had a more mild form of plate tectonics, and then somewhere about a billion years ago, it ramped up.
That ramping up changed everything on the planet, because here’s a funny thing. The Earth used to be flat. All the Flat Earthers out there can get excited for one second.
The weathering of that, the erosion of that puts huge amounts of nutrients, things that microbes want to use, into the oceans. And then what we call the net primary productivity, the bottom of the food chain, how much sugars they are producing, how much photosynthesis they are doing shot up by a factor of almost 1000. The fact that you had plate tectonics supercharged evolution in some sense. We’re not exactly sure how it happened, but it’s clear that the amount of life, the amount of living activity that was happening really got a boost from the fact that something there was this new vigorous form of plate tectonics.
But then you go through this period they called the Boring Billion, where it’s a billion years and it’s just microbes. Nothing’s happening, it’s just microbes. The microbes are doing amazing things. They’re inventing fermentation. Thank you very much, we appreciate that. But it’s not until you get probably these continents slamming into each other, you really get the beginning of continents forming and driving changes that evolution has to respond to. That on a planetary scale, this turmoil, this chaos is creating new niches, as well as closing other ones. Biology, evolution has to respond to that.
Somewhere around there is when you get the Cambrian Explosion. It’s when suddenly every body plan … Evolution goes on an orgy, essentially. Yeah. It does look like that chaos or that turmoil was actually very helpful to evolution.
With the comet impact, the K-T Boundary, certainly lots of niches opened up. That’s why we’re here, because our ancestors were little basically rodents, rats living under the footsteps of the dinosaurs. It was that comet impact that opened the route for us. That still took another 65 million years. It was like this thing immediately happened.
But what we found with this Hard Steps Paper, because the whole idea of the Hard Steps Paper was it was one of these anthropic reasoning kinds of things. Where Brandon Carter said, “Oh, look. The intelligence doesn’t show up on Earth until about almost close to when the end of the Sun’s lifetime.” He’s like, “Well, there should be no reason why the Sun’s lifetime and the time for evolution to produce intelligence should be the same.” He goes through all this reasoning, anthropic reasoning. He ends up with the idea that, “Oh, it must be that the odds of getting intelligence are super-low, and so that’s the hard step.”
There was a series of steps in evolution that were very, very hard. Because of that, you can calculate some probability distributions. Everybody loves a good probability distribution, and they went a long way with this. But it turns out that the whole thing is flawed because, when you look at it, of course the timescale for the Sun’s evolution and the timescale for the evolution on life are coupled, because the timescale for evolution of the Earth is coupled, is about the same timescale as the evolution of the Sun. It’s billions of years. The Earth evolves over billions of years.
Life and the Earth co-evolve. That’s what Brandon Carter didn’t see is that actually, the fate of the Earth the fate of life are inextricably combined. This is really important for astrobiology, too. Life doesn’t happen on a planet, it happens to a planet. This is something that David Grinspoon and Sara Walker both say, and I agree with this. It’s a really nice way of putting it.
Plate tectonics, the evolution of oxygen, of an oxygen atmosphere, which only happened because of life. These things, these are things that are happening where life and the planet are sloshing back-and-forth. Rather than, to your point about do you need giant catastrophes, maybe not giant catastrophes. But what happens is, as the Earth and life are evolving together, windows are opening up, evolutionary windows.
For example, life put oxygen into the atmosphere. When life invented this new form of photosynthesis about 2.5 billion years ago, that broke water apart to work to do its chemical shenanigans. It broke water apart and pushed oxygen into the atmosphere. That’s why there’s oxygen in the atmosphere. It’s only because of life.
That opened up huge possibilities, new spaces for evolution to happen. But it also changed the chemistry of the planet forever. The introduction of oxygen photosynthesis changed the planet forever, and it opened up a bunch of windows for evolution that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Like for example, you and I, we need that amount of oxygen. Big-brained creatures need an oxygen-rich atmosphere because oxygen is so potent for metabolism. You couldn’t get intelligent creatures 100 million years after the planet formed.
There was this thing, Gaia Theory, which James Lovelock introduced in the ’70s. And then, Lynn Margulis, the Biologist Lynn Margulis together. This Gaia Theory was the idea that life takes over a planet, life hijacks a planet in a way that the sum total of life creates these feedbacks between the planet and the life, such that it keeps the planet habitable. It’s kind of a homeostasis.
I can go out … Right now outside, it’s 100-degrees. And I go outside, but my internal temperature is going to be the same. I can go back to Rochester, New York in the winter, and it’s going to be zero-degrees, but my internal temperature is going to be the same. That’s homeostasis.
The idea of Gaia Theory was that life, the biosphere exerts this pressure on the planet or these feedbacks on the planet, that even as other things are changing, the planet will always stay in the right kinds of conditions for life. Now when this theory came out, it was very controversial. People were like, “Oh my God, what are you, smoking weed?” There were all these Gaian Festivals with Gaian dances. It became very popular in the New Age community.
But Lovelock actually, they were able to show that no, this has nothing to do with the planet being conscious or anything. It was about these feedbacks, that the biology, the biosphere can exert these feedbacks. We’re still unclear whether there are true Gaian feedbacks, in the sense that the planet can really exert complete control. But it is absolutely true that the biosphere is a major player in Earth’s history.
The biosphere is somewhere … Sara Walker, and David Grinspoon, and I actually did a paper on this about the idea of planetary intelligence, or cognition across a planetary scale. I think that actually is possible. It’s not conscious, but there is a cognitive activity going on. The biosphere, in some sense, knows what is happening because of these feedbacks. It’s still unclear whether we have these full Gaian feedbacks, but we certainly have semi-Gaian feedbacks.
If there’s a perturbation on the planetary scale, temperature, insulation, how much sunlight’s coming in, the biosphere will start to have feedbacks that will damp that perturbation. Temperature goes up, the biosphere starts doing something, temperature comes down.
Now we just invented this technosphere in the last couple of hundred years. What we were arguing in that paper is that it’s an immature technosphere. Because right now, with climate change and all the other things we’re doing, the technosphere right now is destroying the conditions under which it needs to maintain itself. The real job for us if we’re going to last over geological timescales, if we want a technosphere that’s going to last tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, then we’ve got to become mature. Which means to not undermine the conditions, to not subvert the conditions that you need to stay alive. As of right now, I’d say we’re not autopoietic.
But what you can think of right now with what’s happening with the Anthropocene, the great acceleration that is the technosphere, is the creation of it, that is a giant perturbation on the biosphere. The technosphere sits on top of the biosphere, and if the technosphere undermines the biosphere for its own conditions of habitability, then you’re in trouble. The biosphere is not going away. There’s nothing we could do. The idea that we have to save the Earth is a little ridiculous. The Earth is not a furry little bunny that we need to protect. But it’s the conditions for us. Humanity emerged out of the Holocene, the last 10,000 years interglacial period. We can’t tolerate very different kinds of Earths. That’s what I mean about a perturbation.
This paper here, this plot is all these different people who’ve written all these papers. This is the point, actually. You can see all these papers that were written on the hard steps. Each one proposing a different set of what those steps should be. There’s this other idea from biology of the major transitions in evolution, MTEs, that those were the hard steps.
But what we actually found was that none of those are actually hard. The whole idea of hard steps, that there are hard steps, is actually suspect. What’s amazing about this model is it shows how important it is to actually work with people who are in the field. Brandon Carter was a brilliant physicist, the guy who came up with this. And then lots of physicists and astrophysicists like me have used this. But the people who actually study evolution and the planet were never involved.
If you went and talked to an evolutionary biologist or a bio-geophysicist, they’d look at you when you explained this to them and they’d be like, “What? What are you guys doing?” It turns out, none of the details, or none of the conceptual structure of this matches with what the people who actually study the planet and its evolution.
Then the next thing is this idea of whether a step is hard or not. Because for hard, what we mean by a hard step is, like I said, every time there’s a generation, every time there’s a next generation born, you’re rolling the dice on whether this mutation will happen. The idea of something being a hard step, there’s two ways in which something might even appear as a hard step and not be. Or actually not be a hard step at all.
One is that you see something that has occurred in evolution that has only happened once. Let’s take the opposite, we see something that’s happened multiple times. Like wings, lots of examples of wings over lots of different evolutionary lineages. Making wings is not a hard step.
There’s certain other things that people say, “No, that’s a hard step.” Oxygen, the oxygen photosynthesis. But they tend to be so long ago that we’ve lost all the information. There could be other things in the fossil record that made this innovation, but they’re just gone now so you can’t tell, so there’s information loss.
The other thing is the idea of pulling up the ladder. That somebody, some species makes the innovation, but then it fills the niche and nobody else can do it again. Yeah, it only happened once but it happened once because basically, the creature was so successful it took over, and there was no space for anybody else to evolve it.
Yeah. The interesting thing about this was seeing how much, once you look at the details of life’s history on Earth, how it really shifts you away from this hard steps model. It shows you that those details, as we were talking about with do you have to know about the planet, do you have to know about plate tectonics? Yeah, you’re going to have to.
Again, nothing against Carter. It was a brilliant idea. But it just goes to show you … I’m a theoretical physicist. Give me a simplified model, with dynamical equations and some initial conditions, I’m very happy. But there’s this great XTC comic, where somebody’s working something out on the board, and this physicist is looking over and saying, ” Oh, oh, I just wrote down an equation for that. I solved your problem. Do you guys even have a journal for this?” The subtitle is Why Everybody Hates Physicists.
Frank Drake in 1960 does the first ever astrobiological experiment. He gets a radio telescope, points it at a couple of stars, and listens for signals. That was the first time anybody had done any experiment about any kind of life in the history of humanity. He does it, and he’s waiting for everybody to make fun of him. Instead, he gets a phone call from the government and says, “Hey, we want you to do a meeting on interstellar communications.” He’s like, “Okay.”
They organized a meeting with just eight people. A young Carl Sagan is going to be there as well. The night before, Drake has to come up with an agenda. How do you come up with an agenda for a meeting on a topic that no one’s ever talked about before? What he does, what’s so brilliant about the Drake Equation, is he breaks the problem of how many civilizations are there out there into a bunch of sub-problems. He breaks it into seven sub-problems. Each one of them is a factor in an equation that, when you multiply them all together, you get the number of civilizations out there that we could communicate with.
The first term is the rate at which stars form. The second term is the fraction of those stars that have plants, F-sub-P. The next term is the number of planets in the habitable zone, the place where we think life could form. The next term after that is the fraction of those planets where actually an abiogenesis event, life forms, occurs. The next one is the fraction of planets on which you start to get intelligence. After that, it’s the fraction of planets where that intelligence goes on to create a civilization. Then finally, the last term, which is the one that we really care about, is the lifetime, have a civilization and how long does it last.
Now each one of these terms, what was brilliant about what he did was, what he was doing was he was quantifying our ignorance. By breaking the problem up into these seven sub-problems, he gave astronomers something to do. This is always with a new research field, you need a research program or else you just have a bunch of vague questions. You don’t even know really what you’re trying to do.
The star people could figure out how many stars were forming per year. The people who were interested in planets could go out and find techniques to discover planets, et cetera, et cetera.
So, the Drake equation is absolutely foundational for astrobiology, but we should remember that it’s not a law of nature. It’s not equal to MC squared. And so, you can see it being abused in some sense. Yeah, it’s generated a trillion papers. Some of those papers are good, I’ve written some of those. And some of those papers are bad, I’m not sure where my paper fits in on those. I’m saying one should be careful about what you’re using it for. But in terms of understanding the problem that astrobiology faces, this really broke it up in a useful way.
It’s incredible to think how many places and stories there are out there. So, the first term was F sub P, which is how many stars have planets. The next term is how many planets are in the habitable zone on average, and it turns out to be one over five, so around 0.2. So, that means you just count five of them go out at night and go one, two, three, four, five. One of them has an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone, like, whoa.
So basically, the habitable zone is the band of orbits around a star where you can have liquid water on the surface. You could take a glass of water, pour it on the surface, and it would just pull up. It wouldn’t freeze immediately, which would happen if your planet is too far out and it wouldn’t just boil away if your planet’s too close in. So, that’s the formal definition of the habitable zone. So, it’s a nice strict definition, there’s probably way more going on than that, but this is a place to start.
I wouldn’t be able to see life on Europa because it’s under 10 miles of ice. So, with the important thing about planets in the habitable zone is that we’re thinking they have atmospheres. Atmospheres are the things we can characterize across 10, 50 light years and we can see biosignatures as we’re going to talk about. So, there is a reason why the habitable zone becomes important for the detection of extra solar life.
So, they were laughing about this as they’re walking, and they started being physicists, started talking about interstellar travel, interstellar propulsion. Conversation goes on for a while, conversation turns to something else, they’ve gone to other things. About 40 minutes later, over lunch, Fermi blurts out, “Well, where is everybody?” Typical Fermi sort of thing. He’d done the calculation in his head and he suddenly realized that, look, if intelligence is common, that even traveling at sub lights speeds a civilization could cross, hop from one star system to the other and spread it out across the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years.
And he realized this, and so he was like, “Why aren’t they here now?” And that was the beginning of the Fermi paradox. It actually got picked up as a formal thing in 1975 in a paper by Hart where he actually went through this calculation and showed and said, “Well, there’s nobody here now, therefore, there’s nobody anywhere.” Okay, so that is what we will call the direct Fermi paradox, why aren’t they here now? But something happened after SETI began, where people started to, there was this idea of the great silence. People got this idea in their head that like, “Oh, we’ve been looking for decades now for signals of extra-terrestrial intelligence that we haven’t found any. Therefore, there’s nothing out there.
So, we’ll call that the indirect Fermi paradox and there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There’s never been any money to look. SETI was always done by researchers who were scabbing some time, some extra time from their other projects to look a little bit at the sky where the telescope, telescopes are expensive. So, Jason Wright, one of my collaborators, he and his students did a study where they looked at the entire search space for SETI, and imagine that’s an ocean. All the different stars you have to look at, the radio frequencies you have to look at, how when you look, how often you look.
Then they summed up all the SETI searches that had ever been done, they went through the literature. And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you’re looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That’s how much of the ocean that we’ve looked up. We’ve dragged a hot tub’s worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it, and so now are we going to say, “Well, there’s no fish in the ocean.” So, there is absolutely positively no indirect Fermi paradox, we just haven’t looked, but we’re starting to look. So finally, we’re starting to look, that’s what’s exciting.
The direct Fermi paradox, there are so many ways out of that. There’s a book called 77 Solutions to the Fermi Paradox that you can pick your favorite one. It just doesn’t carry a lot of weight because there’s so many ways around it. We did an actual simulation, my group, Jonathan Carroll, one of my collaborators, we actually simulated the galaxy and we simulated probes moving at sub light speed from one star to the other, gathering resources heading to the next one. And so, we could actually track the expansion wave across the galaxy, have one IA biogenesis event, and then watch the whole galaxy get colonized or settled. And it is absolutely true that wave crosses, Hart was right, Fermi was right, that wave crosses very quickly. But civilizations don’t last forever, so one question is when did they visit? When did they come to Earth? So, if you give civilizations a finite lifetime, let them last 10,000, 100,000 years, what you find is you now have a steady state. Civilizations are dying, they’re coming back, they’re traveling between the stars. What you find then is you can have big holes opened up. You can have regions of space where there is nobody for millions of years. And so, if we’re living in one of those bubbles right now, then maybe we revisited but we revisited 100 million years ago.
And there was a paper that Gavin Schmidt and I did that showed that if there was a civilization, whether it was dinosaurs or aliens that was here a 100 million years ago, there’s no way to tell, there’s no record left over, the fossil record is too sparse. The only way maybe you could tell is by looking at the isotopic strata to see if there was anything reminiscent of an industrial civilization. But the idea that you’d be able to find iPhones or toppled buildings after 100 million years is there’s no way.
And so, we realized is, “Well, okay, we got to get rid of time.” The lifetime thing, we can’t say anything about that, but if we don’t ask how long do they last but instead ask, “What’s the probability that there have been any civilizations at all?” No matter how long they lasted, I’m not asking whether they exist now or not, I’m just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the universe and that we were able to constrain. And so, what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is that those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run.
And the only way that we’re this whole process from a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed. So therefore, you could put a probability, we called it the pessimism line. We don’t really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, but we could set a limit using this. We could say, “Look, if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22, 1 in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we’re alone.” If it’s anywhere larger than that, then we’re not the first, it’s happened somewhere else. And to me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn’t tell me there’s anybody nearby, the galaxy could be sterile.
It just told me that unless nature’s really has some bias against civilizations, we’re not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.
Gave you an actual number that if you could somehow calculate what the probability of forming a technological civilization was, this thing shows you where the limit is. As long as you’re above 10 to the minus 22, then you actually absolutely, it has occurred in the history. Other civilizations have occurred in the history of the universe.
So, that means you really do need to think about like, “Okay, how do billion-year civilizations manifest themselves? What signatures will they leave?” And yeah, what’s so cool about it, it’s so much fun because you have to imagine the unimaginable. Obviously biological evolution can happen on those kinds of timescales, so you wouldn’t even really be the same thing you started out as. But social forms, what kind of social forms can you imagine that would be continuous over that? Or maybe they wouldn’t be continuous, should get they drop out, they destroy themselves, and then they come back. So, maybe it’s a punctuated evolution, but this is the fun part we have to work this out.
And I don’t think it’ll be necessarily all that different because really I think within a few hundred years we will have lots of people in the solar system, and it doesn’t even have to be on Mars. We did a paper where we look based on, because I always wanted to know about whether an idea in The Expanse was really possible. In The Expanse, the asteroid belt, what they’ve done is they have colonized the asteroid belt by hollowing out the asteroids and spinning them up and living on the inside because they have the Coriolis force. And I thought like, “Wow, what a cool idea.”
And when I ran the blog for NPR, actually talked to the guys and said, “Did you guys calculate this to see whether it’s possible?” Sadly, it’s not possible. The rock is just not strong enough that if you tried to spin it up to the speeds you need to get one third gravity, which is what I think the minimum you need for human beings. The rock would just fall apart, it would break. But we came up with another idea, which was that if you could take small asteroids, put a giant bag around them, a nanofiber bag and spin those up, it would inflate the bag. And then even a small couple of kilometer wide asteroid would expand out to, you could get a Manhattan’s worth of material inside.
So, forget about even colonizing Mars space stations or space habitats with millions of people in them. So anyway, the point is that I think within a few hundred years, it is not unimaginable that there will be millions, if not billions of people living in the solar system.
Whatever you want, a libertarian space habitat, everybody’s going to be able to create, there’ll be lots of experiments in human flourishing. And those kinds of experiments will be really useful for us to figure out better ways for us to interact and have maximum flourishing, maximum wellness, maximum democracy, maximum freedom.
So, I don’t think it’s a backup plan in that way, but I do think, like I said, it’s the prize. If we get through this, then we get the entire solar system to play around and experiment with and do really cool things with.
So, that’s why I think we’d be better off trying to solve these problems than I just think the odds that we’re going to be able to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars before that threat comes to head is small. So, we’d have to deal with the threat.
And so, A, how do we build a vibrant, powerful technosphere that also doesn’t mess with the biosphere, mess with the biosphere’s capacity to support our technosphere? So, by trying to build space habitats, in some sense, you’re thinking about building a small-scale version of this. So, I think the two problems are going to feedback on each other.
I think the Moon’s too much because it’s so sterile. But Mars, I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know, but it’s an interesting idea.
Because the bacteria, even though they’re individual examples of life, and I believe this the true unit of life, it’s not DNA, it’s not a cell, it’s the biosphere. It’s the whole community.
Now, because we know exactly where to look and we know exactly how to look, we can just go about looking for passive signatures of the civilization, going about its civilizationing business, without asking whether they want to be contacted or not. So this is what we call a biosignature or a technosignature. It is an imprint in the light from the planet of the activity of a biosphere or a technosphere, and that’s really important. That is why the whole Gaia idea ends up being astrobiological, that biospheres and technospheres are so potent, they change the entire planet, and you can see that from 20 light years.
So let’s give an example of a biosignature to start off with, which would be a signature of a biosphere, oxygen. Right? On earth at least, we know that oxygen is only in the atmosphere because life put it there. If life went away, the oxygen, and particularly oxygen and methane, that pair, they would disappear very quickly. They’d react away. They’d all be gone. So if you find a planet with oxygen and methane, that’s a good bet that there’s a biosphere there. Okay, what about technospheres? Technospheres, so I’m the principal investigator on the first grant NASA has ever given to do these exoplanet technosignatures. For reasons we can talk about, NASA had gotten pretty gun-shy about funding anything about intelligent life, but okay. What’s an example of a technosignature? Well, one could be atmospheric, “Pollution.” I’m going to put, “Pollution,” in quotes here because it doesn’t have to be pollution, but gases like chlorofluorocarbons.
So we dumped a huge amount of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere by mistake. It was affecting the ozone, but we put so much in there that actually, this is one of the things we did, we did a paper where we showed, you could detect it across interstellar distances. You could look at the atmosphere, look at the light coming from a distant planet, pass the light through a spectrograph and see the spectral lines, the fingerprint, the spectral fingerprint of chlorofluorocarbons in an atmosphere. And that would for sure tell you that there was a technological civilization there, because there’s no other way to make chlorofluorocarbons except through some kind of industrial process.
So one of these things could be the structure of the network of chemical reactions that biology always produces very different chemical networks, who’s reacting with who, than just rock and water. So there’s been some proposals for networked biosignatures. Information theory, you can try and look at the information that is in the different compounds that you find in the atmosphere, and maybe that information shows you like, “Oh, there’s too much information here. There must’ve been biology happening. It’s not just rock.” Same thing for techno. That’s what we’re working on right now, for technosignatures as well.
So our job in this grant is to develop the first ever library of technosignatures. Nobody’s really ever thought about this before. So we’re trying to come up with all the possible ideas for what a civilization might produce that could be visible across interstellar distances. And are these good ones or are these ones going to be hard to detect or such?
And then let the sun act like a lens and collect, focus the light onto the telescope and you would be able to get, and they’ve done… It’s amazing. This idea is insane. They’d be able to get, if everything works out, 24 kilometer resolution. You’d be able to see Manhattan on an exoplanet. And this thing, it sounds insane, but actually, NASA, the team has already gotten through three levels of NASA… There’s the NASA program for, “Give us your wackiest idea.” And then the ones that survive that are like, “Okay, tell us whether that wacky idea is even feasible?” And they’re marching along. And the idea is that they even have plans for how you’d be able to get these probes out into the Oort cloud on relatively fast time scales. You need to be about 500 times as far from the sun as earth is, but right now, the idea seems to hold together.
So probably when I’ll be dead, but when you’re an old man, it’s possible that something like this… Could you imagine having that kind of resolution, a picture of an exoplanet down to kilometers? So I’m very excited about that [inaudible 01:24:26].
Now, we probably couldn’t land, so maybe we take 30 years to build, 10 years to get there, 10 years to get the picture back. Okay, you’re dead, but your kids are… You know what I mean? So it becomes now this multi-generational project. How long did it take to build the pyramids? How long did it take to build the giant cathedrals? Those were multi-generational projects, and I think we’re on the cusp of that kind of project.
For example, there was this planet K2-18b, which they did a beautiful job getting the spectra, and the spectra indicated it may be an entirely new kind of habitable world called a hycean world, hycean meaning hydrogen ocean world. And that is a kind of planet that it would be in the super earth, sub-Neptune domain we were talking about, maybe eight times the mass of the earth. But it’s got a layer of hydrogen, of an atmosphere of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas. So hydrogen will keep the planet underneath it warm enough that you could get liquid water, you can get a giant ocean of liquid water, and that’s an entirely different kind of planet. That could be habitable planet. It could be a 60 degree warm ocean.
So the data that came out of JWST for that planet was good enough to be able to indicate like, “Oh yeah, you know what? From what we understand with the models, this looks like it could be a hycean world.”
It turns out that a Dyson sphere doesn’t really work, it’s unstable, but a Dyson swarm, and that’s really what he meant, this large collection of large orbiting structures that were able to collect light.
Turns out, sadly, they were not alien megastructures. They were probably gas or dust clouds, but it raised the possibility like, “Oh, these are observable.” And people have worked out the details of what they would look like. You don’t really need direct imaging. You can do transits, right? They’re big enough that when they pass in front of the star, they’re going to produce a little blip of light because that’s what they’re supposed to. They’re absorbing starlight. So people have worked out like, “Well, a square one or a triangular one.”
The next would be to use all the starlight there is from that star. Right? So that’s the Dyson sphere. So Dyson had already proposed his idea of the swarm and Kardashev was picking up. So that’s a type two civilization. Type three is galactic scale, a civilization that could use all the starlight in a galaxy. So where are we now? Remarkably, on a log scale. We’re at 0.7 of a type one.
So there’s a way in which we probably can’t get to a type one without devastating the earth’s climate. The most important thing actually here is probably, this is why space becomes… So the colonization or settlement of space. If we have an idea that we’ve been working on for a while called service worlds, that at some point you probably move a lot of your industry off world. We’ve got Mercury, for example. There’s nothing on Mercury, there’s no life on Mercury. Why don’t you put your energy harvesting there? Because you can’t mess with the biosphere. The biosphere is more powerful than you are. And so there’s limits to how much energy we can harvest to do work on the earth without really adversely affecting the biosphere.
So yeah, right. It’s the kind of technology. I think there’s probably absolutely limits on how much energy you can use, but how do you use that energy? And then also, getting off planet eventually. If you want to use 10 times more energy than that, you’re going to not going to do it on world.
Another possibility is looking for the tailings of asteroid mining. This was an idea, it was a group at Harvard Smithsonian, that to be able to look for… If you’re really chewing up asteroids to build space habitats, there’d be dust particles left around and would they look different from just say the dust from just regular collisions?
So there’s this process called gardening, which is just the micrometeorite, constant rain of micrometeorites, and that’s where you get the lunar regolith. That fine powder on the Moon is because of this gardening. And it turns out it is literally hundreds of millions to billions of years-
If you see an atmosphere that is wildly out of equilibrium that indicates that there’s something happening on that planet biosphere or technosphere that is pumping gases into the atmosphere, that is keeping the whole system from relaxing.
So yeah, there are possibilities along with that. One of the funny things, I don’t know if they’ve gotten past this, but somebody calculated the problem with the Alcubierre drive or this warp drive was that if you dropped out of warp, there would be this spray of gamma rays that would sterilize any planet in front of you. So, it’s like, “Well yeah, you probably don’t want to do that,” but that would be a great bios or techno signature, another planet obliterated.
Because nothing can move across space faster than the speed of light, but spacetime itself can move faster than the speed of light. But here’s the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something. The thing you added, the little fictional term you added into the equations is something called exotic matter and it doesn’t exist. It’s really just something we dreamed up to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do. So, it’s a nice fiction but really right now, we live in this weird moment in history of the great acceleration where the technology we used now is completely different from the technology we used 10 years ago is remarkably different from the technology from 100 years ago.
But I remember playing Assassin’s Creed where everybody’s like, “What is it, it’s 1200?” And everybody’s like, “Stab, stab, stab.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s a great game.” And then I got Assassin’s Creed II and it was 300 years later and everybody’s like, “Stab, stab, stab.” And it was like 300 years and the technology hadn’t changed and that was actually true for most of human history. You used your great-grandfather’s tools because there was no need to have any other new tools and you probably did his job. So, we could be fooled into thinking like, “Oh, technology’s going to go on forever, we’re always going to find new advances.”
As opposed to sometimes things just flatten out for a long time. So, you have to be careful about that bias that we have living in this time of great acceleration.
So, I don’t know. Yeah, there’s no way I’m going to say that we won’t get warp drives. But as of right now, it’s all fictional. It’s barely even a coherent concept.
I thought that was a really interesting inversion. The interesting thing about, we were talking about these space habitats.
And that anybody we meet is going to be a machine anyway, whether it’s downloaded bodies or it’s just going to be artificial intelligence. There’s the whole idea of how long does biological evolution last? Maybe it’s a very short period before everybody goes to, or the machines take over and kill you, or it’s some hybrid.
And so, evolution’s about solving problems to survive that the environment presents. And the environment’s always going to present these problems in physical and chemical terms, so that you’d expect a balance between what we call convergence, evolutionary convergence and evolutionary contingency. So, if you’ve got to move along a surface, a hard surface and air, then the idea of some kind of jointed stick legs makes sense that you’re probably going to trigger that. If you look at Earth’s history multiple times, multiple lineages that had nothing to do with each other are going to solve the problem of getting towards energy sources using some kind of stick-like apparatus.
So, what we’ve been talking about is convergence. You expect that evolution will converge on wings multiple times when presented with the problems that wings can solve. But contingency is accidents that you’ve got something that’s evolving a certain kind of wing, a leathery wing. And then the climate changes and they all die out, end of story or an asteroid, total accident, asteroid hits. And so, contingency accidents play also a huge role in evolution. And one of the things that lots of evolutionary biologists have talked about is the idea that if you ran the tape of Earth’s history over again, would you get the same creatures? Now, Stephen Jay Gould was of the opinion that no way, you wouldn’t find anything on Earth that resembled any species today.
They’ve done experiments actually on this with E. coli. You take a bunch of E. coli, you let them evolve for a while, you take a bunch of them out, freeze them, let one, let that population continue to evolve, the other one’s frozen. Now, started over again with the frozen. And it seems to be that contingency tends to win. At least from what we can tell, that’s not a hard result, but in those experiments, what you find is that accidents really do matter. And this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks, how many joints they’re going to be? Anybody’s guess.
Do you expect humanoids, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That’s probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
But the very interesting thing about purpose is that once you do get to a idea generating species or collective organism, yeah, then all bets are off and there is goals, there is teleology. Now suddenly, absolutely, there’s a direction implied. So that’s a cool interesting thing that once you get to that, evolution stops being goalless and directionless and suddenly, yeah, we’re the ones who supply or any kind of creature like us has an absolute direction that way they decide on.
So, definitely we should be cautious, I would say, because we just have zero information. And the idea, you used to have this idea of, well, if they’re advanced, they’ve managed to survive. So of course, they’re going to be wearing togas and be singing kumbaya, but I just wouldn’t assume that. It’s also possible though that their cognitive structure is so different that we’re not even living in the same universe in a certain way. I think we have to be prepared for that. We may not even be able to recognize each other in some way as cognizing beings. One of my favorite movies is Arrival, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that one.
I really love that one because they literally, they have a different language. They have a different cognitive structure in terms of their language, and they’re literally living in a different physics.
And in the movie, they send a Carl Sagan guy in and a linguist, and the Carl Sagan guy fails immediately. And it’s the linguist who understands that language is actually embodied. Language is not just something that happens in your head, it’s actually the whole experience and she’s the one who breaks through. And it just points to the idea that how utterly different the cognitive structures of a different species should be. So somehow, we have to figure out how to think about it, but be so careful of our biases or figure out a systematic way to break through our biases and not just make science fiction movies. You know what I mean?
So, those are the kind of questions. Like I said, it’s not high on my list of thinking this could happen, but it could happen. Unless you look, you don’t know.
And I’ve begun to internalize and understand that perspective of why you’re doing that. And if I was an alien civilization, I probably would be doing a similar kind of thing. And of course, there’s always the teenager or the troll who’s going to start messing with this stuff or the scientists.
Because the idea that when you ask, what would you do if you were an alien? But again, alien minds could be so unbelievably different that they wouldn’t even recognize the question you just posed.
Because we have this thing that we call standards of evidence, and it’s the idea of you have a piece of evidence that you want to link to a claim. And under what conditions can you say, “Oh, look, I’ve got evidence of this claim X, Y, and Z.” And in science, we are so mean to each other about whether or not that piece of evidence lives up to the standards that we have. And we spent 400 years determining what those standards are, and that is why cell phones work. If you didn’t have super rigorous standards about what you think that’s, “Oh, this little antenna, I’ve invented a new kind of antenna that I can slip into the cell phone and I can show you that it works.”
If you didn’t have these standards, every cell phone would be a brick. And when it comes to UFOs and UAPs, the evidence you have and the claim that though this shows that we are being visited by non-human, advanced civilization just doesn’t even come close to the same standards. I’m going to have to obey or whatever live under. If my team, the group I work with is one of them says, “Look, we’ve discovered and he wants to announce that, oh, we’ve discovered a technosignature on an alien planet.” We’re going to get shredded as we expect to be, we expect to be beaten up. And the UAP, UFO community should expect the same thing. You don’t get a pass because it’s a really cool topic.
So, that’s where I am right now. I just don’t think any of the evidence is even close to anything that could support that claim.
You better have all of that nailed down before you make that kind of claim. So we have to have characterized detectors looking up, down, and maybe on planes themselves, we need a rational search strategy. So let’s say you want to lay out these ground-based detectors. Where do you put them? Right? There’s only so much money in the world, so do you want to put them near places where you’ve seen a lot of things beforehand or do you want to have them try and do sparse coverage of the entire country?
And then you need the data analysts analysis, right? You’re going to have so much data, so many false positives or false triggering that you need a way of sorting through enormous amounts of data and figuring out what you’re going to throw out and what you’re going to keep, and all of these things we’re used to doing in other scientific enterprises. And without that, if we don’t do that, we’re going to be having the same damn argument about these things for the next 100 years.
Like, okay, there’s an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly. They don’t want to be detected. They’ve got super powerful technology, but they really suck at using it because we keep seeing them, we keep seeing them, but then they disappear. I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under. So there’s that whole sort of argument. You’ve got to explain why if they want to stay hidden, are they so bad at it? So that’s why I take that level of difficulty and then I put it on top of where should I look? I should look at where they’re from. That makes me want to look at do the telescopic stuff.
So life has this possibility of innovating, of being creative. So what it means is, and that’s kind of a fundamental definition of what it means to be alive. It goes past itself. So give life enough time and what are the end result? That’s why I love science fiction so much. At some point, does life reach a point where it climbs into the laws of physics itself. It becomes the laws of physics or these sort of lie at the extreme limits of thinking about what we mean by reality, what we mean by experience. But I’m not sure there was much we can do with them scientifically, but they’re open-ended question about the open-ended nature of what it means to be alive and what life can do.
And so yeah, black holes are super cool. Cosmology is super cool. But really this question of what is life? Especially, from by viewing it from the inside, because it’s really about the verb to be. Really what is the most impressing philosophical question beyond science? Is the verb to be, what is being? This is what Stephen Hawking said when he talked about, “What puts the fire in the equations? The fire.” The fire is this presence and this is where it touches things like whatever you want to say it, the sacred, spirituality, whatever you want to talk about. My first book was about science and human spirituality. So this question of life, what makes life as a physical system so different is to me much more because that is where being appears. Being doesn’t appear out there. The only place that ever appears to any of us is us. I can do this kind of projection into this third person thing, but nobody ever has that, that God’s eye view. That’s a story we tell. This is where, this between us is where the verb to be, appears.
It’s this sort of raw presence that you can’t get away from until you die. And then who the hell knows that as long as you’re around, it’s there. And what we’re saying is that, that is the way to say this, that is the precondition for the possibility of science and the whole nature of science, the way it has evolved is that it purposely pushed that out. It pushed that out. So it could make progress, and that’s fine for a certain class of problems. But when we try to answer, when we try and go deeper, there’s a whole other class of problems. The nature of consciousness, the nature of time, quantum mechanics, that comes back to bite us. And that if we don’t learn how to take, understand that, that is always the background, that experience is always the background. Then we just end up with these paradoxes and that require this intellectual yoga to get out of.
So what is it? One is reductionism that you are nothing but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry, which is nothing but all the way down to quarks. That’s it. So that’s reductionism.
The objective frame that science gives us this god’s eye view, this third-person view of the world to view the world from the outside. That’s what science bequeaths to us, that view.
Physicalism, that everything in the world is basically made of stuff. There’s nothing else to talk about that, that’s all there is. And everything can be reduced to that.
And then also the reification of mathematics, that mathematics is somehow more real than this.
And there’s a bunch of other things. But all these together, what they all do is they end up pushing experience out and saying experience is an epiphenomena. Consciousness. I tend not to use the word consciousness. I think it leads us in the wrong direction. We should focus on experience because it is a verb kind of in a way. It is verb-like and by being blind to that, we end up with these paradoxes and problems that really not only block science, but also have been detrimental to society as a whole, especially where we’re at right now.
We can’t reduce what happens in science to some sort of formal… A lot of it is about we love our formal systems, our mathematics, and we’re substituting. That’s one of the things that, there’s two philosophers we really like for our heroes. One is Husserl, who is a mathematician, who invented phenomenology. And the other is Whitehead, who’s one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. And Husserl came up with this idea of the surreptitious substitution. Part of The Blind Spot is substituting a formal system, a calculus of data for actual experience that that’s more important.
And so let me just do, before I go to those three responses, let’s just do the parable of temperature because I think people can… It’ll help them understand what we mean. So think about degree Celsius. We have in the modern scientific culture we live in, we think like, oh yeah, degree Celsius. They’re out there. The universe, the molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees Kelvin. The way we got there is we’ve forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience. We started off with science by, we had the subjective experience of hot and cold. I feel hot, I feel cold, you feel hot, you feel cold. Science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what Michel Bitbol philosopher calls, “The structural invariance.” The things that we could both kind of agree on. So we figured out like, oh, we could make a gradiated little cylinder that’s got mercury in it and that hot things will be higher in on that gradiated cylinder, cold things will be lower, and we can both kind of figure out what we’re going to agree on are our standards for that. And then we have thermometry, yay. We have a way of having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal experience of hot or cold.
And then from that, we can come up with thermodynamics, etc. And then we end up at the bottom of that with this idea of everyday I wake up and I check my phone and I’m like, oh, it’s going to be 60 degrees out. Great. And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold. That thermodynamics, the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from. It required that bodily experience that also, not just me, I have to tell you, it’s part of my communication with you, cold today, isn’t it? That from that basic irreducible experience of being in the world with everything that it involves, I developed degree Celsius, but then I forgot about it. I forgot the experience. So that’s called the amnesia of experience.
So that’s what we mean by how the blind spot emerges, how we end up, how science purposely pushes experience out of the way so it can make progress, but then it forgets that experience was important. So where does this show up? Why is this? What are the responses to trying to get this back in and where this crisis of meaning emerge? So scientific triumphalism is the idea that the only thing that’s true for us are scientific truths. Unless it can be codified in a formal system and represented as data, captured in some kind of scientific causal network, it doesn’t even exist. And anything else that’s not part of it that can be formalized in that way is an epiphenomenon. It’s not real.
So scientific triumphalism is this response to the weirdness of, I could call it the mystery, the weirdness of experience by just ignoring it completely. So there’s no other truth. Art, music, human spirituality, it’s all actually reducible it neural correlates. So that’s one way that it’s been dealt with.
The other way is this sort of, right, you’ve got on the postmodern, the left academic left, you get this thing, science is just a game. It’s just a game from the powerful come up with, which is also not true. Science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening. So that’s another way to push science away or respond to it. The denial, science denial that happens. That’s also another way of not understanding the balance that science is trying, that we need to establish with experience.
And then there’s just pseudoscience, which wants to sort of say, oh, the new age movement or whatever, which wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it in this weird pseudo spiritual way or that doesn’t have the rigor of science.
So all of these ways, all of these responses, we have this difficulty about experience. We need to understand how experience fits into the web of meaning, and we don’t really have a good way of doing it yet. And the point of the book was to identify very clearly how the problem manifests, what the problem is, and what its effects are in the various sciences.
That you are always telling those stories from the perspective of already existing, of already being in experience. So whatever account we want to give of the world is going to have to take that as experience as being irreducible and the irreducible starting point. So ultimately, we don’t have an answer. That’s when people are like, “Well, what are you suggesting is the alternative?” It’s like, look, that’s the good work of the next science to come. Well, our job was to point out the problem with this, but what we would argue with is, and we’re thinking about the next book, is this is really going to require a new conception of nature. That doesn’t sort of jump to that third-person… That fictional third-person view and somehow figures out how to do science. Recognizing that it always starts from experience. It always starts from this field of experience. Or in phenomenology, the word is the life world that you’re embedded in. You can’t un-embed yourself from it.
So how do you do… So one of the things that Whitehead said was, “We have to avoid the bifurcation of nature.” And what he meant by that is the bifurcation into scientific concepts, wavelength. Think about seeing a sunset. You can say like, “Oh look, it’s just wavelengths and scattering particles.” And your experience of the redness, the actual experience of the redness and all the other things. It’s not just red. There’s no qualia, there’s no pure redness. Everything that’s happening in the experiential part is just an epiphenomena. It’s just brain states, whatever. He said, “You can’t do that. They’re both real. They’re both accounts. They both need to be integrated.” And so that required, I think, really a different of what we mean by nature.
Quantum mechanics slams you with the idea of the measurement problem. And most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamical equation, the Schrodinger equation, which you put in, like we talked about before, you have initial conditions and now you’ve got a differential equation and you crank out the differential equation and it makes predictions for the future, right? Exactly like Newtonian physics or its higher versions of the Lagrange or Hamiltonians. But then this other thing happens where it’s like, oh, by the way, as soon as you look at it, as soon as the measurement is made, I have a whole nother set of rules for you. That’s what we call the born rule. And it was telling you right from the beginning that measurement matters, right? So when you’re asking, how will we do this? Quantum mechanics is actually pointing to how to do it.
So there’s been all these different interpretations of the quantum mechanics. Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn’t there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter. And then you get something like QBism, which is I’m going to advocate for, is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, which puts the Born rule at the center. Instead of focusing on the Schrodinger equation and the weird things that come out of it, like Schrodinger’s cat and all that other stuff. It says, “No, no, actually the real mystery is the Born rule. Let’s think about the Born rule.” And like you said, that puts the agent, the agent and information at the center of the whole thing.
So we have Shannon information, which is a probability distribution that tells you basically how much surprise there is in a message. Semantic information focuses on meaning, right? Focuses on in a very simple way, just how much of the information that the agent, the critter is getting from the world actually helps it survive. That’s the most basic idea of meaning. We can get all philosophical about meaning, but this is it. Does it help me stay alive or not? And the whole question of agency and autonomy that occurs in this setting of just asking about how do cells move up a chemical gradient to get more food? Kind of has the feel the same sort of architecture as what’s going on in quantum mechanics. So I think what you said is exactly it, how do we bring this sort of recognition? That there’s always us, the agent or life the agent interacting with the world and drawing both giving information and passing information back as a way of doing science, doing hardcore science with experiments, but never forgetting that agency, which also means experience in some sense, is at the center of the whole thing.
So clearly another direction has to be found, and maybe it has nothing to do with this, but I suspect that because so many times the agent or having to deal with the view from the inside or the role of agency. When it comes to time thinking that you can replace the block universe with the actual experience of time. Clocks don’t tell time. We use clocks to tell time. So maybe that even the fundamental nature of time can’t be viewed from the outside, that there’s a new physics theory that is going to come from, that comes from this agential, informational, computational view. I don’t know. But that’s kind of what I think it would be fertile ground to explore.
There’s a kind of phenomenal structure there, which is different from the representation of time that you have with the formal mathematics. And the way we would look at this is that the problem with the surreptitious substitution, the problem with the blind spot is it says, “Oh, no, no, the formal system is time,” but really the only place time appears is with us, where we’re so having a theory that actually could start with us and then stretch out into the universe rather than imposing this imaginary third-person view back on us. Could, that’s a route towards a different way of approaching the whole problem.
So this idea of pulling out from experience, these thinner, abstract, structural invariance, the things that we could actually do science with, and it’s kind of like, we call it an ascending spiral of abstraction. So the problem with the way we do things now is we take those abstractions, which came from experience, and then with something like a computational model of consciousness or experience, we think we can put it back in. You literally pulled out these super thin things, these abstractions neglecting experience because that’s the only way to do science. And then you think somehow, oh, I’m going to jam experience back in and have an explanation for experience.
But the idea why we argue about free will often is because we already have this blind spot view that the world is deterministic because of our equations, which themselves, we treat the equations as if they’re more real than experience. And the equations are a paler… They don’t corral experience. They are a thinner representation. As we like to say, “Don’t confuse the map for the terrain.” What’s happening between us right now and all the weirdness of it. That’s the terrain. The map is what I can write down on equations. And then in the workshop, do experiments on. Super powerful, needs an account, but experience overflows that.
It’s given. So you have to kind of jump in and then try and find a language to account for its structure. But then, so that has not been part of this discussion about you’ll never, good luck finding a YouTube video where someone, a famous scientist is talking about science from a phenomenological point of view, even though it’s a huge branch of philosophy. And then you get the philosophies that occurred from other cores of civilization. So there’s the western core out of which comes the Greeks and the Judeo- Christian Islamic tradition. But then you get India and you get Asia and they developed their own. They were highly complex societies that developed their own responses to these questions. And they, for reasons they had contemplative practice. They were very focused on direct, trying to directly probe attention and experience. They asked questions in ways that the West never really did.
Phenomenology kind of started it, but there’s philosophers like Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu. They’re like the Plato and the Aristotle of those philosophies. And they were really focused on experience in the West. I think maybe because we had the Judeo-Christian tradition where we already had this kind of God who was going to be the frame on which you could always point to that frame in the traditions that came from the classical philosophies of India and Asia. They started always with this. They wanted to know about experience. Their whole philosophies and their logic and their argumentation was based on, I’ve got this experience, I can’t get out of this experience. How do I reason from it? So I think there’s a lot of other philosophical traditions that we could draw from. Not slavishly, we don’t all have to become Buddhists to do it, but there are traditions that really tried to work this out in a way that the Western traditions just didn’t.
The cell membrane lets stuff through, keeps other stuff out. But the cell membrane is part of the processes and it’s a product of the processes that the cell membrane needs, right? In some sense, the cell membrane creates itself. So there’s this strange, it’s always with life, there’s always this strange loop. And so somehow figuring out how to jump into that strange loop is the science that’s ahead of us. And so this idea of causal closure accounting for how the, we talk about downward causation. So reductionism says everything only depends on the microstate. Everything just depends on the atoms. That’s it. If you know the Lagrangian for the standard model, you are done. Of course, in principle, you need God’s computer, but fine. In principle, it could be done. Causal closure, and I was just reading this great paper that sort of argues for this.
There’s ways in which using Epsilon machines and all this machinery from information theory, that you can see ways in which the system can organize itself so that it decouples from the microstates. Now, the macrostate fundamentally no longer needs the microstate for its own description, its own account of the laws, whether that paper is true or not. It’s an example of heading down that road. There’s also Robert Rosen’s work. He was a theoretical biologist who he talked about closure to efficient cause that living systems are organizationally closed, are causally closed so that they don’t depend anymore on the microstate. And he had a proof, which is very contentious. Nobody knows if it’s some argue it’s true, some argue it’s not. But he said that because of this, living systems are not church-turing complete, they cannot be represented as formal systems. So in that way, they’re not axioms, they’re not living systems will not be axioms.
They can only be partially captured by algorithms. Now again, people fight back and forth about whether or not his proof is valid or not. But I’m saying them giving you examples of when you see the blind spot, when you acknowledge the blind spot, it opens up a whole other class of kinds of scientific investigations. The book we thought was going to be really heretical. Obviously most public facing scientists are very sort of in that, especially scientific triumphant. So we were just waiting for the fight. Then the review from science came out and it was totally pro… It was very positive. We’re like, “Oh my God.” Then a review came out in Nature Physics and it was totally positive.
Then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal, kind of criticized, not capitalism, but we criticized all industrial economies for that they had been touched by the blind spots, socialism, communism. It doesn’t matter. These extractive sort of had that sort of view that the is just reducible to resources. The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review. So it feels like there’s actually out there, there is some, among working scientists in particular, there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist view and a recognition that we need to shift something in order to jump past these hurdles that we’ve been arguing about forever and we’re sort of stuck in a vortex.
So there’s a great paper, speaking of Santa Fe by David Krakauer, where they looked at sort of information, theoretic measures of individuality. And what you find is it’s actually pretty fluid. My liver cell is an individual, but really it’s part of the liver. And my liver is a separate system, but really it’s part of me. So I’m an individual, yay. But actually I’m part of a society and I couldn’t be me without the entire community of say, language users. I wouldn’t even be able to frame any questions. And my community of language users is part of ecosystems that are alive, that I am a part of, a lineage of. This is like Sarah Walker stuff, and then those ecosystems are part of the biosphere. We’re never separable as opposed to this very atomizing, the triumphal, this science view is wants like Boltzmann brains, you’re just a brain floating in the space.
So that’s why I think the LLMs are not going to, it’s not imitation. It’s going to require, this goes to the brain in the VAT thing. I did an article about the brain in the vat, which was really Evans, I was reporting on Evans. Where they did the brain in the VAT argument. But they said, “Look, in the end, actually the only way to actually get a real brain in the VAT is actually to have a brain in a body.” And it could be a robot body, but you still need a brain in the body. So I don’t think LLMs will get there because they can’t. You really need to be embedded in a world, at least that’s the E-four idea.
The contemplative practice really tries to focus on experience itself. Spend five days at a zen session doing contemplative practice from 7:00 AM. until 9:00 PM, obviously with breaks. And you’ll really get a much deeper understanding of what my own experience is. What is it really like? It forces you to learn how to stabilize your attention because attention is kind of like this thing. It’s usually just like, “Oh, over there. Oh, my foot hurts. Oh, I got to do my taxes. Oh, what’s that guy over there? Why is he wearing those stupid shoes?” And with a contemplative practice, you learn how to stabilize it.
And once you stabilize it, you can now begin to sort of explore the phenomenal nature of it. So what I think I’ve learned from that is kind of whatever, I’m not really kind of real to begin with. The Adam Frank part, the identity, the thing, and the part of me that is real is everything’s coming and going. It’s all coming and going. Well, how could I ever not come and go? And the entire world is just, Buddhism has this idea of co-dependent arising. Nothing exists, nothing has self-nature. Nothing exists by itself. It’s an endless, infinitely connected web.
You’re like, “What?” Every time my teacher gives it to him, I’m like, “What are you talking about?” This is the whole zen thing of up is down, but down is up. You must understand this. So your job with these koans is to sit with them, is to sit with them until you realize what the thing is trying to teach you what aspect of experience it’s trying to teach you. So there’s no answer. No. And in fact, actually, you don’t give an answer. You actually usually have to demonstrate. The first time when I did a call on and the guy was like, “Don’t tell me the answer, show me the answer.” I was like, what are you talking about? But after doing these for years now, I’ve kind of learned the language of them. So I could never tell you. If I told you the answer, I could give you a call and tell you the answer. You’d be like, “What?”
It’s not the words, it’s the So your experience of like, yeah, the cup is empty. With a contemplative practice as it deepens over years, it really does take years. Just like anything in math, it took me years to understand the Lagrangians. You kind of come to a deeper understanding with yeah, the words of, it’s not just like, oh, everything changes. You actually feel that movement. You feel it with breath to breath, and it really becomes, sometimes I have this feeling, this is messed up, but of just joy and it’s not connected to anything. That’s what I’ve kind of gotten from practice. It’s just like, yeah, that passage, that infinite passage of moment to moment that is truly the way things are. And it’s okay. It’s not okay because I have a feeling about it. Okay. I want it to be okay. It just is okay. And so really, it’s a pretty awesome thing.
So these guys are always about, don’t think. I’ve written all this stuff, but they’re guideposts. They’re like the finger pointing at the moon. And there’s the idea of first, your mind is usually scattered. Right now, when I walk out, I’m going to go get the Uber and everything. My mind’s going to be all over the place, but with sitting, first, you concentrate the mind so that there’s no more scatter anymore. The thoughts are still happening, but you’re just not there happening up there. You’re not even paying attention to them. And then as time goes on, you unify the mind, which is this very powerful thing where kind of the self drops away and there’s just this presence.
It’s kind of like a raw presence, and that’s often where the joy up wells from, but you sit with whatever, maybe you’re going to sit and maybe you’re going to go through an hour of being bummed out about your mom who died or something. You’re just going to sit with whatever comes up you’re going to make. That’s why the sitting part, you’re making the commitment. I’m going to sit here with whatever comes up, I will not be moved. And then what You come away with it actually over time, it actually changes kind of who you are. I’m still the asshole I was from New Jersey growing up, but I just have more space now for things.
Somehow in this process, you realize that it really is about helping all sentient beings. That’s the way they frame, just being here to help. So I know that sounds cornball, but especially for a guy from Jersey, which is the main thing is to get over. Your job is to get over. But that’s really what I found. It is actually kind… And so that joy, the joy, some of that joy is just, it’s like this. One of the things I have when I have really, there’s a kind of experience I’ll have in contemplative practice, which will carry out into the world, which is just this gratitude for the fact that the world gives you everything, and there’s a certain way, just the blue sky and the breath, the world is just giving you itself completely unhindered. It holds nothing back. And yeah, that’s kind of the experience. And then you kind of like, “Oh, I need to be helpful, because who’s not having this experience.”
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 1:58 – Planet formation
- 7:08 – Plate tectonics
- 14:30 – Extinction events
- 18:41 – Biosphere
- 21:39 – Technosphere
- 25:53 – Emergence of intelligence
- 32:06 – Drake equation
- 36:20 – Exoplanets
- 39:04 – Habitable zones
- 42:06 – Fermi Paradox
- 51:04 – Alien civilizations
- 1:00:32 – Colonizing Mars
- 1:12:48 – Search for aliens
- 1:29:13 – Alien megastructures
- 1:35:19 – Kardashev scale
- 1:40:32 – Detecting aliens
- 1:47:14 – Warp drives
- 1:53:21 – Cryogenics
- 1:56:39 – What aliens look like
- 2:05:24 – Alien contact
- 2:16:29 – UFO sightings
- 2:28:14 – Physics of life
- 2:54:05 – Nature of time
- 3:10:29 – Cognition
- 3:14:53 – Mortality
Introduction
Adam Frank
If we don’t ask how long they last, but instead ask what’s the probability that there have been any civilizations at all, now matter how long they lasted. I’m not asking whether they exist now or not, I’m just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the university. That, we’re able to constrain. What we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. What that means is those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. The only way that we’re the only time that this whole process from abiogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if everyone one of those experiments failed.
If we don’t ask how long they last, but instead ask what’s the probability that there have been any civilizations at all, now matter how long they lasted. I’m not asking whether they exist now or not, I’m just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the university. That, we’re able to constrain. What we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. What that means is those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. The only way that we’re the only time that this whole process from abiogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if everyone one of those experiments failed.
Therefore, you could put a probability, we called it the Pessimism Line. We don’t really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, but we could set a limit using this. We could say, look, if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus-22, one in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we’re alone. If it’s anywhere larger than that, then we’re not the first. It’s happened somewhere else. To me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn’t tell me there’s anybody nearby, the galaxy could be sterile. It just told me that unless nature’s really has some bias against civilizations, we’re not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Adam Frank, an astrophysicist interested in the evolution of star systems and the search for alien civilizations in our universe. This is The Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Adam Frank.
The following is a conversation with Adam Frank, an astrophysicist interested in the evolution of star systems and the search for alien civilizations in our universe. This is The Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Adam Frank.
Planet formation
Lex Fridman
You wrote a book about aliens. The big question, how many alien civilizations are out there?
You wrote a book about aliens. The big question, how many alien civilizations are out there?
Adam Frank
Yeah, that’s the question. The amazing thing is that, after two-and-a-half millennia of people yelling at each other, or setting each other on fire occasionally over the answer, we now actually have the capacity to answer that question. In the next 10, 20, 30 years, we’re going to have data relevant to the answer to that question. We’re going to have hard data finally that will, one way or the other … Even if we don’t find anything immediately, we will have gone through a number of planets. We’ll be able to start putting limits on how common life is.
Yeah, that’s the question. The amazing thing is that, after two-and-a-half millennia of people yelling at each other, or setting each other on fire occasionally over the answer, we now actually have the capacity to answer that question. In the next 10, 20, 30 years, we’re going to have data relevant to the answer to that question. We’re going to have hard data finally that will, one way or the other … Even if we don’t find anything immediately, we will have gone through a number of planets. We’ll be able to start putting limits on how common life is.
The one answer I can tell you, which was an important part of the problem, is how many planets are there? Just like people have been arguing about the existence of life elsewhere for 2500 years, people have been arguing about planets for the exact same amount of time. You can see Aristotle yelling at Democritus about this. You can see they had very wildly different opinions about how common planets were going to be, and how unique Earth was. And that question got answered. Which is pretty remarkable, that in a lifetime, you can have a 2500-year-old question. The answer is they’re everywhere. There are planets everywhere.
It was possible that planets were really rare. We didn’t really understand how planets formed. If you go back to, say the turn of the 20th Century, there was a theory that said planets formed when two stars passed by each other closely, and then material was gravitationally squeezed out. In which case, those kinds of collisions are so rare that you would expect one in a trillion stars to have planets. Instead, every star in the night sky has planets.
Lex Fridman
One of the things you’ve done is simulated the formation of stars. How difficult do you think it is to simulate the formation of planet? Like simulate a solar system through the entire of the evolution of the solar system. This is a numerical simulation sneaking up to the question of how many planets are there.
One of the things you’ve done is simulated the formation of stars. How difficult do you think it is to simulate the formation of planet? Like simulate a solar system through the entire of the evolution of the solar system. This is a numerical simulation sneaking up to the question of how many planets are there.
Adam Frank
That, actually, we’re able to do now. You can run simulations of the formation of planetary system. If you run the simulation, really where you want to start is a cloud of gas, these giant interstellar clouds of gas that may have a million times the mass of the Sun in them. You run a simulation of that, it’s turbulent. Gas is roiling and tumbling. Every now and then, you get a place where the gas is dense enough that gravity gets hold of it and it can pull it downward, so you’ll start to form a proto-star.
That, actually, we’re able to do now. You can run simulations of the formation of planetary system. If you run the simulation, really where you want to start is a cloud of gas, these giant interstellar clouds of gas that may have a million times the mass of the Sun in them. You run a simulation of that, it’s turbulent. Gas is roiling and tumbling. Every now and then, you get a place where the gas is dense enough that gravity gets hold of it and it can pull it downward, so you’ll start to form a proto-star.
A proto-star is basically the young star, this ball of gas where nuclear reactions are getting started. But it’s also a disc. As material falls inward because everything’s rotating, as it falls inward, it’ll spin up and then it’ll form a disc. The material will collect in what’s called an accretion disc or a proto-planetary disc. You can simulate all of that.
Once you get into the disc itself and you want to do planets, things get a little bit more complicated because the physics gets more complicated. Now you got to start worrying about dust, because actually dust … Dust is the wrong word. It’s smoke, really. These are the tiniest bits of solids. They will coagulate in the disc to form pebbles, and then the pebbles will collide to form rocks. And then the rocks will form boulders, et cetera, et cetera. That process is super complicated. But we’ve been able to simulate enough of it to begin to get a handle on how planets form. How you accrete enough material to get the first proto-planets, or planetary embryos as we call them.
The next step is those things start slamming into each other to form planetary-sized bodies. Then the planetary bodies slam into each other. Earth, the Moon came about because there was a Mars-sized body that slammed into the Earth and basically blew off all the material. Then eventually formed the Moon.
Lex Fridman
And all of them have different chemical compositions, different temperatures?
And all of them have different chemical compositions, different temperatures?
Adam Frank
Yeah. The temperature of the material in the disc depends on how far away you are from the star.
Yeah. The temperature of the material in the disc depends on how far away you are from the star.
Lex Fridman
Got it.
Got it.
Adam Frank
It decreases.
It decreases.
There’s a really interesting point. Close to the star, temperatures are really high. The only thing that can condense, that can freeze out, is going to be stuff like metals. That’s why you find Mercury is this giant ball of iron, basically. Then as you go further out, stuff, the gas gets cooler. And now you can start getting things like water to freeze. There’s something we call the Snow Line, which is somewhere in our solar system, out around between Mars and Jupiter. That’s the reason why the giant planets in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all have huge amounts of ice in them, or water and ice.
Actually, Jupiter and Saturn don’t have so much, but the moons do. The moons have so much water in them that there’s oceans. We’ve got a number of those moons have got more water on them than there’s water on Earth.
Lex Fridman
Do you think it’s possible to do that kind of simulation to have a stronger and stronger estimate of how likely an Earth-like planet is? Can we get the physics simulation done well enough to where we can start estimating what are the possible Earth-like things that could be generated?
Do you think it’s possible to do that kind of simulation to have a stronger and stronger estimate of how likely an Earth-like planet is? Can we get the physics simulation done well enough to where we can start estimating what are the possible Earth-like things that could be generated?
Plate tectonics
Adam Frank
Yeah, I think we can. I think we’re learning how to do that now. One part is trying to just figure out how planets form themselves in doing the simulations. That cascade from dust grains up to planetary embryos, that’s hard to simulate because you got to do both the gas, and you got to do the dust and the dust colliding, and all that physics.
Yeah, I think we can. I think we’re learning how to do that now. One part is trying to just figure out how planets form themselves in doing the simulations. That cascade from dust grains up to planetary embryos, that’s hard to simulate because you got to do both the gas, and you got to do the dust and the dust colliding, and all that physics.
Once you get up to a planet-sized body, then you have to switch over to almost a different kind of simulation. Often what you’re doing is you’re assuming the planet this this spherical ball, and then you’re doing a 1D, a radial calculation. You’re just asking, “All right, what is the structure of it going to be? Am I going to have a solid iron core, or am I going to get a solid iron core with a liquid iron core out around it?” Like we have on Earth. Then you get a silicate, rocky mantle, and then a crust. All those details, those are beyond being able to do full 3D simulations from Ab Initio, from scratch. We’re not there yet.
Lex Fridman
How important are those details, like the crust and the atmosphere, do you think?
How important are those details, like the crust and the atmosphere, do you think?
Adam Frank
Hugely important. I’m part of a collaboration at the University of Rochester, where we’re using the giant laser. Literally, this is called the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. We got a huge grant from the NSF to use that laser to slam tiny pieces of silica to understand what conditions are like at the center of the Earth. Or even more importantly, the center of Super-Earths.
Hugely important. I’m part of a collaboration at the University of Rochester, where we’re using the giant laser. Literally, this is called the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. We got a huge grant from the NSF to use that laser to slam tiny pieces of silica to understand what conditions are like at the center of the Earth. Or even more importantly, the center of Super-Earths.
This is what’s wild. The most common kind of planet in the universe, we don’t have in our solar system. Which is amazing, right? We’ve been able to study or observe enough planets now to get a census. We have an idea of whose average, whose weird. Our solar system’s weird, because the average planet has a mass somewhere between a few times the mass of the Earth, to maybe 10 times the mass of the Earth. That’s exactly where there are no planets in our solar system.
The smaller ones of those we call Super-Earths, the larger ones we call Sub-Neptunes. They’re anybody’s guess. We don’t really know what happens to material when you’re squeezed to those pressures, which is millions, tens of millions of times the pressure on the surface of the Earth. Those details really will matter of what’s on in there, because that will determine whether or not you have, say for example, plate tectonics.
We think plate tectonics may have been really important for life on Earth, for the evolution of complex life on Earth. It turns out, and this is the next generation where we’re going with the understanding the evolution of planets and life. It turns out that you actually have to think hard about the planetary context for life. You can just be like, “Oh, there’s a warm pond,” and then some interesting chemistry happens in the warm pond. You actually have to think about the planet as a whole and what it’s gone through in order to really understand whether a planet is a good place for life or not.
Lex Fridman
Why do you think plate tectonics might be useful for the formation of complex life?
Why do you think plate tectonics might be useful for the formation of complex life?
Adam Frank
There’s a bunch of different things. One is that the Earth went through a couple of phases of being a snowball planet. We went into a period of glaciation where pretty much the entire planet was under ice. The oceans were frozen.
There’s a bunch of different things. One is that the Earth went through a couple of phases of being a snowball planet. We went into a period of glaciation where pretty much the entire planet was under ice. The oceans were frozen.
Early on in Earth’s history, there was barely any land. We were actually a water world, with just a couple of Australia-sized cratons they called them, proto-continents.
We went through these snowball Earth phases. If it wasn’t for the fact that we had an active plate tectonics, which had a lot of vulcanism on it, we could have been locked in that forever. Once you get into a snowball state, a planet can be trapped there forever. Which is maybe you already had life formed, but then because it’s so cold, you may never get anything more than just microbes.
What plate tectonics does, because it fosters more vulcanism, is that you’re going to get carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, which warms the planet up and gets you out of the snowball Earth phase. But even more, there’s even more really important things.
I just finished a paper where we were looking at something called the Hard Steps Model, which is this model that’s been out there for a long time that purports to say intelligent life in the universe will be really rare. It made all these assumptions about the Earth’s history, particularly about the history of life and the history of the planet have nothing to do with each other. It turns out, and as I was doing the reading for this, that Earth probably, early on, had a more mild form of plate tectonics, and then somewhere about a billion years ago, it ramped up.
That ramping up changed everything on the planet, because here’s a funny thing. The Earth used to be flat. All the Flat Earthers out there can get excited for one second.
Lex Fridman
Clip it. It still is.
Clip it. It still is.
Adam Frank
What I mean by that is that there really weren’t many mountain ranges. The beginning of, I think the term is orogenesis, mountain building, the true Himalayan-style giant mountains, didn’t happen until this more robust form of plate tectonics, where the plates are really being driven around the planet. That is when you get the crusts hitting each other, and they start pushing into these Himalayan- style mountains.
What I mean by that is that there really weren’t many mountain ranges. The beginning of, I think the term is orogenesis, mountain building, the true Himalayan-style giant mountains, didn’t happen until this more robust form of plate tectonics, where the plates are really being driven around the planet. That is when you get the crusts hitting each other, and they start pushing into these Himalayan- style mountains.
The weathering of that, the erosion of that puts huge amounts of nutrients, things that microbes want to use, into the oceans. And then what we call the net primary productivity, the bottom of the food chain, how much sugars they are producing, how much photosynthesis they are doing shot up by a factor of almost 1000. The fact that you had plate tectonics supercharged evolution in some sense. We’re not exactly sure how it happened, but it’s clear that the amount of life, the amount of living activity that was happening really got a boost from the fact that something there was this new vigorous form of plate tectonics.
Lex Fridman
It’s nice to have turmoil. In terms of temperature, in terms of surface geometries, in terms of the chemistry of the planet, turmoil.
It’s nice to have turmoil. In terms of temperature, in terms of surface geometries, in terms of the chemistry of the planet, turmoil.
Adam Frank
Yeah, that’s actually really true. Because what happens is, if you look at the history of life … That’s an excellent point that you’re bringing up. If you look at the history of life on Earth, we get abiogenesis somewhere around at least 3.8 billion years ago. That’s the first microbes. They take over enough that they really do, you get a biosphere. You get a biosphere that is actively changing the planet.
Yeah, that’s actually really true. Because what happens is, if you look at the history of life … That’s an excellent point that you’re bringing up. If you look at the history of life on Earth, we get abiogenesis somewhere around at least 3.8 billion years ago. That’s the first microbes. They take over enough that they really do, you get a biosphere. You get a biosphere that is actively changing the planet.
But then you go through this period they called the Boring Billion, where it’s a billion years and it’s just microbes. Nothing’s happening, it’s just microbes. The microbes are doing amazing things. They’re inventing fermentation. Thank you very much, we appreciate that. But it’s not until you get probably these continents slamming into each other, you really get the beginning of continents forming and driving changes that evolution has to respond to. That on a planetary scale, this turmoil, this chaos is creating new niches, as well as closing other ones. Biology, evolution has to respond to that.
Somewhere around there is when you get the Cambrian Explosion. It’s when suddenly every body plan … Evolution goes on an orgy, essentially. Yeah. It does look like that chaos or that turmoil was actually very helpful to evolution.
Extinction events
Lex Fridman
I wonder if there is some extremely elevated levels of chaos, almost like catastrophes behind every leap of evolution. You’re not going to have leaps. In human societies, we have an Einstein that comes up with a good idea. But it feels like on an evolutionary timescale, you need some real big drama going on for the evolutionary system to have to come up with a solution to that drama. An extra complex solution to that drama.
I wonder if there is some extremely elevated levels of chaos, almost like catastrophes behind every leap of evolution. You’re not going to have leaps. In human societies, we have an Einstein that comes up with a good idea. But it feels like on an evolutionary timescale, you need some real big drama going on for the evolutionary system to have to come up with a solution to that drama. An extra complex solution to that drama.
Adam Frank
Well, I’m not sure if that’s true. I don’t know if it needs to be an almost extinction event.
Well, I’m not sure if that’s true. I don’t know if it needs to be an almost extinction event.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Adam Frank
Because it’s certainly true that we have gone through almost extinction events. We’ve had five mass extinctions. But you don’t necessarily see that there was this giant evolutionary leap happening after those.
Because it’s certainly true that we have gone through almost extinction events. We’ve had five mass extinctions. But you don’t necessarily see that there was this giant evolutionary leap happening after those.
With the comet impact, the K-T Boundary, certainly lots of niches opened up. That’s why we’re here, because our ancestors were little basically rodents, rats living under the footsteps of the dinosaurs. It was that comet impact that opened the route for us. That still took another 65 million years. It was like this thing immediately happened.
But what we found with this Hard Steps Paper, because the whole idea of the Hard Steps Paper was it was one of these anthropic reasoning kinds of things. Where Brandon Carter said, “Oh, look. The intelligence doesn’t show up on Earth until about almost close to when the end of the Sun’s lifetime.” He’s like, “Well, there should be no reason why the Sun’s lifetime and the time for evolution to produce intelligence should be the same.” He goes through all this reasoning, anthropic reasoning. He ends up with the idea that, “Oh, it must be that the odds of getting intelligence are super-low, and so that’s the hard step.”
There was a series of steps in evolution that were very, very hard. Because of that, you can calculate some probability distributions. Everybody loves a good probability distribution, and they went a long way with this. But it turns out that the whole thing is flawed because, when you look at it, of course the timescale for the Sun’s evolution and the timescale for the evolution on life are coupled, because the timescale for evolution of the Earth is coupled, is about the same timescale as the evolution of the Sun. It’s billions of years. The Earth evolves over billions of years.
Life and the Earth co-evolve. That’s what Brandon Carter didn’t see is that actually, the fate of the Earth the fate of life are inextricably combined. This is really important for astrobiology, too. Life doesn’t happen on a planet, it happens to a planet. This is something that David Grinspoon and Sara Walker both say, and I agree with this. It’s a really nice way of putting it.
Plate tectonics, the evolution of oxygen, of an oxygen atmosphere, which only happened because of life. These things, these are things that are happening where life and the planet are sloshing back-and-forth. Rather than, to your point about do you need giant catastrophes, maybe not giant catastrophes. But what happens is, as the Earth and life are evolving together, windows are opening up, evolutionary windows.
For example, life put oxygen into the atmosphere. When life invented this new form of photosynthesis about 2.5 billion years ago, that broke water apart to work to do its chemical shenanigans. It broke water apart and pushed oxygen into the atmosphere. That’s why there’s oxygen in the atmosphere. It’s only because of life.
That opened up huge possibilities, new spaces for evolution to happen. But it also changed the chemistry of the planet forever. The introduction of oxygen photosynthesis changed the planet forever, and it opened up a bunch of windows for evolution that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Like for example, you and I, we need that amount of oxygen. Big-brained creatures need an oxygen-rich atmosphere because oxygen is so potent for metabolism. You couldn’t get intelligent creatures 100 million years after the planet formed.
Biosphere
Lex Fridman
So really, on a scale of a planet when there’s billions and trillions of organisms on a planet, they can actually have planetary scale impact.
So really, on a scale of a planet when there’s billions and trillions of organisms on a planet, they can actually have planetary scale impact.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
The chemical shenanigans of an individual organism when scaled out to trillions can actually change a planet.
The chemical shenanigans of an individual organism when scaled out to trillions can actually change a planet.
Adam Frank
Yeah. We know this for a fact now.
Yeah. We know this for a fact now.
There was this thing, Gaia Theory, which James Lovelock introduced in the ’70s. And then, Lynn Margulis, the Biologist Lynn Margulis together. This Gaia Theory was the idea that life takes over a planet, life hijacks a planet in a way that the sum total of life creates these feedbacks between the planet and the life, such that it keeps the planet habitable. It’s kind of a homeostasis.
I can go out … Right now outside, it’s 100-degrees. And I go outside, but my internal temperature is going to be the same. I can go back to Rochester, New York in the winter, and it’s going to be zero-degrees, but my internal temperature is going to be the same. That’s homeostasis.
The idea of Gaia Theory was that life, the biosphere exerts this pressure on the planet or these feedbacks on the planet, that even as other things are changing, the planet will always stay in the right kinds of conditions for life. Now when this theory came out, it was very controversial. People were like, “Oh my God, what are you, smoking weed?” There were all these Gaian Festivals with Gaian dances. It became very popular in the New Age community.
But Lovelock actually, they were able to show that no, this has nothing to do with the planet being conscious or anything. It was about these feedbacks, that the biology, the biosphere can exert these feedbacks. We’re still unclear whether there are true Gaian feedbacks, in the sense that the planet can really exert complete control. But it is absolutely true that the biosphere is a major player in Earth’s history.
Lex Fridman
The biosphere fights for homeostasis on Earth.
The biosphere fights for homeostasis on Earth.
Adam Frank
Okay. What I would say right now is I don’t know if I can say that scientifically. I can certainly say that the biosphere does a huge amount of the regulation of the planetary state. And over billions of years, has strongly modified the evolution of the planet. A true Gaian feedback would be exactly what you said.
Okay. What I would say right now is I don’t know if I can say that scientifically. I can certainly say that the biosphere does a huge amount of the regulation of the planetary state. And over billions of years, has strongly modified the evolution of the planet. A true Gaian feedback would be exactly what you said.
The biosphere is somewhere … Sara Walker, and David Grinspoon, and I actually did a paper on this about the idea of planetary intelligence, or cognition across a planetary scale. I think that actually is possible. It’s not conscious, but there is a cognitive activity going on. The biosphere, in some sense, knows what is happening because of these feedbacks. It’s still unclear whether we have these full Gaian feedbacks, but we certainly have semi-Gaian feedbacks.
If there’s a perturbation on the planetary scale, temperature, insulation, how much sunlight’s coming in, the biosphere will start to have feedbacks that will damp that perturbation. Temperature goes up, the biosphere starts doing something, temperature comes down.
Technosphere
Lex Fridman
Now I wonder if the technosphere also has a Gaian feedback or elements of a Gaian feedback? Such that the technosphere will also fight to some degree for homeostasis. Open question, I guess.
Now I wonder if the technosphere also has a Gaian feedback or elements of a Gaian feedback? Such that the technosphere will also fight to some degree for homeostasis. Open question, I guess.
Adam Frank
Well, I’m glad you asked that question. Because that paper that David, and Sara, and I wrote, what we were arguing was is that over the history of a planet … When life first forms, 3.8 billion years ago, it’s thin on the ground. You’ve got the first species, these are all microbes. There are not enough of them to exert any kind of these Gaian feedbacks. We call that an immature biosphere. But then as time goes on, as life becomes more robust and it begins to exert these feedbacks keeping the planet in the place where it needs to be for life, we call that a mature biosphere. I’m sure later on, we’re going to talk about definitions of life and such. There’s this great term called autopoiesis that Francisco Varela, the Neurobiologist Francisco Varela came up with. He said, “One of the defining things about life is this property of autopoiesis,” which means self-creating and self-maintaining. Life does not create the conditions which will destroy itself. It’s always trying to keep itself in a place where it can stay alive. The biosphere, from this Gaian perspective, has been autopoietic for billions of years.
Well, I’m glad you asked that question. Because that paper that David, and Sara, and I wrote, what we were arguing was is that over the history of a planet … When life first forms, 3.8 billion years ago, it’s thin on the ground. You’ve got the first species, these are all microbes. There are not enough of them to exert any kind of these Gaian feedbacks. We call that an immature biosphere. But then as time goes on, as life becomes more robust and it begins to exert these feedbacks keeping the planet in the place where it needs to be for life, we call that a mature biosphere. I’m sure later on, we’re going to talk about definitions of life and such. There’s this great term called autopoiesis that Francisco Varela, the Neurobiologist Francisco Varela came up with. He said, “One of the defining things about life is this property of autopoiesis,” which means self-creating and self-maintaining. Life does not create the conditions which will destroy itself. It’s always trying to keep itself in a place where it can stay alive. The biosphere, from this Gaian perspective, has been autopoietic for billions of years.
Now we just invented this technosphere in the last couple of hundred years. What we were arguing in that paper is that it’s an immature technosphere. Because right now, with climate change and all the other things we’re doing, the technosphere right now is destroying the conditions under which it needs to maintain itself. The real job for us if we’re going to last over geological timescales, if we want a technosphere that’s going to last tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, then we’ve got to become mature. Which means to not undermine the conditions, to not subvert the conditions that you need to stay alive. As of right now, I’d say we’re not autopoietic.
Lex Fridman
Wow. I wonder if we look across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, that the technosphere should create perturbations as a way for developing greater and greater defenses against perturbations. Which sounds like a ridiculous statement. But basically, go out and play in the yard and hurt yourself, to strengthen. Or drink water from the pond.
Wow. I wonder if we look across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, that the technosphere should create perturbations as a way for developing greater and greater defenses against perturbations. Which sounds like a ridiculous statement. But basically, go out and play in the yard and hurt yourself, to strengthen. Or drink water from the pond.
Adam Frank
From the pond. Yeah, right. Get sick a few times.
From the pond. Yeah, right. Get sick a few times.
Lex Fridman
To strengthen the immune system.
To strengthen the immune system.
Adam Frank
Yeah. Well, you know it’s interesting with the technosphere, we can talk about this more. We’re just emerging as a technosphere, in terms of as an interplanetary technosphere. That’s really the next step for us. David Grinspoon talks about it. I love this idea of anti-accretion. This amazing thing that, for the first time over the entire history of the planet, stuff is coming off the planet. It used to be everything just fell down, all the meteorites fell down. But now we’re starting to push stuff out. The idea of planetary defense or such, we are actually going to start exerting perturbations on the solar system as a whole. We’re going to start engineering, if we make it. I always like to say that if we can get through climate change, the prize at the end is the solar system. We’ll be literally engineering the solar system.
Yeah. Well, you know it’s interesting with the technosphere, we can talk about this more. We’re just emerging as a technosphere, in terms of as an interplanetary technosphere. That’s really the next step for us. David Grinspoon talks about it. I love this idea of anti-accretion. This amazing thing that, for the first time over the entire history of the planet, stuff is coming off the planet. It used to be everything just fell down, all the meteorites fell down. But now we’re starting to push stuff out. The idea of planetary defense or such, we are actually going to start exerting perturbations on the solar system as a whole. We’re going to start engineering, if we make it. I always like to say that if we can get through climate change, the prize at the end is the solar system. We’ll be literally engineering the solar system.
But what you can think of right now with what’s happening with the Anthropocene, the great acceleration that is the technosphere, is the creation of it, that is a giant perturbation on the biosphere. The technosphere sits on top of the biosphere, and if the technosphere undermines the biosphere for its own conditions of habitability, then you’re in trouble. The biosphere is not going away. There’s nothing we could do. The idea that we have to save the Earth is a little ridiculous. The Earth is not a furry little bunny that we need to protect. But it’s the conditions for us. Humanity emerged out of the Holocene, the last 10,000 years interglacial period. We can’t tolerate very different kinds of Earths. That’s what I mean about a perturbation.
Emergence of intelligence
Lex Fridman
Before we forget, I got to ask you about this paper.
Before we forget, I got to ask you about this paper.
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
It’s pretty interesting. There’s an interesting table here about hard steps. Abiogenesis, glucose fermentation to propionic acid, all kinds of steps, all the way to homo sapiens, animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoskeletons. Eye precursor, so formation of the eye.
It’s pretty interesting. There’s an interesting table here about hard steps. Abiogenesis, glucose fermentation to propionic acid, all kinds of steps, all the way to homo sapiens, animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoskeletons. Eye precursor, so formation of the eye.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Complex multicellularity.
Complex multicellularity.
Adam Frank
That’s definitely one of the big ones.
That’s definitely one of the big ones.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Interesting. What can you say about this chart? There are all kinds of papers talking about, what, the difficulty of these steps?
Yeah. Interesting. What can you say about this chart? There are all kinds of papers talking about, what, the difficulty of these steps?
Adam Frank
Right. This was the idea. What Carter said was, “We’re using anthropic reasoning.” He said, “There must be a few very hard steps for evolution to get through to make it to intelligence.” Some steps are going to be easy, so every generation, you roll the dice. Yeah, it won’t take long for you to get that step. But there must be a few of them, and he said you could even calculate how many there were, five, six, in order to get to intelligence.
Right. This was the idea. What Carter said was, “We’re using anthropic reasoning.” He said, “There must be a few very hard steps for evolution to get through to make it to intelligence.” Some steps are going to be easy, so every generation, you roll the dice. Yeah, it won’t take long for you to get that step. But there must be a few of them, and he said you could even calculate how many there were, five, six, in order to get to intelligence.
This paper here, this plot is all these different people who’ve written all these papers. This is the point, actually. You can see all these papers that were written on the hard steps. Each one proposing a different set of what those steps should be. There’s this other idea from biology of the major transitions in evolution, MTEs, that those were the hard steps.
But what we actually found was that none of those are actually hard. The whole idea of hard steps, that there are hard steps, is actually suspect. What’s amazing about this model is it shows how important it is to actually work with people who are in the field. Brandon Carter was a brilliant physicist, the guy who came up with this. And then lots of physicists and astrophysicists like me have used this. But the people who actually study evolution and the planet were never involved.
If you went and talked to an evolutionary biologist or a bio-geophysicist, they’d look at you when you explained this to them and they’d be like, “What? What are you guys doing?” It turns out, none of the details, or none of the conceptual structure of this matches with what the people who actually study the planet and its evolution.
Lex Fridman
Is it mostly about the fact that there’s not really discrete, big steps? Is this a gradual, continual kind of process?
Is it mostly about the fact that there’s not really discrete, big steps? Is this a gradual, continual kind of process?
Adam Frank
Well, there’s two things. The first most important one was that the planet and the biosphere have evolved together.
Well, there’s two things. The first most important one was that the planet and the biosphere have evolved together.
Lex Fridman
Together.
Together.
Adam Frank
That’s something that most bio-geophysicists completely accept. It was the first thing that Carter rejected. He said, “No, that’s probably not possible.” And yet, if he’d only had more discussions with this other community, he would have seen, no, there are actually windows that open up.
That’s something that most bio-geophysicists completely accept. It was the first thing that Carter rejected. He said, “No, that’s probably not possible.” And yet, if he’d only had more discussions with this other community, he would have seen, no, there are actually windows that open up.
Then the next thing is this idea of whether a step is hard or not. Because for hard, what we mean by a hard step is, like I said, every time there’s a generation, every time there’s a next generation born, you’re rolling the dice on whether this mutation will happen. The idea of something being a hard step, there’s two ways in which something might even appear as a hard step and not be. Or actually not be a hard step at all.
One is that you see something that has occurred in evolution that has only happened once. Let’s take the opposite, we see something that’s happened multiple times. Like wings, lots of examples of wings over lots of different evolutionary lineages. Making wings is not a hard step.
There’s certain other things that people say, “No, that’s a hard step.” Oxygen, the oxygen photosynthesis. But they tend to be so long ago that we’ve lost all the information. There could be other things in the fossil record that made this innovation, but they’re just gone now so you can’t tell, so there’s information loss.
The other thing is the idea of pulling up the ladder. That somebody, some species makes the innovation, but then it fills the niche and nobody else can do it again. Yeah, it only happened once but it happened once because basically, the creature was so successful it took over, and there was no space for anybody else to evolve it.
Yeah. The interesting thing about this was seeing how much, once you look at the details of life’s history on Earth, how it really shifts you away from this hard steps model. It shows you that those details, as we were talking about with do you have to know about the planet, do you have to know about plate tectonics? Yeah, you’re going to have to.
Lex Fridman
To be fair to Carter on the first point, it makes it much more complicated if life and the planet are co-evolving. Because it would be nice to consider the planet as a static thing that sets the initial conditions.
To be fair to Carter on the first point, it makes it much more complicated if life and the planet are co-evolving. Because it would be nice to consider the planet as a static thing that sets the initial conditions.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And then we can, from an outside perspective, analyze planets based on the initial conditions they create. Then there’s a binary yes or no at will it create life. But if they co-evolve, it’s a really complex dynamical system, the way everything is … Because it’s much more difficult from the perspective of settee. Of looking out there and trying to figure out which ones are actually producing life.
And then we can, from an outside perspective, analyze planets based on the initial conditions they create. Then there’s a binary yes or no at will it create life. But if they co-evolve, it’s a really complex dynamical system, the way everything is … Because it’s much more difficult from the perspective of settee. Of looking out there and trying to figure out which ones are actually producing life.
Adam Frank
But I think we’re at the point now, now there may be other kinds of principles that actually … Co-evolution actually has its own. Not deterministic, you’re done with determinism.
But I think we’re at the point now, now there may be other kinds of principles that actually … Co-evolution actually has its own. Not deterministic, you’re done with determinism.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Frank
But complex systems have patterns.
But complex systems have patterns.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Frank
Complex systems have constraints. That’s actually what we’re going to be looking for, are constraints on them.
Complex systems have constraints. That’s actually what we’re going to be looking for, are constraints on them.
Again, nothing against Carter. It was a brilliant idea. But it just goes to show you … I’m a theoretical physicist. Give me a simplified model, with dynamical equations and some initial conditions, I’m very happy. But there’s this great XTC comic, where somebody’s working something out on the board, and this physicist is looking over and saying, ” Oh, oh, I just wrote down an equation for that. I solved your problem. Do you guys even have a journal for this?” The subtitle is Why Everybody Hates Physicists.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Frank
Sometimes that approach totally works.
Sometimes that approach totally works.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Frank
Sometimes physicists, we can be very good at zooming in on what is important and casting the details aside so you can get to the heart of an issue. That’s very useful sometimes. Other times, it obfuscates. Other times, it clouds over actually what you needed to focus on, especially when it comes to complexity.
Sometimes physicists, we can be very good at zooming in on what is important and casting the details aside so you can get to the heart of an issue. That’s very useful sometimes. Other times, it obfuscates. Other times, it clouds over actually what you needed to focus on, especially when it comes to complexity.
Drake equation
Lex Fridman
Speaking of simplifying everything down to an equation, let’s return back to the question of how many alien civilizations are out there and talk about the Drake Equation.
Speaking of simplifying everything down to an equation, let’s return back to the question of how many alien civilizations are out there and talk about the Drake Equation.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Can you explain the Drake Equation?
Can you explain the Drake Equation?
Adam Frank
People have various feelings about the Drake Equation. It can be abused. The story actually is really interesting.
People have various feelings about the Drake Equation. It can be abused. The story actually is really interesting.
Frank Drake in 1960 does the first ever astrobiological experiment. He gets a radio telescope, points it at a couple of stars, and listens for signals. That was the first time anybody had done any experiment about any kind of life in the history of humanity. He does it, and he’s waiting for everybody to make fun of him. Instead, he gets a phone call from the government and says, “Hey, we want you to do a meeting on interstellar communications.” He’s like, “Okay.”
They organized a meeting with just eight people. A young Carl Sagan is going to be there as well. The night before, Drake has to come up with an agenda. How do you come up with an agenda for a meeting on a topic that no one’s ever talked about before? What he does, what’s so brilliant about the Drake Equation, is he breaks the problem of how many civilizations are there out there into a bunch of sub-problems. He breaks it into seven sub-problems. Each one of them is a factor in an equation that, when you multiply them all together, you get the number of civilizations out there that we could communicate with.
The first term is the rate at which stars form. The second term is the fraction of those stars that have plants, F-sub-P. The next term is the number of planets in the habitable zone, the place where we think life could form. The next term after that is the fraction of those planets where actually an abiogenesis event, life forms, occurs. The next one is the fraction of planets on which you start to get intelligence. After that, it’s the fraction of planets where that intelligence goes on to create a civilization. Then finally, the last term, which is the one that we really care about, is the lifetime, have a civilization and how long does it last.
Lex Fridman
When you say we, we humans?
When you say we, we humans?
Adam Frank
We humans, because we’re staring at multiple guns pointing at us.
We humans, because we’re staring at multiple guns pointing at us.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Frank
Nuclear war, climate change, AI. How long in general does civilizations last?
Nuclear war, climate change, AI. How long in general does civilizations last?
Now each one of these terms, what was brilliant about what he did was, what he was doing was he was quantifying our ignorance. By breaking the problem up into these seven sub-problems, he gave astronomers something to do. This is always with a new research field, you need a research program or else you just have a bunch of vague questions. You don’t even know really what you’re trying to do.
The star people could figure out how many stars were forming per year. The people who were interested in planets could go out and find techniques to discover planets, et cetera, et cetera.
Lex Fridman
These are their own fields. Essentially by creating this equation, he’s launching new fields.
These are their own fields. Essentially by creating this equation, he’s launching new fields.
Adam Frank
Yeah. That’s exactly … He gave astrobiology, which wasn’t even a term then, a roadmap. “Okay, you guys go do this, you go do that.”
Yeah. That’s exactly … He gave astrobiology, which wasn’t even a term then, a roadmap. “Okay, you guys go do this, you go do that.”
Adam Frank
And then, a roadmap like, “Okay, you guys go do this, you go do that, you go do that.” And it had such far-reaching effect on astrobiology because it did break the problem up in a way that gave useful marching orders for all these different groups. For example, it’s because of the Drake equation in some sense that people who were involved in SETI pushed NASA to develop the technologies for planet hunting. There was this amazing meeting in 1978, two meetings, 1978 and 1979, that were driven in some part by the people who were involved in SETI getting NASA together to say, “Look, okay, look, what’s the roadmap for us to develop technologies to find planets?”
And then, a roadmap like, “Okay, you guys go do this, you go do that, you go do that.” And it had such far-reaching effect on astrobiology because it did break the problem up in a way that gave useful marching orders for all these different groups. For example, it’s because of the Drake equation in some sense that people who were involved in SETI pushed NASA to develop the technologies for planet hunting. There was this amazing meeting in 1978, two meetings, 1978 and 1979, that were driven in some part by the people who were involved in SETI getting NASA together to say, “Look, okay, look, what’s the roadmap for us to develop technologies to find planets?”
So, the Drake equation is absolutely foundational for astrobiology, but we should remember that it’s not a law of nature. It’s not equal to MC squared. And so, you can see it being abused in some sense. Yeah, it’s generated a trillion papers. Some of those papers are good, I’ve written some of those. And some of those papers are bad, I’m not sure where my paper fits in on those. I’m saying one should be careful about what you’re using it for. But in terms of understanding the problem that astrobiology faces, this really broke it up in a useful way.
Exoplanets
Lex Fridman
We could talk about each one of these, but let’s just look at exoplanets.
We could talk about each one of these, but let’s just look at exoplanets.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So, that’s a really interesting one. I think when you look back hundreds of years from now, was it in the 90s when they first detected the first-
So, that’s a really interesting one. I think when you look back hundreds of years from now, was it in the 90s when they first detected the first-
Adam Frank
Yeah. ’92 and ’95. ’95 to me was really, that was the discovery of the first planet orbiting a sun-like star. To me, that was the water, the dam being broken.
Yeah. ’92 and ’95. ’95 to me was really, that was the discovery of the first planet orbiting a sun-like star. To me, that was the water, the dam being broken.
Lex Fridman
I think that’s one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.
I think that’s one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.
Adam Frank
I agree. I agree.
I agree. I agree.
Lex Fridman
Right now, I guess nobody’s celebrating it too much because you don’t know what it really means. But I think once we almost certainly will find life out there, it will obviously allow us to generalize across the entire galaxy of the entire universe. So, if you can find life on a planet, even in the solar system, you can now start generalizing across the entire universe.
Right now, I guess nobody’s celebrating it too much because you don’t know what it really means. But I think once we almost certainly will find life out there, it will obviously allow us to generalize across the entire galaxy of the entire universe. So, if you can find life on a planet, even in the solar system, you can now start generalizing across the entire universe.
Adam Frank
You can, all you need is one. Right now, our understanding of life, we have one example. We have N equals one example of life. So, that means we could be an accident. It could be that we’re the only place in the entire universe where this weird thing called life has occurred. Get one more example and now you’re done, because if you have one more example, now you don’t have to find all the other examples. You just know that it’s happened more than once, and now you are from a Bayesian perspective, you can start thinking like, “Yeah. Life is not something that’s hard to make.”
You can, all you need is one. Right now, our understanding of life, we have one example. We have N equals one example of life. So, that means we could be an accident. It could be that we’re the only place in the entire universe where this weird thing called life has occurred. Get one more example and now you’re done, because if you have one more example, now you don’t have to find all the other examples. You just know that it’s happened more than once, and now you are from a Bayesian perspective, you can start thinking like, “Yeah. Life is not something that’s hard to make.”
Lex Fridman
Well, let me get your sense of estimates for the Drake equation. You’ve also written a paper expanding on the Drake equation, but what do you think is the answer?
Well, let me get your sense of estimates for the Drake equation. You’ve also written a paper expanding on the Drake equation, but what do you think is the answer?
Adam Frank
So, there was this paper we wrote, Woody Sullivan and I in 2016, where we said, “Look, we have all this exoplanet data now.” So, the thing that exoplanet science and the exoplanet census I was talking about before have nailed is F sub P, the fraction of stars that have planets, it’s one. Every fricking star that you see in the sky hosts a family of worlds. I mean, it’s mind-boggling because those are all places, right? They’re either gas giants, probably with moons, so the moons are places you can stand and look out. Or they’re like terrestrial worlds where even if there’s not life, there’s still snow falling and there’s oceans washing up on shorelines.
So, there was this paper we wrote, Woody Sullivan and I in 2016, where we said, “Look, we have all this exoplanet data now.” So, the thing that exoplanet science and the exoplanet census I was talking about before have nailed is F sub P, the fraction of stars that have planets, it’s one. Every fricking star that you see in the sky hosts a family of worlds. I mean, it’s mind-boggling because those are all places, right? They’re either gas giants, probably with moons, so the moons are places you can stand and look out. Or they’re like terrestrial worlds where even if there’s not life, there’s still snow falling and there’s oceans washing up on shorelines.
It’s incredible to think how many places and stories there are out there. So, the first term was F sub P, which is how many stars have planets. The next term is how many planets are in the habitable zone on average, and it turns out to be one over five, so around 0.2. So, that means you just count five of them go out at night and go one, two, three, four, five. One of them has an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone, like, whoa.
Lex Fridman
So, what defines a habitable zone?
So, what defines a habitable zone?
Habitable zones
Adam Frank
Habitable zone is an idea that was developed in the 1958 by the Chinese American astronomer, Xu Sheng, and it was a brilliant idea. It said, “Look, I can do the simple calculation. If I take a planet and just stick it at some distance from a star of what’s the temperature of the planet? What’s the temperature of the surface?” So now, give it a standard Earth-like atmosphere and ask, “Could there be liquid water on the surface?” We believe that liquid water is really important for life. There could be other things that’s happening fine, but if you were to start off trying to make life, you’d probably choose water as your solvent for it.
Habitable zone is an idea that was developed in the 1958 by the Chinese American astronomer, Xu Sheng, and it was a brilliant idea. It said, “Look, I can do the simple calculation. If I take a planet and just stick it at some distance from a star of what’s the temperature of the planet? What’s the temperature of the surface?” So now, give it a standard Earth-like atmosphere and ask, “Could there be liquid water on the surface?” We believe that liquid water is really important for life. There could be other things that’s happening fine, but if you were to start off trying to make life, you’d probably choose water as your solvent for it.
So basically, the habitable zone is the band of orbits around a star where you can have liquid water on the surface. You could take a glass of water, pour it on the surface, and it would just pull up. It wouldn’t freeze immediately, which would happen if your planet is too far out and it wouldn’t just boil away if your planet’s too close in. So, that’s the formal definition of the habitable zone. So, it’s a nice strict definition, there’s probably way more going on than that, but this is a place to start.
Lex Fridman
Well, we should say it’s a place to start, I do think it’s too strict of a constraint.
Well, we should say it’s a place to start, I do think it’s too strict of a constraint.
Adam Frank
I would agree.
I would agree.
Lex Fridman
We’re talking about temperature where water can be on the surface. There’s so many other ways to get the aforementioned turmoil where the temperature varies, whether it’s volcanic, so interaction of volcanoes and ice and all of this on the moons of planets that are much farther away, all this kind of stuff.
We’re talking about temperature where water can be on the surface. There’s so many other ways to get the aforementioned turmoil where the temperature varies, whether it’s volcanic, so interaction of volcanoes and ice and all of this on the moons of planets that are much farther away, all this kind of stuff.
Adam Frank
Yeah. Well, for example, we know in our own solar system we have, say Europa, the moon of Jupiter, which has got a hundred-mile-deep ocean under 10 miles of ice. That’s not in the habitable zone, that is outside the habitable zone, and that may be the best place. It’s got more water than Earth does, all of its oceans. It’s twice as much water on Europa than there is on Earth. So, that may be a really great for life to form, and it’s outside the habitable zone. So, the habitable zone is a good place to start and it helps us. And there’s reasons why you do want to focus on the habitable zone, because like Europa, I won’t be able to see from across telescopic distances across light years.
Yeah. Well, for example, we know in our own solar system we have, say Europa, the moon of Jupiter, which has got a hundred-mile-deep ocean under 10 miles of ice. That’s not in the habitable zone, that is outside the habitable zone, and that may be the best place. It’s got more water than Earth does, all of its oceans. It’s twice as much water on Europa than there is on Earth. So, that may be a really great for life to form, and it’s outside the habitable zone. So, the habitable zone is a good place to start and it helps us. And there’s reasons why you do want to focus on the habitable zone, because like Europa, I won’t be able to see from across telescopic distances across light years.
I wouldn’t be able to see life on Europa because it’s under 10 miles of ice. So, with the important thing about planets in the habitable zone is that we’re thinking they have atmospheres. Atmospheres are the things we can characterize across 10, 50 light years and we can see biosignatures as we’re going to talk about. So, there is a reason why the habitable zone becomes important for the detection of extra solar life.
Lex Fridman
But for me, when I look up at the stars, it’s very likely that there’s a habitable planet or moon in each of the stars, habitable defined broadly.
But for me, when I look up at the stars, it’s very likely that there’s a habitable planet or moon in each of the stars, habitable defined broadly.
Adam Frank
Yeah, I think that’s not unreasonable to say, especially since the formal definition, you get one in five, right? One in five is a lot, there’s a lot of stars in the sky. So yeah, saying that in general, when I look at a star, there’s a pretty good chance that there’s something habitable orbiting it. It is not a unreasonable scientific claim.
Yeah, I think that’s not unreasonable to say, especially since the formal definition, you get one in five, right? One in five is a lot, there’s a lot of stars in the sky. So yeah, saying that in general, when I look at a star, there’s a pretty good chance that there’s something habitable orbiting it. It is not a unreasonable scientific claim.
Fermi Paradox
Lex Fridman
To me, it seems like there should be alien civilizations everywhere. Why the Fermi paradox? Why haven’t we seen them?
To me, it seems like there should be alien civilizations everywhere. Why the Fermi paradox? Why haven’t we seen them?
Adam Frank
Okay, the Fermi paradox. I love talking about the Fermi paradox because there is no Fermi paradox. Dun dun, dun dun. Yeah, so the Fermi paradox, let’s talk a about the Fermi paradox and the history of it. So, Enrico Fermi, it’s 1950, he’s walking with his friends at Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab to the Cantina, and there had been this cartoon in the New Yorker, they all read the New Yorker. And the cartoon was trying to explain why there had been this rash of garbage cans being disappearing in New York. And this cartoon said, “Oh, it’s UFOs.” Because it’s 1950, the first big UFO craze happened in ’47.
Okay, the Fermi paradox. I love talking about the Fermi paradox because there is no Fermi paradox. Dun dun, dun dun. Yeah, so the Fermi paradox, let’s talk a about the Fermi paradox and the history of it. So, Enrico Fermi, it’s 1950, he’s walking with his friends at Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab to the Cantina, and there had been this cartoon in the New Yorker, they all read the New Yorker. And the cartoon was trying to explain why there had been this rash of garbage cans being disappearing in New York. And this cartoon said, “Oh, it’s UFOs.” Because it’s 1950, the first big UFO craze happened in ’47.
So, they were laughing about this as they’re walking, and they started being physicists, started talking about interstellar travel, interstellar propulsion. Conversation goes on for a while, conversation turns to something else, they’ve gone to other things. About 40 minutes later, over lunch, Fermi blurts out, “Well, where is everybody?” Typical Fermi sort of thing. He’d done the calculation in his head and he suddenly realized that, look, if intelligence is common, that even traveling at sub lights speeds a civilization could cross, hop from one star system to the other and spread it out across the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years.
And he realized this, and so he was like, “Why aren’t they here now?” And that was the beginning of the Fermi paradox. It actually got picked up as a formal thing in 1975 in a paper by Hart where he actually went through this calculation and showed and said, “Well, there’s nobody here now, therefore, there’s nobody anywhere.” Okay, so that is what we will call the direct Fermi paradox, why aren’t they here now? But something happened after SETI began, where people started to, there was this idea of the great silence. People got this idea in their head that like, “Oh, we’ve been looking for decades now for signals of extra-terrestrial intelligence that we haven’t found any. Therefore, there’s nothing out there.
So, we’ll call that the indirect Fermi paradox and there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There’s never been any money to look. SETI was always done by researchers who were scabbing some time, some extra time from their other projects to look a little bit at the sky where the telescope, telescopes are expensive. So, Jason Wright, one of my collaborators, he and his students did a study where they looked at the entire search space for SETI, and imagine that’s an ocean. All the different stars you have to look at, the radio frequencies you have to look at, how when you look, how often you look.
Then they summed up all the SETI searches that had ever been done, they went through the literature. And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you’re looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That’s how much of the ocean that we’ve looked up. We’ve dragged a hot tub’s worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it, and so now are we going to say, “Well, there’s no fish in the ocean.” So, there is absolutely positively no indirect Fermi paradox, we just haven’t looked, but we’re starting to look. So finally, we’re starting to look, that’s what’s exciting.
The direct Fermi paradox, there are so many ways out of that. There’s a book called 77 Solutions to the Fermi Paradox that you can pick your favorite one. It just doesn’t carry a lot of weight because there’s so many ways around it. We did an actual simulation, my group, Jonathan Carroll, one of my collaborators, we actually simulated the galaxy and we simulated probes moving at sub light speed from one star to the other, gathering resources heading to the next one. And so, we could actually track the expansion wave across the galaxy, have one IA biogenesis event, and then watch the whole galaxy get colonized or settled. And it is absolutely true that wave crosses, Hart was right, Fermi was right, that wave crosses very quickly. But civilizations don’t last forever, so one question is when did they visit? When did they come to Earth? So, if you give civilizations a finite lifetime, let them last 10,000, 100,000 years, what you find is you now have a steady state. Civilizations are dying, they’re coming back, they’re traveling between the stars. What you find then is you can have big holes opened up. You can have regions of space where there is nobody for millions of years. And so, if we’re living in one of those bubbles right now, then maybe we revisited but we revisited 100 million years ago.
And there was a paper that Gavin Schmidt and I did that showed that if there was a civilization, whether it was dinosaurs or aliens that was here a 100 million years ago, there’s no way to tell, there’s no record left over, the fossil record is too sparse. The only way maybe you could tell is by looking at the isotopic strata to see if there was anything reminiscent of an industrial civilization. But the idea that you’d be able to find iPhones or toppled buildings after 100 million years is there’s no way.
Lex Fridman
So, if there was an alien camp here, an alien village, a small civilization, maybe even large civilizations?
So, if there was an alien camp here, an alien village, a small civilization, maybe even large civilizations?
Adam Frank
Even a large civilization, even if it was-
Even a large civilization, even if it was-
Lex Fridman
100 million years ago?
100 million years ago?
Adam Frank
And it lasted 10,000 years, fossil record’s not going to have it. Yeah, the fossil record is too sparse, most things don’t fossilize.
And it lasted 10,000 years, fossil record’s not going to have it. Yeah, the fossil record is too sparse, most things don’t fossilize.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Frank
And 10,000 years is a blink in the eye of geological time. So, Gavin called this the Silurian Hypothesis after the Doctor who episode with the lizard creatures, the Silurians. And so, that paper got a lot of press, but it was an important idea, and this was really Gavin’s, I was just helping with the astrobiology. That to recognize that like, “Yeah, we could have been visited a long time ago there just would be no record.” Yeah, it’s mind-blowing.
And 10,000 years is a blink in the eye of geological time. So, Gavin called this the Silurian Hypothesis after the Doctor who episode with the lizard creatures, the Silurians. And so, that paper got a lot of press, but it was an important idea, and this was really Gavin’s, I was just helping with the astrobiology. That to recognize that like, “Yeah, we could have been visited a long time ago there just would be no record.” Yeah, it’s mind-blowing.
Lex Fridman
It’s really mind-blowing.
It’s really mind-blowing.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And it’s also a good reminder that intelligent species have been here for a very short amount of time.
And it’s also a good reminder that intelligent species have been here for a very short amount of time.
Adam Frank
Very short amount of time. Yeah. This is not to say that there was, so I was on Joe Rogan for exactly this paper, and I had to always emphasize, we’re not saying there was a Silurian, but we’re just saying that if there was, that’s why I love Gavin’s question. Gavin’s question was just like, “How could you tell”? It was a very beautifully scientific question. That’s what we were really showing is that unless you did a very specific kind of search, which nobody’s done so far, there’s not an obvious way to tell that there could have been civilizations here earlier on.
Very short amount of time. Yeah. This is not to say that there was, so I was on Joe Rogan for exactly this paper, and I had to always emphasize, we’re not saying there was a Silurian, but we’re just saying that if there was, that’s why I love Gavin’s question. Gavin’s question was just like, “How could you tell”? It was a very beautifully scientific question. That’s what we were really showing is that unless you did a very specific kind of search, which nobody’s done so far, there’s not an obvious way to tell that there could have been civilizations here earlier on.
Lex Fridman
I’ve actually been reading a lot about ancient civilizations, and it just makes me sad how much of the wisdom of that time is lost and how much guessing is going on, whether it’s in South America, what happened in the jungle.
I’ve actually been reading a lot about ancient civilizations, and it just makes me sad how much of the wisdom of that time is lost and how much guessing is going on, whether it’s in South America, what happened in the jungle.
Adam Frank
Like the Amazon, that was the conquistadors came and wiped everybody out, and especially just even the plague may have decimated. So yeah, how much of that civilization.
Like the Amazon, that was the conquistadors came and wiped everybody out, and especially just even the plague may have decimated. So yeah, how much of that civilization.
Lex Fridman
And there’s a lot of theories, and because of archaeology only looks at cities, they don’t really know the origins of humans.
And there’s a lot of theories, and because of archaeology only looks at cities, they don’t really know the origins of humans.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And there’s a lot of really interesting theories, and there are of course controversial and there’s a lot of controversial people in every discipline, but archaeology is a fascinating one because we know so little. They’re basically storytellers, you’re assembling the picture from just very few puzzle pieces, and it’s fascinating. It’s humbling and it’s sad that there could be entire civilizations, ancient civilizations that are either almost entirely or entirely lost.
And there’s a lot of really interesting theories, and there are of course controversial and there’s a lot of controversial people in every discipline, but archaeology is a fascinating one because we know so little. They’re basically storytellers, you’re assembling the picture from just very few puzzle pieces, and it’s fascinating. It’s humbling and it’s sad that there could be entire civilizations, ancient civilizations that are either almost entirely or entirely lost.
Adam Frank
Yeah. Well, the indigenous peoples of North America, there could have been millions and millions. We get this idea that like, oh, the Europeans came and it was empty. But it may have only been empty because the plague gets swept up from what happened in Mesoamerica, and they didn’t really build cities. They didn’t build wooden or stone cities, they built wooden cities.
Yeah. Well, the indigenous peoples of North America, there could have been millions and millions. We get this idea that like, oh, the Europeans came and it was empty. But it may have only been empty because the plague gets swept up from what happened in Mesoamerica, and they didn’t really build cities. They didn’t build wooden or stone cities, they built wooden cities.
Lex Fridman
Everybody seems to be building pyramids and they’re really damn good at it. I don’t know-
Everybody seems to be building pyramids and they’re really damn good at it. I don’t know-
Adam Frank
What it is up with a pyramid. Why does that apply? What archetype in our brain is that?
What it is up with a pyramid. Why does that apply? What archetype in our brain is that?
Lex Fridman
And it is also really interesting, speaking of archetypes, is that independent civilizations formed and they had a lot of similar dynamics like human nature when it builds up hierarchies in a certain way, it builds up myths and religions in a certain way, it builds pyramids in a certain way. It goes to war, all this kind of stuff independently, which is fascinating.
And it is also really interesting, speaking of archetypes, is that independent civilizations formed and they had a lot of similar dynamics like human nature when it builds up hierarchies in a certain way, it builds up myths and religions in a certain way, it builds pyramids in a certain way. It goes to war, all this kind of stuff independently, which is fascinating.
Adam Frank
Santa Fe Institute, the stuff the Santa Fe Institute does on these as complex systems, the origin of hierarchies and such. Very cool.
Santa Fe Institute, the stuff the Santa Fe Institute does on these as complex systems, the origin of hierarchies and such. Very cool.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, Santa Fe folks, complexity in general is really cool.
Yeah, Santa Fe folks, complexity in general is really cool.
Adam Frank
Really cool.
Really cool.
Alien civilizations
Lex Fridman
What phenomena emerge when a bunch of small things get together and interact? Going back to this paper, a new empirical constraint on the prevalence of technological species in the universe. This paper that expands on the Drake equation, what are some interesting things in this paper?
What phenomena emerge when a bunch of small things get together and interact? Going back to this paper, a new empirical constraint on the prevalence of technological species in the universe. This paper that expands on the Drake equation, what are some interesting things in this paper?
Adam Frank
Well, so the main thing we were trying to do with this paper is say, “Look, we have all of this exoplanet data.” It’s got to be good for something, especially since two of the terms that have been nailed down empirically are two terms in the Drake equation. So, F sub P, that’s the second term, fraction of stars that have planets, and then N sub E, the average number of planets in the habitable zone. Those are the second and third term in the Drake equation. So, what that means is all the astronomical terms have been nailed. And so, we said, “Okay, how do we use this to do something with the Drake equation?”
Well, so the main thing we were trying to do with this paper is say, “Look, we have all of this exoplanet data.” It’s got to be good for something, especially since two of the terms that have been nailed down empirically are two terms in the Drake equation. So, F sub P, that’s the second term, fraction of stars that have planets, and then N sub E, the average number of planets in the habitable zone. Those are the second and third term in the Drake equation. So, what that means is all the astronomical terms have been nailed. And so, we said, “Okay, how do we use this to do something with the Drake equation?”
And so, we realized is, “Well, okay, we got to get rid of time.” The lifetime thing, we can’t say anything about that, but if we don’t ask how long do they last but instead ask, “What’s the probability that there have been any civilizations at all?” No matter how long they lasted, I’m not asking whether they exist now or not, I’m just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the universe and that we were able to constrain. And so, what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is that those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run.
And the only way that we’re this whole process from a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed. So therefore, you could put a probability, we called it the pessimism line. We don’t really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, but we could set a limit using this. We could say, “Look, if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22, 1 in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we’re alone.” If it’s anywhere larger than that, then we’re not the first, it’s happened somewhere else. And to me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn’t tell me there’s anybody nearby, the galaxy could be sterile.
It just told me that unless nature’s really has some bias against civilizations, we’re not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.
Lex Fridman
10 billion trillion experiments.
10 billion trillion experiments.
Adam Frank
Yeah, that’s a lot of experiments.
Yeah, that’s a lot of experiments.
Lex Fridman
That’s a lot.
That’s a lot.
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
1,000 is a lot.
1,000 is a lot.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
100 is a lot.
100 is a lot.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
If we, normal humans saw 100 experiments, and we knew that at least one time there was a successful human civilization built we would say for sure, in 100 you’ll get another one.
If we, normal humans saw 100 experiments, and we knew that at least one time there was a successful human civilization built we would say for sure, in 100 you’ll get another one.
Adam Frank
Yeah. So, that’s why these kinds of arguments you have to be careful of what they can do. But I felt like what this paper showed was that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists. So, that’s why we called it the pessimism line. Throughout history, there’s been alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they’ve been yelling at each other, that’s all they had to go with. And with Giordano Bruno in 1600, they burned the guy at the stake for being an alien optimist. But nobody really knew what pessimism or optimism meant. We thought this was like the plank length, this was the plank length of astrobiology.
Yeah. So, that’s why these kinds of arguments you have to be careful of what they can do. But I felt like what this paper showed was that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists. So, that’s why we called it the pessimism line. Throughout history, there’s been alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they’ve been yelling at each other, that’s all they had to go with. And with Giordano Bruno in 1600, they burned the guy at the stake for being an alien optimist. But nobody really knew what pessimism or optimism meant. We thought this was like the plank length, this was the plank length of astrobiology.
Gave you an actual number that if you could somehow calculate what the probability of forming a technological civilization was, this thing shows you where the limit is. As long as you’re above 10 to the minus 22, then you actually absolutely, it has occurred in the history. Other civilizations have occurred in the history of the universe.
Lex Fridman
So, to me, at least, the big question is FE, which is basically a biogenesis. How hard is it for life to originate in a planet? Because all the other ones seem very likely, everything seems very likely. The only open question to me is how hard is it for life to originate?
So, to me, at least, the big question is FE, which is basically a biogenesis. How hard is it for life to originate in a planet? Because all the other ones seem very likely, everything seems very likely. The only open question to me is how hard is it for life to originate?
Adam Frank
There’s lots of ways to, again, we don’t know unless we look, and you had Sarah Walker around not too long ago, she’s very interested in origins of life. So, lots of people are working on this. But I think it’s hard looking at the history of the Earth, and again, you can do Bayesian arguments on this. But yeah, forming life I don’t think is hard. Getting basic biology started, I don’t think is hard. It’s still wild, it’s an amazing process that actually I think requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize what life is and what life isn’t. That’s one of the things I like about Sarah’s work, we’re pursuing on a different level about life as the only system that uses information. But still, regardless of all those kinds of details, life is probably easy to make. That’s my gut feeling.
There’s lots of ways to, again, we don’t know unless we look, and you had Sarah Walker around not too long ago, she’s very interested in origins of life. So, lots of people are working on this. But I think it’s hard looking at the history of the Earth, and again, you can do Bayesian arguments on this. But yeah, forming life I don’t think is hard. Getting basic biology started, I don’t think is hard. It’s still wild, it’s an amazing process that actually I think requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize what life is and what life isn’t. That’s one of the things I like about Sarah’s work, we’re pursuing on a different level about life as the only system that uses information. But still, regardless of all those kinds of details, life is probably easy to make. That’s my gut feeling.
Lex Fridman
Day by day, this changes for me, but I just see that once you create bacteria, it is off to the races. You’re going to get complex life as long as you have enough time. That boring billion, but I just can’t imagine a habitable planet not having a couple of billion to spare.
Day by day, this changes for me, but I just see that once you create bacteria, it is off to the races. You’re going to get complex life as long as you have enough time. That boring billion, but I just can’t imagine a habitable planet not having a couple of billion to spare.
Adam Frank
Yeah, a couple billion years to spare. There is a mystery there about why did it take so long with the Cambrian explosion, but that may be again, about these windows. That it couldn’t happen until the window, the planet and the life had evolved together enough that they together opened the window for the next step. Intelligent life and how long intelligent, technological civilizations, I think there’s a big question about how long those last. And I’m hopeful, but in terms of just, I think life is absolutely going to be common, pretty common in the universe.
Yeah, a couple billion years to spare. There is a mystery there about why did it take so long with the Cambrian explosion, but that may be again, about these windows. That it couldn’t happen until the window, the planet and the life had evolved together enough that they together opened the window for the next step. Intelligent life and how long intelligent, technological civilizations, I think there’s a big question about how long those last. And I’m hopeful, but in terms of just, I think life is absolutely going to be common, pretty common in the universe.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I think, again, if I were to bet everything, even in advanced civilizations are common. So, to me then the only explanation is the L. Our galaxy is a graveyard of civilizations.
Yeah. I think, again, if I were to bet everything, even in advanced civilizations are common. So, to me then the only explanation is the L. Our galaxy is a graveyard of civilizations.
Adam Frank
Yeah. You think about it, we’ve only been around, truly when we think about in Drake’s definition, you had to have radio telescopes, that’s been 100 years. And if we got another 10,000, 100,000 years of history, for us, it’d be pretty amazing. But that still, that wouldn’t be long enough to really pop up the number of civilizations in the galaxy. So, you really need it to be hundreds of millions of years. And that raises a question, which I am very interested in, which is how do we even talk about, I call it the billion-year civilization. How do we even begin to hypothesize or think about in any kind of systematic way, what happens to a technological civilization across hundreds of millions to a billion years?
Yeah. You think about it, we’ve only been around, truly when we think about in Drake’s definition, you had to have radio telescopes, that’s been 100 years. And if we got another 10,000, 100,000 years of history, for us, it’d be pretty amazing. But that still, that wouldn’t be long enough to really pop up the number of civilizations in the galaxy. So, you really need it to be hundreds of millions of years. And that raises a question, which I am very interested in, which is how do we even talk about, I call it the billion-year civilization. How do we even begin to hypothesize or think about in any kind of systematic way, what happens to a technological civilization across hundreds of millions to a billion years?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. How do you even simulate the trajectories as civilizations can take across that kind of timescale?
Yeah. How do you even simulate the trajectories as civilizations can take across that kind of timescale?
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
When all the data we have is just for the 10,000 years or so, 20,000 years that humans have been building civilizations.
When all the data we have is just for the 10,000 years or so, 20,000 years that humans have been building civilizations.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And I don’t know what you put it at, but maybe 100 years that we’ve been technological?
And I don’t know what you put it at, but maybe 100 years that we’ve been technological?
Adam Frank
And we’re ready to blow ourselves to bits or drive ourselves off the planet. Yeah, no, it’s really interesting. But there’s got to be a way that I think that’s really a frontier. So, you had David Kipping on not too long ago, and David and I did a paper and Caleb Scharf, David really drove this. Where it was a Bayesian calculation to ask the question, “If you were to find a detection, if you were to find a signal or a techno signature, would that come from a civilization that was younger your age or older?” And you could see, this is not hard to do, but it was great. The formalism, the formalism was hard. It’s intuitive, but the formalism was hard to show that, yeah, they’re older, probably much older.
And we’re ready to blow ourselves to bits or drive ourselves off the planet. Yeah, no, it’s really interesting. But there’s got to be a way that I think that’s really a frontier. So, you had David Kipping on not too long ago, and David and I did a paper and Caleb Scharf, David really drove this. Where it was a Bayesian calculation to ask the question, “If you were to find a detection, if you were to find a signal or a techno signature, would that come from a civilization that was younger your age or older?” And you could see, this is not hard to do, but it was great. The formalism, the formalism was hard. It’s intuitive, but the formalism was hard to show that, yeah, they’re older, probably much older.
So, that means you really do need to think about like, “Okay, how do billion-year civilizations manifest themselves? What signatures will they leave?” And yeah, what’s so cool about it, it’s so much fun because you have to imagine the unimaginable. Obviously biological evolution can happen on those kinds of timescales, so you wouldn’t even really be the same thing you started out as. But social forms, what kind of social forms can you imagine that would be continuous over that? Or maybe they wouldn’t be continuous, should get they drop out, they destroy themselves, and then they come back. So, maybe it’s a punctuated evolution, but this is the fun part we have to work this out.
Lex Fridman
Well, one way to approach that question is what are the different ways to achieve homeostasis is you get greater and greater technological innovation. So, if you expand out into the universe and you have up to Kardashev scale, what are the ways you can avoid destroying yourself? Just achieve stability while still growing. That’s an interesting question, I think it’s probably simulatable?
Well, one way to approach that question is what are the different ways to achieve homeostasis is you get greater and greater technological innovation. So, if you expand out into the universe and you have up to Kardashev scale, what are the ways you can avoid destroying yourself? Just achieve stability while still growing. That’s an interesting question, I think it’s probably simulatable?
Adam Frank
Could be, agent-based modeling you could do it with. So, our group has used agent-based modeling to do something like the Fermi paradox that was agent-based modeling. But you can also do this. People at Santa Fe have done this, other groups have done this to do use agent-based modeling to track the formation of hierarchies, the formation of stable hierarchies. So, I think it’s actually very doable, but understanding the assumptions and principles that are going into it and what you can extract from those, that is what is the frontier.
Could be, agent-based modeling you could do it with. So, our group has used agent-based modeling to do something like the Fermi paradox that was agent-based modeling. But you can also do this. People at Santa Fe have done this, other groups have done this to do use agent-based modeling to track the formation of hierarchies, the formation of stable hierarchies. So, I think it’s actually very doable, but understanding the assumptions and principles that are going into it and what you can extract from those, that is what is the frontier.
Colonizing Mars
Lex Fridman
Do you think if humans colonize Mars, the dynamic between the civilization on Earth and Mars will be fundamentally different than the dynamic between individual nations on Earth right now? That’s a thing to load into the agent-based simulation we’re talking about.
Do you think if humans colonize Mars, the dynamic between the civilization on Earth and Mars will be fundamentally different than the dynamic between individual nations on Earth right now? That’s a thing to load into the agent-based simulation we’re talking about.
Adam Frank
Yeah. If we settle it, Mars will very quickly want to become its own nation.
Yeah. If we settle it, Mars will very quickly want to become its own nation.
Lex Fridman
Well, no, there’s already going to be nations on Mars that’s guaranteed-
Well, no, there’s already going to be nations on Mars that’s guaranteed-
Adam Frank
Yeah. And they’re there on-
Yeah. And they’re there on-
Lex Fridman
2 million people. The moment you have 1 million people, there’s going to be two tribes.
2 million people. The moment you have 1 million people, there’s going to be two tribes.
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
And then they’re going to start fighting.
And then they’re going to start fighting.
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
And the question is, interplanetary fighting. How quickly does that happen and does it have a different nature to it because of the distances?
And the question is, interplanetary fighting. How quickly does that happen and does it have a different nature to it because of the distances?
Adam Frank
Are you a fan of The Expanse? Have you watched The Expanse? Great show, I highly recommend to everybody. It’s based on a series of books that are excellent. It’s on Prime, six seasons, and it’s basically about the settled solar system. It takes place about 300 years from now, and the entire solar system is settled, and it is the best show about interplanetary politics. The first season, actually, the journal, what was it? Foreign Affairs said the best show on TV about politics it takes place is interplanetary. So yeah, I think human beings being human beings, yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict.
Are you a fan of The Expanse? Have you watched The Expanse? Great show, I highly recommend to everybody. It’s based on a series of books that are excellent. It’s on Prime, six seasons, and it’s basically about the settled solar system. It takes place about 300 years from now, and the entire solar system is settled, and it is the best show about interplanetary politics. The first season, actually, the journal, what was it? Foreign Affairs said the best show on TV about politics it takes place is interplanetary. So yeah, I think human beings being human beings, yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict.
And I don’t think it’ll be necessarily all that different because really I think within a few hundred years we will have lots of people in the solar system, and it doesn’t even have to be on Mars. We did a paper where we look based on, because I always wanted to know about whether an idea in The Expanse was really possible. In The Expanse, the asteroid belt, what they’ve done is they have colonized the asteroid belt by hollowing out the asteroids and spinning them up and living on the inside because they have the Coriolis force. And I thought like, “Wow, what a cool idea.”
And when I ran the blog for NPR, actually talked to the guys and said, “Did you guys calculate this to see whether it’s possible?” Sadly, it’s not possible. The rock is just not strong enough that if you tried to spin it up to the speeds you need to get one third gravity, which is what I think the minimum you need for human beings. The rock would just fall apart, it would break. But we came up with another idea, which was that if you could take small asteroids, put a giant bag around them, a nanofiber bag and spin those up, it would inflate the bag. And then even a small couple of kilometer wide asteroid would expand out to, you could get a Manhattan’s worth of material inside.
So, forget about even colonizing Mars space stations or space habitats with millions of people in them. So anyway, the point is that I think within a few hundred years, it is not unimaginable that there will be millions, if not billions of people living in the solar system.
Lex Fridman
You think most of them will be in space habitats versus on Mars on the planetary surface?
You think most of them will be in space habitats versus on Mars on the planetary surface?
Adam Frank
It’s a lot easier on some level. It depends on how with nanofabrication and such, but getting down to gravity well is hard. So, there’s a certain way in which it’s a lot easier to build real estate out of the asteroids, but we’ll probably do both. I think what’ll happen is the next, should we make it through climate change and nuclear war and all the other, and AI? The next 1,000 years of human history is the solar system. And so, I think we’ll settle every nook and cranny we possibly can, and what I love about, what’s hopeful about it is this idea you’re going to have all of these pockets, and I’m sure there’s going to be a Mormon space habitat.
It’s a lot easier on some level. It depends on how with nanofabrication and such, but getting down to gravity well is hard. So, there’s a certain way in which it’s a lot easier to build real estate out of the asteroids, but we’ll probably do both. I think what’ll happen is the next, should we make it through climate change and nuclear war and all the other, and AI? The next 1,000 years of human history is the solar system. And so, I think we’ll settle every nook and cranny we possibly can, and what I love about, what’s hopeful about it is this idea you’re going to have all of these pockets, and I’m sure there’s going to be a Mormon space habitat.
Whatever you want, a libertarian space habitat, everybody’s going to be able to create, there’ll be lots of experiments in human flourishing. And those kinds of experiments will be really useful for us to figure out better ways for us to interact and have maximum flourishing, maximum wellness, maximum democracy, maximum freedom.
Lex Fridman
Do you think that’s a good backup solution to go out into space, so to avoid the possibility of humans destroying themselves completely here on Earth?
Do you think that’s a good backup solution to go out into space, so to avoid the possibility of humans destroying themselves completely here on Earth?
Adam Frank
Well, I think I want to be always careful with that, because like I said, it’s centuries that we’re talking about. So, the problem with climate change, and same thing with nuclear war, it’s breathing down our necks now. So, trying to establish a base on Mars it’s going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple a century at least. So, it’s not like a backup plan now, we have to solve the problem of climate change, we have to deal with that. There’s still enough nuclear weapons to really do horrific things to the planet for human beings.
Well, I think I want to be always careful with that, because like I said, it’s centuries that we’re talking about. So, the problem with climate change, and same thing with nuclear war, it’s breathing down our necks now. So, trying to establish a base on Mars it’s going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple a century at least. So, it’s not like a backup plan now, we have to solve the problem of climate change, we have to deal with that. There’s still enough nuclear weapons to really do horrific things to the planet for human beings.
So, I don’t think it’s a backup plan in that way, but I do think, like I said, it’s the prize. If we get through this, then we get the entire solar system to play around and experiment with and do really cool things with.
Lex Fridman
Well, I think it could be a lot less than a couple of centuries if there’s a urgency, a real urgency, like a catastrophe. Maybe a small nuclear war breaks out where it’s like, holy shit, this is for sure a bigger one is looming. Maybe if geopolitically the war between China and the United States escalates where there’s this tension that builds and builds and builds and it becomes more obvious that we need to really, really [inaudible 01:05:39].
Well, I think it could be a lot less than a couple of centuries if there’s a urgency, a real urgency, like a catastrophe. Maybe a small nuclear war breaks out where it’s like, holy shit, this is for sure a bigger one is looming. Maybe if geopolitically the war between China and the United States escalates where there’s this tension that builds and builds and builds and it becomes more obvious that we need to really, really [inaudible 01:05:39].
Adam Frank
Yeah. I think my only dilemma with that is that I just think that a self-sufficient base is so far away. That say you start doing that and then there is a full-scale nuclear exchange that base is, it’s not going to last because the self-sufficiency requires a kind of economy. Literally a material economy that we are so far from with Mars that we are centuries from. Like I said, three centuries, which is not that long, two to three centuries. Look at 1820, nobody had traveled faster than 60 miles an hour unless they were falling off a cliff. And now we routinely travel at 500 miles an hour, but it is centuries long.
Yeah. I think my only dilemma with that is that I just think that a self-sufficient base is so far away. That say you start doing that and then there is a full-scale nuclear exchange that base is, it’s not going to last because the self-sufficiency requires a kind of economy. Literally a material economy that we are so far from with Mars that we are centuries from. Like I said, three centuries, which is not that long, two to three centuries. Look at 1820, nobody had traveled faster than 60 miles an hour unless they were falling off a cliff. And now we routinely travel at 500 miles an hour, but it is centuries long.
So, that’s why I think we’d be better off trying to solve these problems than I just think the odds that we’re going to be able to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars before that threat comes to head is small. So, we’d have to deal with the threat.
Lex Fridman
That’s an interesting scientific and engineering question of how to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars or out in space as a space habitat where Earth entirely could be destroyed, you could still survive.
That’s an interesting scientific and engineering question of how to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars or out in space as a space habitat where Earth entirely could be destroyed, you could still survive.
Adam Frank
Yeah. Because it’s really what about, thinking about complex systems? A space habitat would have to be as robust as an ecosystem. As the kind of thing, you go out and you see a pond with all the different webs of interactions. That’s why I always think that if this process of going out into space will help us with climate change and with thinking about making a long-term sustainable version of human civilization. Because you really have to think about these webs, the complexity of these webs and recognize the biosphere has been doing this forever. The biosphere knows how to do this.
Yeah. Because it’s really what about, thinking about complex systems? A space habitat would have to be as robust as an ecosystem. As the kind of thing, you go out and you see a pond with all the different webs of interactions. That’s why I always think that if this process of going out into space will help us with climate change and with thinking about making a long-term sustainable version of human civilization. Because you really have to think about these webs, the complexity of these webs and recognize the biosphere has been doing this forever. The biosphere knows how to do this.
And so, A, how do we build a vibrant, powerful technosphere that also doesn’t mess with the biosphere, mess with the biosphere’s capacity to support our technosphere? So, by trying to build space habitats, in some sense, you’re thinking about building a small-scale version of this. So, I think the two problems are going to feedback on each other.
Lex Fridman
Well, there’s also the other possibility of the movie Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth, where we can create this life gun that just shoots as opposed to engineering everything. Basically, seeding life on a bunch of places and letting life do its thing, which is really good at doing it seems like. So, as opposed to with a space habitat, you basically have to build the entire biosphere and technosphere, the whole thing-
Well, there’s also the other possibility of the movie Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth, where we can create this life gun that just shoots as opposed to engineering everything. Basically, seeding life on a bunch of places and letting life do its thing, which is really good at doing it seems like. So, as opposed to with a space habitat, you basically have to build the entire biosphere and technosphere, the whole thing-
Adam Frank
The whole thing.
The whole thing.
Lex Fridman
… by yourself. If you just, hey, the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria, place it in Europa, I think you’d be surprised what happens.
… by yourself. If you just, hey, the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria, place it in Europa, I think you’d be surprised what happens.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Honestly, if you put a huge amount of bacteria, a giant number of organisms from Earth into on Mars, on some of these moons of the other planets in the solar system, I feel like some of them would actually find a way to survive.
Honestly, if you put a huge amount of bacteria, a giant number of organisms from Earth into on Mars, on some of these moons of the other planets in the solar system, I feel like some of them would actually find a way to survive.
Adam Frank
The moon is hard, the moon may be really hard. But I wonder if somebody must’ve done these experiments. Because we know they’re extremophiles, we know that you can go down 10 miles below the Earth’s surface. And there are things where there’s no sunlight, the conditions are so extreme and there’s lots of microbes having a great time living off the radioactivity in the rocks. But they had lots of time to evolve to those conditions, so I’m not sure if you dumped a bunch of bacteria, so somebody must’ve done these experiments. How fast could microbial evolution occur in under harsh conditions that you maybe get somebody who figures out, ” Okay, I can deal with this.”
The moon is hard, the moon may be really hard. But I wonder if somebody must’ve done these experiments. Because we know they’re extremophiles, we know that you can go down 10 miles below the Earth’s surface. And there are things where there’s no sunlight, the conditions are so extreme and there’s lots of microbes having a great time living off the radioactivity in the rocks. But they had lots of time to evolve to those conditions, so I’m not sure if you dumped a bunch of bacteria, so somebody must’ve done these experiments. How fast could microbial evolution occur in under harsh conditions that you maybe get somebody who figures out, ” Okay, I can deal with this.”
I think the Moon’s too much because it’s so sterile. But Mars, I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know, but it’s an interesting idea.
Lex Fridman
I wonder if somebody has done those experiments.
I wonder if somebody has done those experiments.
Adam Frank
Yeah, you think somebody would, let’s take a bunch of microbes-
Yeah, you think somebody would, let’s take a bunch of microbes-
Lex Fridman
The harshest possible condition of all different kinds, temperature, all this kind of stuff.
The harshest possible condition of all different kinds, temperature, all this kind of stuff.
Adam Frank
Right, pressure, salinity, and then just dump a bunch of things that are not used to it, and then just see, does everybody just die? That’s it.
Right, pressure, salinity, and then just dump a bunch of things that are not used to it, and then just see, does everybody just die? That’s it.
Lex Fridman
The thing about life, it flourishes in a non-sterile environment where there’s a bunch of options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh-
The thing about life, it flourishes in a non-sterile environment where there’s a bunch of options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh-
Lex Fridman
… Options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh. In the lab, I don’t know if you can reconstruct harsh conditions plus options for survival. You know what I mean? You have to have the huge variety of resources that are always available on a planet somehow, even when it’s a super harsh condition. So that’s actually not a trivial experiment and if somebody did that experiment in the lab, I’d be a little bit skeptical because I could see bacteria doesn’t survive in this kind of temperature. But then I’d be like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
… Options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh. In the lab, I don’t know if you can reconstruct harsh conditions plus options for survival. You know what I mean? You have to have the huge variety of resources that are always available on a planet somehow, even when it’s a super harsh condition. So that’s actually not a trivial experiment and if somebody did that experiment in the lab, I’d be a little bit skeptical because I could see bacteria doesn’t survive in this kind of temperature. But then I’d be like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Adam Frank
Right. Are there other options? Is the condition rich enough?
Right. Are there other options? Is the condition rich enough?
Lex Fridman
Rich enough, yeah.
Rich enough, yeah.
Adam Frank
There’s an alternative view though, which is, there’s this great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora. So there’s been 1,000,000 sentry ship stories where Earth sends out a generation ship or sentry ship, and it goes to another planet and they land and they colonize. And on this one, they get all the way there and they think the planet’s going to be habitable. And it turns out that it’s not habitable for earth life. There’s bacteria or prions actually, that just kill people in the simplest way. And the important thing about this book was the idea that life is actually very tied to its planet. It may not be so easy. I just thought it was a really interesting idea. I’m not saying necessarily supporting it, but that actually, life reflects the planetary conditions… Not the planetary, the planet itself, the whole lineage, the whole history of the biosphere. And it may not be so easy to just be like, “Oh, just drop it over here and it’ll…”
There’s an alternative view though, which is, there’s this great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora. So there’s been 1,000,000 sentry ship stories where Earth sends out a generation ship or sentry ship, and it goes to another planet and they land and they colonize. And on this one, they get all the way there and they think the planet’s going to be habitable. And it turns out that it’s not habitable for earth life. There’s bacteria or prions actually, that just kill people in the simplest way. And the important thing about this book was the idea that life is actually very tied to its planet. It may not be so easy. I just thought it was a really interesting idea. I’m not saying necessarily supporting it, but that actually, life reflects the planetary conditions… Not the planetary, the planet itself, the whole lineage, the whole history of the biosphere. And it may not be so easy to just be like, “Oh, just drop it over here and it’ll…”
Because the bacteria, even though they’re individual examples of life, and I believe this the true unit of life, it’s not DNA, it’s not a cell, it’s the biosphere. It’s the whole community.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. That’s actually an interesting field of study is how when you arrive from one planet to another… So we humans arrive to a planet that has a biosphere, maybe a technosphere, what is the way to integrate without killing yourself or-
Yeah. That’s actually an interesting field of study is how when you arrive from one planet to another… So we humans arrive to a planet that has a biosphere, maybe a technosphere, what is the way to integrate without killing yourself or-
Adam Frank
Or the other one?
Or the other one?
Lex Fridman
Or the other one? Let’s stick to biology. That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if we have a rigorous way of investigating that.
Or the other one? Let’s stick to biology. That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if we have a rigorous way of investigating that.
Adam Frank
Because everything on life has the same lineage. We all come from LUCA, the last universal common ancestor. And what you see is often in science fiction, people will do things like, “Oh, well, it’s okay,” because that metabolism, that biochemistry is so different from ours that we can coexist because they don’t even know each other.
Because everything on life has the same lineage. We all come from LUCA, the last universal common ancestor. And what you see is often in science fiction, people will do things like, “Oh, well, it’s okay,” because that metabolism, that biochemistry is so different from ours that we can coexist because they don’t even know each other.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Adam Frank
And then the other version is you get there, you land, and instantly, the nose bleeds and you’re dead. So it’s-
And then the other version is you get there, you land, and instantly, the nose bleeds and you’re dead. So it’s-
Lex Fridman
Unfortunately, I think it’s the latter.
Unfortunately, I think it’s the latter.
Adam Frank
Yeah, it feels like the alien kind of thing.
Yeah, it feels like the alien kind of thing.
Search for aliens
Lex Fridman
So as we look out there, according to the Drake equations we just discussed, it seems impossible to me that there’s not civilizations everywhere. So how do we look at them, this process of SETI?
So as we look out there, according to the Drake equations we just discussed, it seems impossible to me that there’s not civilizations everywhere. So how do we look at them, this process of SETI?
Adam Frank
I have to put on my scientist hat and just say, my gut feeling is that dumb life, so to speak, is common. I can see ways in which intelligent civilizations may be sparse, but until… We got to go look, it’s all armchair astronomy.
I have to put on my scientist hat and just say, my gut feeling is that dumb life, so to speak, is common. I can see ways in which intelligent civilizations may be sparse, but until… We got to go look, it’s all armchair astronomy.
Lex Fridman
That’s from a rigorous scientific perspective. From my bro science perspective, it seems, again, smoking the aforementioned weed-
That’s from a rigorous scientific perspective. From my bro science perspective, it seems, again, smoking the aforementioned weed-
Adam Frank
Smoking the weed, yeah. After the bong hit, it seems so.
Smoking the weed, yeah. After the bong hit, it seems so.
Lex Fridman
Honestly, it really just seems impossible to me that there’s not potentially dead, but advanced civilizations everywhere in our galaxy.
Honestly, it really just seems impossible to me that there’s not potentially dead, but advanced civilizations everywhere in our galaxy.
Adam Frank
Yeah, yeah. The potentially dead part, I think, right. It could be that making civilizations is easy, they just don’t last long. So when we went out there, we’d find a lot of extinct civilizations.
Yeah, yeah. The potentially dead part, I think, right. It could be that making civilizations is easy, they just don’t last long. So when we went out there, we’d find a lot of extinct civilizations.
Lex Fridman
Extinct civilizations. Yeah. Apex predators don’t survive. They get better, better, better.
Extinct civilizations. Yeah. Apex predators don’t survive. They get better, better, better.
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
And they die, kill themselves all somehow. Anyway. So just how do we find them?
And they die, kill themselves all somehow. Anyway. So just how do we find them?
Adam Frank
Yeah. So SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Technology is a term that I am not fond of using anymore. Some people in my field are. So I’m sorry folks, but what I really like is the idea of technosignatures because I think to me, SETI is the… First of all, intelligence. We’re not really looking for intelligence. We’re looking for technology, and SETI, the classic idea of SETI is the radio telescopes and contact, Jodie Foster with the headphones. That whole thing is still part, it’s still active, there’s still great things going on with it, but suddenly, this whole new window opened up. When we discovered exoplanets, we now found a new way to look for intelligence civilizations or life in general in a way that doesn’t have any of the assumptions that had to go into the classic radio SETI. And specifically, what I mean is we’re not looking for somebody sending us a beacon. You really needed that with a classic model, for a bunch of different reasons. You have to assume they wanted to be found and they were sending you a super powerful beacon.
Yeah. So SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Technology is a term that I am not fond of using anymore. Some people in my field are. So I’m sorry folks, but what I really like is the idea of technosignatures because I think to me, SETI is the… First of all, intelligence. We’re not really looking for intelligence. We’re looking for technology, and SETI, the classic idea of SETI is the radio telescopes and contact, Jodie Foster with the headphones. That whole thing is still part, it’s still active, there’s still great things going on with it, but suddenly, this whole new window opened up. When we discovered exoplanets, we now found a new way to look for intelligence civilizations or life in general in a way that doesn’t have any of the assumptions that had to go into the classic radio SETI. And specifically, what I mean is we’re not looking for somebody sending us a beacon. You really needed that with a classic model, for a bunch of different reasons. You have to assume they wanted to be found and they were sending you a super powerful beacon.
Now, because we know exactly where to look and we know exactly how to look, we can just go about looking for passive signatures of the civilization, going about its civilizationing business, without asking whether they want to be contacted or not. So this is what we call a biosignature or a technosignature. It is an imprint in the light from the planet of the activity of a biosphere or a technosphere, and that’s really important. That is why the whole Gaia idea ends up being astrobiological, that biospheres and technospheres are so potent, they change the entire planet, and you can see that from 20 light years.
So let’s give an example of a biosignature to start off with, which would be a signature of a biosphere, oxygen. Right? On earth at least, we know that oxygen is only in the atmosphere because life put it there. If life went away, the oxygen, and particularly oxygen and methane, that pair, they would disappear very quickly. They’d react away. They’d all be gone. So if you find a planet with oxygen and methane, that’s a good bet that there’s a biosphere there. Okay, what about technospheres? Technospheres, so I’m the principal investigator on the first grant NASA has ever given to do these exoplanet technosignatures. For reasons we can talk about, NASA had gotten pretty gun-shy about funding anything about intelligent life, but okay. What’s an example of a technosignature? Well, one could be atmospheric, “Pollution.” I’m going to put, “Pollution,” in quotes here because it doesn’t have to be pollution, but gases like chlorofluorocarbons.
So we dumped a huge amount of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere by mistake. It was affecting the ozone, but we put so much in there that actually, this is one of the things we did, we did a paper where we showed, you could detect it across interstellar distances. You could look at the atmosphere, look at the light coming from a distant planet, pass the light through a spectrograph and see the spectral lines, the fingerprint, the spectral fingerprint of chlorofluorocarbons in an atmosphere. And that would for sure tell you that there was a technological civilization there, because there’s no other way to make chlorofluorocarbons except through some kind of industrial process.
Lex Fridman
So in the case of the biosphere, you’re looking for anomalies in the spectrograph?
So in the case of the biosphere, you’re looking for anomalies in the spectrograph?
Adam Frank
I wouldn’t necessarily call these anomalies. For biosignature, I’m looking for things that a geosphere, right? That just rock and air wouldn’t produce on its own.
I wouldn’t necessarily call these anomalies. For biosignature, I’m looking for things that a geosphere, right? That just rock and air wouldn’t produce on its own.
Lex Fridman
What kind of chemicals would life produce?
What kind of chemicals would life produce?
Adam Frank
Right. And that’s the interesting thing. So we can use earth as an example. We can say, look, oxygen. We know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere if it wasn’t for dimethyl sulfide, which is a compound that phylloplankton dump into the atmosphere, a lot of it, that’s sometimes mentioned. And there was a paper that somebody wrote where it was like, “Well, we’re not saying we see it, but there’s a bunch of noise in the spectra right there.” So there’s a whole list of things that earth has done that are in the atmosphere that might be biosignatures, but now we’re reaching an interesting point. The field has matured to the point where we can start asking about agnostic biosignatures, things that have nothing to do with earth’s history, but we think that would still be indications of this weirdness we call life. What is it in general that life does that leaves an imprint?
Right. And that’s the interesting thing. So we can use earth as an example. We can say, look, oxygen. We know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere if it wasn’t for dimethyl sulfide, which is a compound that phylloplankton dump into the atmosphere, a lot of it, that’s sometimes mentioned. And there was a paper that somebody wrote where it was like, “Well, we’re not saying we see it, but there’s a bunch of noise in the spectra right there.” So there’s a whole list of things that earth has done that are in the atmosphere that might be biosignatures, but now we’re reaching an interesting point. The field has matured to the point where we can start asking about agnostic biosignatures, things that have nothing to do with earth’s history, but we think that would still be indications of this weirdness we call life. What is it in general that life does that leaves an imprint?
So one of these things could be the structure of the network of chemical reactions that biology always produces very different chemical networks, who’s reacting with who, than just rock and water. So there’s been some proposals for networked biosignatures. Information theory, you can try and look at the information that is in the different compounds that you find in the atmosphere, and maybe that information shows you like, “Oh, there’s too much information here. There must’ve been biology happening. It’s not just rock.” Same thing for techno. That’s what we’re working on right now, for technosignatures as well.
Lex Fridman
So how do you detect technosignatures?
So how do you detect technosignatures?
Adam Frank
Okay. So with technosignatures, I gave the example of chlorofluorocarbons. So that would be an example of, and again, that one is a non-agnostic one, because we sort of like, “Oh, we produced chlorofluorocarbons. Maybe they will.” And there’s solar panels. The glint off of solar panels will produce the way the light is reflected off of solar panels, no matter what it’s made out of actually. There was a paper that Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb did in… I think it was 2017. We’ve just followed up on it. That actually could act as a technosignature. You’d be able to see in the reflected light this big jump that would occur because of… City lights, artificial illumination. If there’s really large scale cities like Coruscant and Star Wars or Trantor in the foundation, those city lights would be detectable, the spectral imprint of those across 20, 30 light years.
Okay. So with technosignatures, I gave the example of chlorofluorocarbons. So that would be an example of, and again, that one is a non-agnostic one, because we sort of like, “Oh, we produced chlorofluorocarbons. Maybe they will.” And there’s solar panels. The glint off of solar panels will produce the way the light is reflected off of solar panels, no matter what it’s made out of actually. There was a paper that Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb did in… I think it was 2017. We’ve just followed up on it. That actually could act as a technosignature. You’d be able to see in the reflected light this big jump that would occur because of… City lights, artificial illumination. If there’s really large scale cities like Coruscant and Star Wars or Trantor in the foundation, those city lights would be detectable, the spectral imprint of those across 20, 30 light years.
So our job in this grant is to develop the first ever library of technosignatures. Nobody’s really ever thought about this before. So we’re trying to come up with all the possible ideas for what a civilization might produce that could be visible across interstellar distances. And are these good ones or are these ones going to be hard to detect or such?
Lex Fridman
City lights. So if a planet is all lit up with artificial light across 20 to 30 light years, we can see it.
City lights. So if a planet is all lit up with artificial light across 20 to 30 light years, we can see it.
Adam Frank
Yeah. If you looked at earth at night from a distance, looked at spectra and you had sensitive enough instruments, you’d be able to see all the sodium lights and the reflected light off of. They bounce off the ground, the light bounces off the ground. So you’d convolve the sodium lamps with the reflected spectra from the ground. And yeah, you’d be able to see that there’s city lights. Now, increase that by a factor of 1,000 if you had a trantor, and you’d be able to detect that across interstellar distances. Thomas Beatty did this work, who’s now working with us.
Yeah. If you looked at earth at night from a distance, looked at spectra and you had sensitive enough instruments, you’d be able to see all the sodium lights and the reflected light off of. They bounce off the ground, the light bounces off the ground. So you’d convolve the sodium lamps with the reflected spectra from the ground. And yeah, you’d be able to see that there’s city lights. Now, increase that by a factor of 1,000 if you had a trantor, and you’d be able to detect that across interstellar distances. Thomas Beatty did this work, who’s now working with us.
Lex Fridman
What do you think is the most detectable thing about earth?
What do you think is the most detectable thing about earth?
Adam Frank
Wow, this is fun. We just have Sophia Sheikh, who’s part of our collaboration, just did a paper. We did earth from earth. If you were looking at earth with earth technology for a bunch of different technosignatures, how close would you have to be to be able to detect them? And most of them turn out to be… You’d have to be pretty close, at least out to the Oort cloud, but actually, it is our radio signatures still, that is still most detectable.
Wow, this is fun. We just have Sophia Sheikh, who’s part of our collaboration, just did a paper. We did earth from earth. If you were looking at earth with earth technology for a bunch of different technosignatures, how close would you have to be to be able to detect them? And most of them turn out to be… You’d have to be pretty close, at least out to the Oort cloud, but actually, it is our radio signatures still, that is still most detectable.
Lex Fridman
By the way, when you said you had to be pretty close and then you said the Oort cloud, that’s not very close. But you mean from an interstellar perspective.
By the way, when you said you had to be pretty close and then you said the Oort cloud, that’s not very close. But you mean from an interstellar perspective.
Adam Frank
Interstellar distance, because we really want to know is I’m sitting here on earth, I’m looking at these exoplanets, the nearest star is four light years away. So that’s the minimum distance. So if I’m looking at exoplanets, what kind of signals could I see?
Interstellar distance, because we really want to know is I’m sitting here on earth, I’m looking at these exoplanets, the nearest star is four light years away. So that’s the minimum distance. So if I’m looking at exoplanets, what kind of signals could I see?
Lex Fridman
What is detectable about earth with our current technology from our nearest solar system?
What is detectable about earth with our current technology from our nearest solar system?
Adam Frank
Oh my God, there’s all kinds of stuff. Well, like the chlorofluorocarbons, you can see earth’s pollution, and I think city lights, you had to be within the solar system.
Oh my God, there’s all kinds of stuff. Well, like the chlorofluorocarbons, you can see earth’s pollution, and I think city lights, you had to be within the solar system.
Lex Fridman
If they do direct imaging of earth-
If they do direct imaging of earth-
Adam Frank
They’re going to need much more powerful, but let me tell you, let’s talk about direct imaging for a moment because I just have to go on, this is such a cool idea. So what we really want, and the next generation of space telescopes and such is we’re trying to do direct imaging. We’re trying to get an image of a planet separated from its star to be able to see the reflected light or the actual emission from the planet itself.
They’re going to need much more powerful, but let me tell you, let’s talk about direct imaging for a moment because I just have to go on, this is such a cool idea. So what we really want, and the next generation of space telescopes and such is we’re trying to do direct imaging. We’re trying to get an image of a planet separated from its star to be able to see the reflected light or the actual emission from the planet itself.
Lex Fridman
By the way, just to clarify, direct imaging means literally a picture?
By the way, just to clarify, direct imaging means literally a picture?
Adam Frank
A picture, but the problem is that even with the thing that’s going to come after JWST, it’s going to be a pixel. You’re not going to get any kind of resolution. You’ll be able to get the light from it, which you’ll be able to pass through a spectrograph, but you’re not going to be able to take a picture. But there is this idea called the solar gravity lens telescope, I think that’s what it is. And the idea is insane. So their general relativity says, “Look, massive bodies distort space. They actually curve space-time.” So the sun is a massive body, and so that means that the light passing through the sun gets focused like a lens. So the idea is to send a bunch of telescopes out into the Oort cloud, and then look back towards the sun towards an exoplanet that is behind… Not directly behind the sun, but is in the direction of the sun.
A picture, but the problem is that even with the thing that’s going to come after JWST, it’s going to be a pixel. You’re not going to get any kind of resolution. You’ll be able to get the light from it, which you’ll be able to pass through a spectrograph, but you’re not going to be able to take a picture. But there is this idea called the solar gravity lens telescope, I think that’s what it is. And the idea is insane. So their general relativity says, “Look, massive bodies distort space. They actually curve space-time.” So the sun is a massive body, and so that means that the light passing through the sun gets focused like a lens. So the idea is to send a bunch of telescopes out into the Oort cloud, and then look back towards the sun towards an exoplanet that is behind… Not directly behind the sun, but is in the direction of the sun.
And then let the sun act like a lens and collect, focus the light onto the telescope and you would be able to get, and they’ve done… It’s amazing. This idea is insane. They’d be able to get, if everything works out, 24 kilometer resolution. You’d be able to see Manhattan on an exoplanet. And this thing, it sounds insane, but actually, NASA, the team has already gotten through three levels of NASA… There’s the NASA program for, “Give us your wackiest idea.” And then the ones that survive that are like, “Okay, tell us whether that wacky idea is even feasible?” And they’re marching along. And the idea is that they even have plans for how you’d be able to get these probes out into the Oort cloud on relatively fast time scales. You need to be about 500 times as far from the sun as earth is, but right now, the idea seems to hold together.
So probably when I’ll be dead, but when you’re an old man, it’s possible that something like this… Could you imagine having that kind of resolution, a picture of an exoplanet down to kilometers? So I’m very excited about that [inaudible 01:24:26].
Lex Fridman
I can only imagine having a picture like that, and then there’s some mysterious artifacts that you’re seeing.
I can only imagine having a picture like that, and then there’s some mysterious artifacts that you’re seeing.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
It’s both inspiring and almost heartbreaking that we can see. I think we would be able to see a civilization where there’s a lot of scientists agree that this is very likely something and then we can’t-
It’s both inspiring and almost heartbreaking that we can see. I think we would be able to see a civilization where there’s a lot of scientists agree that this is very likely something and then we can’t-
Adam Frank
We can’t get there. But again, this is the thing about being long-lived. We’ve got to get to the point where we’re long-lived enough that… Let’s imagine that we find, say 10 light years away, we find a planet that looks like it’s got technosignatures. Righ? It doesn’t end there. That would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity, and it wouldn’t be like, “Well, okay, we’re done.” The first thing we do is we build bigger telescopes to try and do those imaging. And then the next thing after that, we plan a mission there. We would figure out, with Breakthrough Starshot, there was this idea of trying to use giant lasers to propel small spacecrafts, light sails, almost to the speed of light. So they would get there in 10 years and take pictures. So if we actually made this discovery, there would be the impulse. There would be the effort to actually try and send something to get there.
We can’t get there. But again, this is the thing about being long-lived. We’ve got to get to the point where we’re long-lived enough that… Let’s imagine that we find, say 10 light years away, we find a planet that looks like it’s got technosignatures. Righ? It doesn’t end there. That would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity, and it wouldn’t be like, “Well, okay, we’re done.” The first thing we do is we build bigger telescopes to try and do those imaging. And then the next thing after that, we plan a mission there. We would figure out, with Breakthrough Starshot, there was this idea of trying to use giant lasers to propel small spacecrafts, light sails, almost to the speed of light. So they would get there in 10 years and take pictures. So if we actually made this discovery, there would be the impulse. There would be the effort to actually try and send something to get there.
Now, we probably couldn’t land, so maybe we take 30 years to build, 10 years to get there, 10 years to get the picture back. Okay, you’re dead, but your kids are… You know what I mean? So it becomes now this multi-generational project. How long did it take to build the pyramids? How long did it take to build the giant cathedrals? Those were multi-generational projects, and I think we’re on the cusp of that kind of project.
Lex Fridman
I think that would probably unite humans.
I think that would probably unite humans.
Adam Frank
I think it would play a big role. I think it would be helpful. Human beings are a mess, let’s face it. That’s why I always say to people, discovery of life, of any kind of life, even if it was microbial life, it wouldn’t matter, that to know that we’re not an accident, to know that there is probably… If we found one example of life, we’d know that we’re not an accident and there’s probably lots of life and that we’re a community. We’re part of a cosmic kind of community of life, and who knows what life has done? All bets are off with life.
I think it would play a big role. I think it would be helpful. Human beings are a mess, let’s face it. That’s why I always say to people, discovery of life, of any kind of life, even if it was microbial life, it wouldn’t matter, that to know that we’re not an accident, to know that there is probably… If we found one example of life, we’d know that we’re not an accident and there’s probably lots of life and that we’re a community. We’re part of a cosmic kind of community of life, and who knows what life has done? All bets are off with life.
Lex Fridman
Since we’re talking about the future of telescopes, let’s talk about our current super sexy, awesome telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, that I still can’t believe actually worked.
Since we’re talking about the future of telescopes, let’s talk about our current super sexy, awesome telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, that I still can’t believe actually worked.
Adam Frank
I can’t believe it worked either. I was really skeptical. I was like, “Okay, guys. All right, sure.”
I can’t believe it worked either. I was really skeptical. I was like, “Okay, guys. All right, sure.”
Lex Fridman
We only got one shot for this incredibly complicated piece of hardware to unfold. So what kind of stuff can we see with it? I’ve been just looking through different kinds of announcements that have been detected. There’s been some direct imaging-
We only got one shot for this incredibly complicated piece of hardware to unfold. So what kind of stuff can we see with it? I’ve been just looking through different kinds of announcements that have been detected. There’s been some direct imaging-
Adam Frank
Yes, like a single pixel.
Yes, like a single pixel.
Lex Fridman
The kinds of exoplanets were able to direct image I guess would have to be hot.
The kinds of exoplanets were able to direct image I guess would have to be hot.
Adam Frank
Hot, reasonably far away from the star. I think JWST is really at the hairy edge of being able to do much with this. What’s more important I think, for JWST is the spectra. And the problem with spectra is that there’s not sexy pictures. It’s like, “Hey, look at this wiggly line,” but be able to find and characterize atmospheres around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step. That’s where we are right now. In order to look for life, we need to find planets with atmospheres. And then we need to be able to do this thing called characterization, where we look at the spectral fingerprints for what’s in the atmosphere. Is there carbon? Is there carbon dioxide? Is there oxygen? Is there methane? And that’s the most exciting thing.
Hot, reasonably far away from the star. I think JWST is really at the hairy edge of being able to do much with this. What’s more important I think, for JWST is the spectra. And the problem with spectra is that there’s not sexy pictures. It’s like, “Hey, look at this wiggly line,” but be able to find and characterize atmospheres around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step. That’s where we are right now. In order to look for life, we need to find planets with atmospheres. And then we need to be able to do this thing called characterization, where we look at the spectral fingerprints for what’s in the atmosphere. Is there carbon? Is there carbon dioxide? Is there oxygen? Is there methane? And that’s the most exciting thing.
For example, there was this planet K2-18b, which they did a beautiful job getting the spectra, and the spectra indicated it may be an entirely new kind of habitable world called a hycean world, hycean meaning hydrogen ocean world. And that is a kind of planet that it would be in the super earth, sub-Neptune domain we were talking about, maybe eight times the mass of the earth. But it’s got a layer of hydrogen, of an atmosphere of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas. So hydrogen will keep the planet underneath it warm enough that you could get liquid water, you can get a giant ocean of liquid water, and that’s an entirely different kind of planet. That could be habitable planet. It could be a 60 degree warm ocean.
So the data that came out of JWST for that planet was good enough to be able to indicate like, “Oh yeah, you know what? From what we understand with the models, this looks like it could be a hycean world.”
Lex Fridman
And it’s 120 light years away from earth.
And it’s 120 light years away from earth.
Adam Frank
And so isn’t that amazing? It’s 120 light years away, but we can see into the atmosphere. We can see to the atmosphere so well that we can be like, “Oh, look, methane.” Methane was a five sigma detection. You knew that the data were so good that it was the gold standard of science.
And so isn’t that amazing? It’s 120 light years away, but we can see into the atmosphere. We can see to the atmosphere so well that we can be like, “Oh, look, methane.” Methane was a five sigma detection. You knew that the data were so good that it was the gold standard of science.
Alien megastructures
Lex Fridman
What about detecting maybe through direct imaging or in other ways, megastructures, that the civilizations build?
What about detecting maybe through direct imaging or in other ways, megastructures, that the civilizations build?
Adam Frank
You know what’s great about megastructures is first of all, it’s fun to say, who doesn’t want to say megastructure? Alien, megastructure, right? Every morning, I’m looking for an opportunity to say that. So the err example of this is the Dyson sphere, which is amazing because it was literally 1960 that this idea came up.
You know what’s great about megastructures is first of all, it’s fun to say, who doesn’t want to say megastructure? Alien, megastructure, right? Every morning, I’m looking for an opportunity to say that. So the err example of this is the Dyson sphere, which is amazing because it was literally 1960 that this idea came up.
Lex Fridman
Can you explain the Dyson sphere?
Can you explain the Dyson sphere?
Adam Frank
Yeah, the Dyson sphere. So Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists ever, who was very broad-minded and thought about a lot of different things. He recognized that as civilizations progress, what they’re going to need is ever more energy to do ever more amazing things. And what’s the best energy source in a solar system? It’s the star. Right? So if you surrounded the star with solar collecting machines, sunlight collecting machines… Anyway, the limit of this would actually build a sphere, an actual sphere around your star that had all solar panels on the inside. You could capture every photon the star produced, which is this insane amount of light. You would have enough power now to do anything to re-engineer your solar system. So that was a Dyson sphere.
Yeah, the Dyson sphere. So Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists ever, who was very broad-minded and thought about a lot of different things. He recognized that as civilizations progress, what they’re going to need is ever more energy to do ever more amazing things. And what’s the best energy source in a solar system? It’s the star. Right? So if you surrounded the star with solar collecting machines, sunlight collecting machines… Anyway, the limit of this would actually build a sphere, an actual sphere around your star that had all solar panels on the inside. You could capture every photon the star produced, which is this insane amount of light. You would have enough power now to do anything to re-engineer your solar system. So that was a Dyson sphere.
It turns out that a Dyson sphere doesn’t really work, it’s unstable, but a Dyson swarm, and that’s really what he meant, this large collection of large orbiting structures that were able to collect light.
Lex Fridman
So he didn’t actually mean a rigid sphere structure.
So he didn’t actually mean a rigid sphere structure.
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
He basically meant a swarm. So like you said, then the limit basically starts to look-
He basically meant a swarm. So like you said, then the limit basically starts to look-
Adam Frank
People started to say, “Yeah, it was like a sphere.” And we actually almost thought we might’ve found one of these back with a Bajoyan star. The way we detect planets is through the transit method where the planet passes in front of the star and there’s a dip in the starlight. It’s a little eclipse basically, and we know exactly what they should look like. And then with this one star, there were these really weird transits where it was like this little dragon’s tooth, and then there’d be another one and another one and another one, and then nothing, and then three more. And in the paper that was written about this, they went through the list of, it could be comets, it could be chunks of a broken up planet, and it could also be an alien megastructure. And of course, the news picked up on this and everybody’s newsfeed the next day, “Alien megastructures discovered.”
People started to say, “Yeah, it was like a sphere.” And we actually almost thought we might’ve found one of these back with a Bajoyan star. The way we detect planets is through the transit method where the planet passes in front of the star and there’s a dip in the starlight. It’s a little eclipse basically, and we know exactly what they should look like. And then with this one star, there were these really weird transits where it was like this little dragon’s tooth, and then there’d be another one and another one and another one, and then nothing, and then three more. And in the paper that was written about this, they went through the list of, it could be comets, it could be chunks of a broken up planet, and it could also be an alien megastructure. And of course, the news picked up on this and everybody’s newsfeed the next day, “Alien megastructures discovered.”
Turns out, sadly, they were not alien megastructures. They were probably gas or dust clouds, but it raised the possibility like, “Oh, these are observable.” And people have worked out the details of what they would look like. You don’t really need direct imaging. You can do transits, right? They’re big enough that when they pass in front of the star, they’re going to produce a little blip of light because that’s what they’re supposed to. They’re absorbing starlight. So people have worked out like, “Well, a square one or a triangular one.”
Lex Fridman
But that wouldn’t be a distance sphere. That would be like one object.
But that wouldn’t be a distance sphere. That would be like one object.
Adam Frank
One object, right. If it’s a swarm, you’d expect the light to be blinking in and out as these things pass in front of… If you’ve got thousands of these, much of the time, they’ll be blotting out the star. Sometimes they won’t be. Right? And so you’re going to get an irregular transit signal.
One object, right. If it’s a swarm, you’d expect the light to be blinking in and out as these things pass in front of… If you’ve got thousands of these, much of the time, they’ll be blotting out the star. Sometimes they won’t be. Right? And so you’re going to get an irregular transit signal.
Lex Fridman
One you wouldn’t expect from a star that doesn’t have anything.
One you wouldn’t expect from a star that doesn’t have anything.
Adam Frank
Exactly. Or just a planet or a couple of planets. There’d be so many of these that it would be like, “Beep, beep, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.”
Exactly. Or just a planet or a couple of planets. There’d be so many of these that it would be like, “Beep, beep, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.”
Lex Fridman
And that usually doesn’t happen in a star system because there’s only just a handful of planets.
And that usually doesn’t happen in a star system because there’s only just a handful of planets.
Adam Frank
That’s exactly what it is. Everything’s coagulant. In a stable solar system, you get a handful of planets, five, 10, that’s it probably, and nothing else. So if now suddenly you see lots of these little micro transits telling you there’s something else that’s big enough to create a transit, but too many of them, and also, within a regular shape, the transit itself, that these could be megastructures.
That’s exactly what it is. Everything’s coagulant. In a stable solar system, you get a handful of planets, five, 10, that’s it probably, and nothing else. So if now suddenly you see lots of these little micro transits telling you there’s something else that’s big enough to create a transit, but too many of them, and also, within a regular shape, the transit itself, that these could be megastructures.
Lex Fridman
How many people are looking for megastructures now?
How many people are looking for megastructures now?
Adam Frank
Well, the main groups looking for megastructures are again, Jason Wright at Penn State, and collaborators. The way they’re looking for it though is for infrared light because the second law of thermodynamics says, “Look, if you capture all of this starlight, your thing’s going to warm up and emit an infrared.” It’s going to be waste heat, waste heat and waste light from this.
Well, the main groups looking for megastructures are again, Jason Wright at Penn State, and collaborators. The way they’re looking for it though is for infrared light because the second law of thermodynamics says, “Look, if you capture all of this starlight, your thing’s going to warm up and emit an infrared.” It’s going to be waste heat, waste heat and waste light from this.
Lex Fridman
That feels like a louder, clearer way to detect it.
That feels like a louder, clearer way to detect it.
Adam Frank
Right. And that’s actually why Dyson proposed it. He wasn’t really proposing it because he was saying, “This is what civilizations are going to do.” He proposed it because he was like, “Oh, we want to start looking for alien civilizations. Here’s something that would have a detectable signature.” So Jason and company have done pretty good searches, and recently, they made news because they were able to eliminate a lot of places. “No, these are not Dyson Spheres,” but they did have a couple that were anomalous enough that they’re like, “Well, this is what it would look like.” It’s not a detection. They were saying they would never say it’s a detection, but they were not non-detections.
Right. And that’s actually why Dyson proposed it. He wasn’t really proposing it because he was saying, “This is what civilizations are going to do.” He proposed it because he was like, “Oh, we want to start looking for alien civilizations. Here’s something that would have a detectable signature.” So Jason and company have done pretty good searches, and recently, they made news because they were able to eliminate a lot of places. “No, these are not Dyson Spheres,” but they did have a couple that were anomalous enough that they’re like, “Well, this is what it would look like.” It’s not a detection. They were saying they would never say it’s a detection, but they were not non-detections.
Lex Fridman
And they’re potential candidates.
And they’re potential candidates.
Adam Frank
Potential candidates, yeah.
Potential candidates, yeah.
Lex Fridman
Love it. We have megastructure candidates. That’s inspiring. What other megastructures do you think that could be? So Dyson Sphere is about capturing the energy of a star.
Love it. We have megastructure candidates. That’s inspiring. What other megastructures do you think that could be? So Dyson Sphere is about capturing the energy of a star.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
There could be other-
There could be other-
Adam Frank
Well, there’s something called the Clark Belt. So we have a bunch of satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit. Nothing naturally is going to end up in geosynchronous orbit. Geosynchronous orbit is one particular orbit that’s really useful if you want to beam things straight down, or if you want to put a space elevator up. Right? So there’s this idea that if a civilization becomes advanced enough that it’s really using geosynchronous orbit, that you actually get a belt, something that would actually be detectable from a distance via a transit. There’s been a couple papers written about the possibility of these Clark Belts, densely occupied Clark Belts being a megastructure. It’s not as mega as a Dyson swarm, but it’s planetary scale.
Well, there’s something called the Clark Belt. So we have a bunch of satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit. Nothing naturally is going to end up in geosynchronous orbit. Geosynchronous orbit is one particular orbit that’s really useful if you want to beam things straight down, or if you want to put a space elevator up. Right? So there’s this idea that if a civilization becomes advanced enough that it’s really using geosynchronous orbit, that you actually get a belt, something that would actually be detectable from a distance via a transit. There’s been a couple papers written about the possibility of these Clark Belts, densely occupied Clark Belts being a megastructure. It’s not as mega as a Dyson swarm, but it’s planetary scale.
Lex Fridman
You think it’s detectable, Clark Belt?
You think it’s detectable, Clark Belt?
Adam Frank
It could be. In our list of technosignatures, it would be down there, but it would be… Again, if you had an advanced enough civilization that did enough of this, you’d have a Clark Belt. And the question is whether or not it’s detectable?
It could be. In our list of technosignatures, it would be down there, but it would be… Again, if you had an advanced enough civilization that did enough of this, you’d have a Clark Belt. And the question is whether or not it’s detectable?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, probably Dyson sphere is the… That’s the more exciting thing too.
Yeah, probably Dyson sphere is the… That’s the more exciting thing too.
Adam Frank
That’s the go-to one. Yeah.
That’s the go-to one. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Speaking of the Dyson Sphere, let’s talk through the Kardashev scales.
Speaking of the Dyson Sphere, let’s talk through the Kardashev scales.
Kardashev scale
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
What is the Kardashev scale and where are humans on it?
What is the Kardashev scale and where are humans on it?
Adam Frank
Right. So the Kardashev scale was at the same time. This is this golden age of SETI, like ’59 to ’65 when it just starts. Frank Drake has done his first experiment. People are like, “Oh my God, this is even possible.” And so people are just throwing out these ideas and as I said in the book, science is conservative. And what I mean by that is it holds onto its best ideas. So Kardashev comes up with this idea that, “Look, if we’re…” Again, it’s always about detectability. “If we’re looking for civilizations, we should think about what are the, “Natural,” stages,” natural in quotes, “That a civilization goes through?” And he was thinking in terms of energy use, like a good physicist. So he said, “Look, the first hurdle in terms of energy or threshold that a civilization will go through is using all the starlight that falls onto a planet.” He called that a type one civilization. In whatever way you’re doing it, some large fraction of the starlight that falls on your planet, you’re using for your own ends.
Right. So the Kardashev scale was at the same time. This is this golden age of SETI, like ’59 to ’65 when it just starts. Frank Drake has done his first experiment. People are like, “Oh my God, this is even possible.” And so people are just throwing out these ideas and as I said in the book, science is conservative. And what I mean by that is it holds onto its best ideas. So Kardashev comes up with this idea that, “Look, if we’re…” Again, it’s always about detectability. “If we’re looking for civilizations, we should think about what are the, “Natural,” stages,” natural in quotes, “That a civilization goes through?” And he was thinking in terms of energy use, like a good physicist. So he said, “Look, the first hurdle in terms of energy or threshold that a civilization will go through is using all the starlight that falls onto a planet.” He called that a type one civilization. In whatever way you’re doing it, some large fraction of the starlight that falls on your planet, you’re using for your own ends.
The next would be to use all the starlight there is from that star. Right? So that’s the Dyson sphere. So Dyson had already proposed his idea of the swarm and Kardashev was picking up. So that’s a type two civilization. Type three is galactic scale, a civilization that could use all the starlight in a galaxy. So where are we now? Remarkably, on a log scale. We’re at 0.7 of a type one.
Lex Fridman
So we’re not even type one?
So we’re not even type one?
Adam Frank
No, no, no. We’re not even type one, but according to… There was a paper written by a group that said, “Can we continue on our path? We’ll be at a type one at around 2300.”
No, no, no. We’re not even type one, but according to… There was a paper written by a group that said, “Can we continue on our path? We’ll be at a type one at around 2300.”
Lex Fridman
2300. So this is on a log scale?
2300. So this is on a log scale?
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So 0.7. So type one is about 10 to the 16th watts. Type two is 10 orders of magnitude larger than that, 10 to the 26th watts, and I think estimate for the galaxy is another 10 orders of magnitude.
So 0.7. So type one is about 10 to the 16th watts. Type two is 10 orders of magnitude larger than that, 10 to the 26th watts, and I think estimate for the galaxy is another 10 orders of magnitude.
Adam Frank
Yeah, because there’s a 100,000,000,000 star of order, 100,000,000 stars.
Yeah, because there’s a 100,000,000,000 star of order, 100,000,000 stars.
Lex Fridman
So that’s a lot.
So that’s a lot.
Adam Frank
That’s a lot energy.
That’s a lot energy.
Lex Fridman
Do you think humans ever get to type one?
Do you think humans ever get to type one?
Adam Frank
I think that there’s a problem with type one, which is that we already know about climate change. The effects of our harvesting energy to do the work of civilization is already changing the climate state, and that’s something that Kardashev couldn’t have recognized. There’s the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there’s the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn’t thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don’t get to use it all. Right? Second law tells you that if I have a tank of gasoline, I can only use a certain fraction of the energy in that tank, and the rest is going to go to heating up the engine block. So that second law tells you that you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like, “Uh-oh, sorry, it’s going to change on you.”
I think that there’s a problem with type one, which is that we already know about climate change. The effects of our harvesting energy to do the work of civilization is already changing the climate state, and that’s something that Kardashev couldn’t have recognized. There’s the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there’s the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn’t thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don’t get to use it all. Right? Second law tells you that if I have a tank of gasoline, I can only use a certain fraction of the energy in that tank, and the rest is going to go to heating up the engine block. So that second law tells you that you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like, “Uh-oh, sorry, it’s going to change on you.”
So there’s a way in which we probably can’t get to a type one without devastating the earth’s climate. The most important thing actually here is probably, this is why space becomes… So the colonization or settlement of space. If we have an idea that we’ve been working on for a while called service worlds, that at some point you probably move a lot of your industry off world. We’ve got Mercury, for example. There’s nothing on Mercury, there’s no life on Mercury. Why don’t you put your energy harvesting there? Because you can’t mess with the biosphere. The biosphere is more powerful than you are. And so there’s limits to how much energy we can harvest to do work on the earth without really adversely affecting the biosphere.
Lex Fridman
It does seem that the best response to the climate change is not to use less technology, but to invent better technology and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects.
It does seem that the best response to the climate change is not to use less technology, but to invent better technology and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects.
Adam Frank
This is the frontier where you are, and that was the topic of my last book, Light of the Stars. It’s like you have to do the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. You have to see the transition that we’re going through now of the Anthropocene on a planetary astrobiological framework. And that paper we were talking about with a 10 billion trillion worlds, that was actually in service of the work I was doing for this other book where I wanted to know how often do you go through an… Does every technological civilization trigger its own planetary crisis, its own climate Anthropocene crisis? And the answer we actually came up from doing models was like, yeah, probably. And then the question is, are you smart enough to figure out how to readjust what you’re doing technologically so that all boats rise? You want to figure out how to do this so that the biosphere becomes even more productive and healthy and resilient.
This is the frontier where you are, and that was the topic of my last book, Light of the Stars. It’s like you have to do the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. You have to see the transition that we’re going through now of the Anthropocene on a planetary astrobiological framework. And that paper we were talking about with a 10 billion trillion worlds, that was actually in service of the work I was doing for this other book where I wanted to know how often do you go through an… Does every technological civilization trigger its own planetary crisis, its own climate Anthropocene crisis? And the answer we actually came up from doing models was like, yeah, probably. And then the question is, are you smart enough to figure out how to readjust what you’re doing technologically so that all boats rise? You want to figure out how to do this so that the biosphere becomes even more productive and healthy and resilient.
So yeah, right. It’s the kind of technology. I think there’s probably absolutely limits on how much energy you can use, but how do you use that energy? And then also, getting off planet eventually. If you want to use 10 times more energy than that, you’re going to not going to do it on world.
Detecting aliens
Lex Fridman
So how do we detect alien type one, two, and three civilizations? So we’ve been kind of talking about basically type one civilization detection.
So how do we detect alien type one, two, and three civilizations? So we’ve been kind of talking about basically type one civilization detection.
Adam Frank
Yeah. Right,
Yeah. Right,
Lex Fridman
Maybe with the Dyson sphere, you start to get a little bit more type two, but it feels like if you have a type two civilization, it won’t be just the Dyson sphere.
Maybe with the Dyson sphere, you start to get a little bit more type two, but it feels like if you have a type two civilization, it won’t be just the Dyson sphere.
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
It feels like that. Just for the same reason you mentioned climate change, but now at the star system level, they’re probably expanding, right? So how would you detect a type two?
It feels like that. Just for the same reason you mentioned climate change, but now at the star system level, they’re probably expanding, right? So how would you detect a type two?
Adam Frank
How about propulsion plumes? Right? If you’re expanding… No, no.
How about propulsion plumes? Right? If you’re expanding… No, no.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great.
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great.
Adam Frank
I literally just put in a NASA proposal now. Thomas Beatty, who’s joined us, he’s at the University of Wisconsin, has an idea to look for plumes. Right? If you have a solar system-wide civilization and you got space truckers going back and forth from Mars to… They’re doing the insettlest run, they’re accelerating and decelerating the whole way there. If you want to get to Mars in a couple of weeks, you have your fusion drive on the entire way out there. You flip and burn and have it on. So you also always have gravity. You have thrust gravity. So would those plumes be detectable? Because now you’ve got spaceships going all over the place and the odds that the plume is going to cross your field of view could become pretty high. So yeah, I think that’s one idea of looking for large-scale interplanetary, which is like when you’re getting to a type two.
I literally just put in a NASA proposal now. Thomas Beatty, who’s joined us, he’s at the University of Wisconsin, has an idea to look for plumes. Right? If you have a solar system-wide civilization and you got space truckers going back and forth from Mars to… They’re doing the insettlest run, they’re accelerating and decelerating the whole way there. If you want to get to Mars in a couple of weeks, you have your fusion drive on the entire way out there. You flip and burn and have it on. So you also always have gravity. You have thrust gravity. So would those plumes be detectable? Because now you’ve got spaceships going all over the place and the odds that the plume is going to cross your field of view could become pretty high. So yeah, I think that’s one idea of looking for large-scale interplanetary, which is like when you’re getting to a type two.
Another possibility is looking for the tailings of asteroid mining. This was an idea, it was a group at Harvard Smithsonian, that to be able to look for… If you’re really chewing up asteroids to build space habitats, there’d be dust particles left around and would they look different from just say the dust from just regular collisions?
Lex Fridman
So pollution of all different kinds.
So pollution of all different kinds.
Adam Frank
Pollution of all different kinds
Pollution of all different kinds
Lex Fridman
And trash also?
And trash also?
Adam Frank
Okay, so trash is an interesting idea when you come to the actual solar system. There’s a whole other field of technosignatures, which are things in the solar system. What if somebody came by 1,000,000 years ago and left some stuff? So the earth has been showing biosignatures for billions of years. A species like us, at our level, looking at earth, would’ve been able to know that earth had life on it, had a biosphere for billions of years. So maybe somebody sent something by a half a billion years ago. So this idea of looking say at the Moon for artifacts that have been there for a long time is something that a number of people are doing. We’re just working on a paper where we just calculated, this was super fun. We calculated how long would the lunar lander exist on the Moon before micrometeorites just chewed it down? How long would you be able to land on the Moon and go, “Oh, look, somebody was here and left some debris.”
Okay, so trash is an interesting idea when you come to the actual solar system. There’s a whole other field of technosignatures, which are things in the solar system. What if somebody came by 1,000,000 years ago and left some stuff? So the earth has been showing biosignatures for billions of years. A species like us, at our level, looking at earth, would’ve been able to know that earth had life on it, had a biosphere for billions of years. So maybe somebody sent something by a half a billion years ago. So this idea of looking say at the Moon for artifacts that have been there for a long time is something that a number of people are doing. We’re just working on a paper where we just calculated, this was super fun. We calculated how long would the lunar lander exist on the Moon before micrometeorites just chewed it down? How long would you be able to land on the Moon and go, “Oh, look, somebody was here and left some debris.”
So there’s this process called gardening, which is just the micrometeorite, constant rain of micrometeorites, and that’s where you get the lunar regolith. That fine powder on the Moon is because of this gardening. And it turns out it is literally hundreds of millions to billions of years-
Lex Fridman
Oh, nice.
Oh, nice.
Adam Frank
That the lunar lander will be visible.
That the lunar lander will be visible.
Lex Fridman
Oh, so we should be able to find artifacts.
Oh, so we should be able to find artifacts.
Adam Frank
If there are artifacts on there, and people have proposed doing this with artificial intelligence. The Moon has been mapped down to a couple of meters with various probes and all that data is sitting there. So why not use machine learning to look through all those things and look for anything that looks not like the lunar surface? And they did a test program where they gave the computer, I don’t know, 50 miles around the Apollo 11 or maybe it was Apollo 17 site, and it instantly was able to pull out the lander.
If there are artifacts on there, and people have proposed doing this with artificial intelligence. The Moon has been mapped down to a couple of meters with various probes and all that data is sitting there. So why not use machine learning to look through all those things and look for anything that looks not like the lunar surface? And they did a test program where they gave the computer, I don’t know, 50 miles around the Apollo 11 or maybe it was Apollo 17 site, and it instantly was able to pull out the lander.
Lex Fridman
The whole task of looking for anomaly, something that looks not like the lunar surface. You make it sound obvious, but it’s not exactly obvious. Detect something that doesn’t look right about this room?
The whole task of looking for anomaly, something that looks not like the lunar surface. You make it sound obvious, but it’s not exactly obvious. Detect something that doesn’t look right about this room?
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
It’s actually really difficult.
It’s actually really difficult.
Adam Frank
Really difficult. It’s really difficult. And what’s cool, it’s a really information theoretic kind of proposal. You really have to use information theory to say, “What’s the background?” How do I define something that I can say, “That looks weird?”
Really difficult. It’s really difficult. And what’s cool, it’s a really information theoretic kind of proposal. You really have to use information theory to say, “What’s the background?” How do I define something that I can say, “That looks weird?”
Lex Fridman
Yeah, maybe when you’re looking at a spectrograph or something, it’s still like…
Yeah, maybe when you’re looking at a spectrograph or something, it’s still like…
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 01:45:00] or something, it’s going to look really weird potentially. We’re hypothesizing all the things that humans would build and how do we detect that.
[inaudible 01:45:00] or something, it’s going to look really weird potentially. We’re hypothesizing all the things that humans would build and how do we detect that.
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
But that could be really weird stuff.
But that could be really weird stuff.
Adam Frank
That’s why there’s this emphasis now on these agnostic signatures. So, actually disequilibrium is a nice one. One way to define life is it is a system that is far from equilibrium, it’s alive, because as soon as it dies, it goes back to equilibrium. And so, you can look at all chemicals in an atmosphere, even if you don’t know whether these could be chemicals that you have no idea whether or not they have anything to do with life. But the degree of disequilibrium, the degree to which they show that that atmosphere has not, the chemicals have not all just gone down to, they’ve all reacted away to an equilibrium state. You can actually tell that in very general ways using what’s called the Gibbs free energy, and that’s a signature.
That’s why there’s this emphasis now on these agnostic signatures. So, actually disequilibrium is a nice one. One way to define life is it is a system that is far from equilibrium, it’s alive, because as soon as it dies, it goes back to equilibrium. And so, you can look at all chemicals in an atmosphere, even if you don’t know whether these could be chemicals that you have no idea whether or not they have anything to do with life. But the degree of disequilibrium, the degree to which they show that that atmosphere has not, the chemicals have not all just gone down to, they’ve all reacted away to an equilibrium state. You can actually tell that in very general ways using what’s called the Gibbs free energy, and that’s a signature.
If you see an atmosphere that is wildly out of equilibrium that indicates that there’s something happening on that planet biosphere or technosphere that is pumping gases into the atmosphere, that is keeping the whole system from relaxing.
Lex Fridman
So, is it possible we can detect anomalies in spacetime?
So, is it possible we can detect anomalies in spacetime?
Adam Frank
Well, you could detect, and there’s been some work on this with the Alcubierre drive, these proposals for warp drives, and we can talk about that later, I’m skeptical of those. Because it may really be possible, you just can’t go faster than the speed of light. But people have done work on what would be the signature of an Alcubierre drive? What would be the signature? Could you detect if you’re using a drive like that, then you certainly are distorting spacetime, which means any light that’s passing by, its trajectory has gotten altered because it had to pass through the distorted spacetime.
Well, you could detect, and there’s been some work on this with the Alcubierre drive, these proposals for warp drives, and we can talk about that later, I’m skeptical of those. Because it may really be possible, you just can’t go faster than the speed of light. But people have done work on what would be the signature of an Alcubierre drive? What would be the signature? Could you detect if you’re using a drive like that, then you certainly are distorting spacetime, which means any light that’s passing by, its trajectory has gotten altered because it had to pass through the distorted spacetime.
So yeah, there are possibilities along with that. One of the funny things, I don’t know if they’ve gotten past this, but somebody calculated the problem with the Alcubierre drive or this warp drive was that if you dropped out of warp, there would be this spray of gamma rays that would sterilize any planet in front of you. So, it’s like, “Well yeah, you probably don’t want to do that,” but that would be a great bios or techno signature, another planet obliterated.
Warp drives
Lex Fridman
So, you think it’s not possible to travel fast than the speed of light?
So, you think it’s not possible to travel fast than the speed of light?
Adam Frank
I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that, but what I think, if you look at the physics, we understand, every possibility for faster than light travel really relies on something that doesn’t exist. So, the cool thing is Einstein’s field equations, you can actually play with them, the equations are right there. You can add things to the right or left-hand side that allow you to get something like the Alcubierre drive. That was a metric that showed you like, “Oh, it’s a warped bubble.” It’s a warping of spacetime that moves through spacetime faster than the speed of light.
I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that, but what I think, if you look at the physics, we understand, every possibility for faster than light travel really relies on something that doesn’t exist. So, the cool thing is Einstein’s field equations, you can actually play with them, the equations are right there. You can add things to the right or left-hand side that allow you to get something like the Alcubierre drive. That was a metric that showed you like, “Oh, it’s a warped bubble.” It’s a warping of spacetime that moves through spacetime faster than the speed of light.
Because nothing can move across space faster than the speed of light, but spacetime itself can move faster than the speed of light. But here’s the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something. The thing you added, the little fictional term you added into the equations is something called exotic matter and it doesn’t exist. It’s really just something we dreamed up to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do. So, it’s a nice fiction but really right now, we live in this weird moment in history of the great acceleration where the technology we used now is completely different from the technology we used 10 years ago is remarkably different from the technology from 100 years ago.
But I remember playing Assassin’s Creed where everybody’s like, “What is it, it’s 1200?” And everybody’s like, “Stab, stab, stab.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s a great game.” And then I got Assassin’s Creed II and it was 300 years later and everybody’s like, “Stab, stab, stab.” And it was like 300 years and the technology hadn’t changed and that was actually true for most of human history. You used your great-grandfather’s tools because there was no need to have any other new tools and you probably did his job. So, we could be fooled into thinking like, “Oh, technology’s going to go on forever, we’re always going to find new advances.”
As opposed to sometimes things just flatten out for a long time. So, you have to be careful about that bias that we have living in this time of great acceleration.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. But also, it is a great acceleration and we also are not good at predicting what that entails if it does keep accelerating. So, for example, somebody like Eric Weinstein often talks about we underinvest in theoretical physics research. Basically, we’re trying too hard for traditional chemical propulsion on rockets versus trying to hack physics, warp drives and so on.
Yeah. But also, it is a great acceleration and we also are not good at predicting what that entails if it does keep accelerating. So, for example, somebody like Eric Weinstein often talks about we underinvest in theoretical physics research. Basically, we’re trying too hard for traditional chemical propulsion on rockets versus trying to hack physics, warp drives and so on.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Because it’s really hard to do space travel, and it seems like in the long arc of human history, if we survive the way to really travel across long distances is going to be some new totally new thing.
Because it’s really hard to do space travel, and it seems like in the long arc of human history, if we survive the way to really travel across long distances is going to be some new totally new thing.
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
So, it’s not going to be an engineering problem, it’s going to be a physics problem-
So, it’s not going to be an engineering problem, it’s going to be a physics problem-
Adam Frank
A fundamental physics problem.
A fundamental physics problem.
Lex Fridman
Fundamental physics problem.
Fundamental physics problem.
Adam Frank
Yeah. I agree with that in principle, but I think there’s a lot of ideas out there. String theory, people have been playing with string theory now for 40 years, it’s not like there hasn’t been a lot of effort. And again, I’m not going to predict, I think it’s entirely possible that there’s incredible boundaries of physics that have yet to be poked through, in which case then all bets are off. Once you get fast interstellar travel, whoa, who knows what can happen? But I tend to be drawn to science fiction stories that take the speed of light seriously. What kind of civilization can you build where it takes 50 years to get to where you’re going and a 50 years back?
Yeah. I agree with that in principle, but I think there’s a lot of ideas out there. String theory, people have been playing with string theory now for 40 years, it’s not like there hasn’t been a lot of effort. And again, I’m not going to predict, I think it’s entirely possible that there’s incredible boundaries of physics that have yet to be poked through, in which case then all bets are off. Once you get fast interstellar travel, whoa, who knows what can happen? But I tend to be drawn to science fiction stories that take the speed of light seriously. What kind of civilization can you build where it takes 50 years to get to where you’re going and a 50 years back?
So, I don’t know. Yeah, there’s no way I’m going to say that we won’t get warp drives. But as of right now, it’s all fictional. It’s barely even a coherent concept.
Lex Fridman
Well, it’s also a really exciting possibility of hacking this whole thing by extending human lifespan or extending our notion of time and maybe as dark as to say, but the value of an individual human life versus the value of life from the perspective of generations.
Well, it’s also a really exciting possibility of hacking this whole thing by extending human lifespan or extending our notion of time and maybe as dark as to say, but the value of an individual human life versus the value of life from the perspective of generations.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So, you can have something like a generational ship that travels for hundreds of thousands of years and you’re not sad that you’ll never see the destination because you have the value for the prolonged survival of humanity versus your own individual life.
So, you can have something like a generational ship that travels for hundreds of thousands of years and you’re not sad that you’ll never see the destination because you have the value for the prolonged survival of humanity versus your own individual life.
Adam Frank
Yeah. It’s a wild ethical question, isn’t it? That book I told you about Aurora, I love the book because it was such a inversion of the usual. Because I love science fiction, I’ve read so many generation ship stories. And they get to that planet, the planet turns out to be uninhabitable. It’s inhabited, but it’s uninhabitable for Earth because again, he has this idea of life is particular to their planets. So, they turn around and they come back, and then when they land, the main character goes, there’s still people who are arguing for more generation ships, and she goes, and she punches the guy out because she spent her whole life in a tube with this.
Yeah. It’s a wild ethical question, isn’t it? That book I told you about Aurora, I love the book because it was such a inversion of the usual. Because I love science fiction, I’ve read so many generation ship stories. And they get to that planet, the planet turns out to be uninhabitable. It’s inhabited, but it’s uninhabitable for Earth because again, he has this idea of life is particular to their planets. So, they turn around and they come back, and then when they land, the main character goes, there’s still people who are arguing for more generation ships, and she goes, and she punches the guy out because she spent her whole life in a tube with this.
I thought that was a really interesting inversion. The interesting thing about, we were talking about these space habitats.
Lex Fridman
Yes.
Yes.
Adam Frank
But if you really had a space habitat, not some super cramped, crappy, usual version of a century ship. But if you had these space habitats that were really like the O’Neill cylinders, they’re actually pretty nice places to live, put a thruster on those. Why keep them in the solar system? Maybe space is full of these traveling space habitats that are in some sense, they’re worlds in and of themselves.
But if you really had a space habitat, not some super cramped, crappy, usual version of a century ship. But if you had these space habitats that were really like the O’Neill cylinders, they’re actually pretty nice places to live, put a thruster on those. Why keep them in the solar system? Maybe space is full of these traveling space habitats that are in some sense, they’re worlds in and of themselves.
Lex Fridman
There’s the show Silo, which raises the question of basically, if you are putting on a generational ship, what do you tell the inhabitants of that ship? You might want to lie to them.
There’s the show Silo, which raises the question of basically, if you are putting on a generational ship, what do you tell the inhabitants of that ship? You might want to lie to them.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
You might want to tell them a story that they believe.
You might want to tell them a story that they believe.
Adam Frank
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
Because there is a society, there’s human nature. It’s like how do you maintain a homeostasis of that little society? That’s a fascinating technical question, the social question, the psychology question
Because there is a society, there’s human nature. It’s like how do you maintain a homeostasis of that little society? That’s a fascinating technical question, the social question, the psychology question
Cryogenics
Adam Frank
The generation ship too, which I talked about in the book, the idea of also you talked about the extending human lifetimes or the stasis, the cryostasis, which is a mainstay of science fiction that you can basically put in suspended animation and such. None of these things we know are possible. But what’s so interesting, and this is why I love science fiction, the way it seeds ideas, all these ideas we’re going to talk about because they’ve been staples of science fiction for 50 years.
The generation ship too, which I talked about in the book, the idea of also you talked about the extending human lifetimes or the stasis, the cryostasis, which is a mainstay of science fiction that you can basically put in suspended animation and such. None of these things we know are possible. But what’s so interesting, and this is why I love science fiction, the way it seeds ideas, all these ideas we’re going to talk about because they’ve been staples of science fiction for 50 years.
Lex Fridman
The whole field of cryogenics.
The whole field of cryogenics.
Adam Frank
Yeah. Where are we at with that?
Yeah. Where are we at with that?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I wonder what the state of the art is for complex organism. Can you freeze? How long can you freeze? And then unfreeze maybe with bacteria you could do freeze.
Yeah. I wonder what the state of the art is for complex organism. Can you freeze? How long can you freeze? And then unfreeze maybe with bacteria you could do freeze.
Adam Frank
Oh, bacteria can last. This is the thing about panspermia, how long can a bacteria survive in a rock that’s been blasted? If there’s a comet impact across interstellar distances, that does seem to actually be possible. People have done those kinds of calculations, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. But a complex organism or multi-systems, with organs and such.
Oh, bacteria can last. This is the thing about panspermia, how long can a bacteria survive in a rock that’s been blasted? If there’s a comet impact across interstellar distances, that does seem to actually be possible. People have done those kinds of calculations, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. But a complex organism or multi-systems, with organs and such.
Lex Fridman
Also, what makes an organism? Which part do you want to preserve? Because maybe for humans, it seems like what makes a personality? It feels like you want to preserve a set of memories. If I woke up in a different body with the same memories, I pretty much, I would feel like I would be the same person.
Also, what makes an organism? Which part do you want to preserve? Because maybe for humans, it seems like what makes a personality? It feels like you want to preserve a set of memories. If I woke up in a different body with the same memories, I pretty much, I would feel like I would be the same person.
Adam Frank
Altered Carbon, that’s a great series. I think it’s on Netflix, that’s a really great series where that’s exactly the idea of sleeves. Everybody’s able to, you can re-sleeve in another body, and it raises exactly this question. It’s not the greatest cyberpunk, but it’s pretty good, it’s got some great action sequences too.
Altered Carbon, that’s a great series. I think it’s on Netflix, that’s a really great series where that’s exactly the idea of sleeves. Everybody’s able to, you can re-sleeve in another body, and it raises exactly this question. It’s not the greatest cyberpunk, but it’s pretty good, it’s got some great action sequences too.
Lex Fridman
As we get better and better advancements in large language models that are able to be fine-tuned on you, it raises a question because to me, they’ve already passed the Turing test as we traditionally have defined it. So, if there’s going to be an LLM that’s able to copy you in terms of language extremely well, it’s going to raise ethical and I don’t know, philosophical questions about what makes you, you. If there’s a thing that can talk exactly like you, what is the thing that makes you? It’s going to speak about your memories very effectively.
As we get better and better advancements in large language models that are able to be fine-tuned on you, it raises a question because to me, they’ve already passed the Turing test as we traditionally have defined it. So, if there’s going to be an LLM that’s able to copy you in terms of language extremely well, it’s going to raise ethical and I don’t know, philosophical questions about what makes you, you. If there’s a thing that can talk exactly like you, what is the thing that makes you? It’s going to speak about your memories very effectively.
Adam Frank
This leads us to, if we’re going to get to the blind spot. I am of the opinion, heretical in some camps that the brain is not the minimal structure for consciousness, it’s the whole body. It’s embodied and may actually, in some sense, it’s communities actually. So yeah, I could be wrong, but this is what this whole work that I did with Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, the philosophy of science. Which is interesting, because it leads to this question about, “Oh, maybe we should just download ourselves into computers.” That’s another story that one tells. I’m super skeptical about those, but that’s one of the narratives about interstellar travel.
This leads us to, if we’re going to get to the blind spot. I am of the opinion, heretical in some camps that the brain is not the minimal structure for consciousness, it’s the whole body. It’s embodied and may actually, in some sense, it’s communities actually. So yeah, I could be wrong, but this is what this whole work that I did with Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, the philosophy of science. Which is interesting, because it leads to this question about, “Oh, maybe we should just download ourselves into computers.” That’s another story that one tells. I’m super skeptical about those, but that’s one of the narratives about interstellar travel.
And that anybody we meet is going to be a machine anyway, whether it’s downloaded bodies or it’s just going to be artificial intelligence. There’s the whole idea of how long does biological evolution last? Maybe it’s a very short period before everybody goes to, or the machines take over and kill you, or it’s some hybrid.
What aliens look like
Lex Fridman
What do you think aliens look like? So, we talked about all the different kinds of bio signatures that might leave or techno signatures, but what would they look like when we show up? Are they going to have arms and legs? Are they going to be recognizable at all? Are they going to be carbon-based?
What do you think aliens look like? So, we talked about all the different kinds of bio signatures that might leave or techno signatures, but what would they look like when we show up? Are they going to have arms and legs? Are they going to be recognizable at all? Are they going to be carbon-based?
Adam Frank
Yeah. So, great question, and this question gets to the heart of thinking about life, about what life is. And this is the physical part of that, there’s also the informational part of it. But let’s just talk about the physical part of it, which is anything that we’re going to call life is probably going to work on Darwinian evolution. That’s the nice thing about Darwinian evolution, just like we know the laws of physics are general, the laws of Darwinian evolution are this logic, this basic logic that anything we’d reasonably call life probably has to operate under these kinds of principles.
Yeah. So, great question, and this question gets to the heart of thinking about life, about what life is. And this is the physical part of that, there’s also the informational part of it. But let’s just talk about the physical part of it, which is anything that we’re going to call life is probably going to work on Darwinian evolution. That’s the nice thing about Darwinian evolution, just like we know the laws of physics are general, the laws of Darwinian evolution are this logic, this basic logic that anything we’d reasonably call life probably has to operate under these kinds of principles.
And so, evolution’s about solving problems to survive that the environment presents. And the environment’s always going to present these problems in physical and chemical terms, so that you’d expect a balance between what we call convergence, evolutionary convergence and evolutionary contingency. So, if you’ve got to move along a surface, a hard surface and air, then the idea of some kind of jointed stick legs makes sense that you’re probably going to trigger that. If you look at Earth’s history multiple times, multiple lineages that had nothing to do with each other are going to solve the problem of getting towards energy sources using some kind of stick-like apparatus.
Lex Fridman
So, that’s about movement?
So, that’s about movement?
Adam Frank
Yeah. So, that’s one problem that has to be solved. The one problem that has to be solved is I got to get to food, right?
Yeah. So, that’s one problem that has to be solved. The one problem that has to be solved is I got to get to food, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Frank
Another problem is they got to get away from predators. You’ve seen wings, we’ve seen wings, the line that went through dinosaurs to birds involved wings, insects evolved wings, mammals evolved wings. If the gas is dense enough that a curved surface, if you move through the curved surface, it’s going to produce lift. Yeah, there you go, evolutionary trip on that. So, I think you can expect certain classes of solutions to the basic problems that life is going to be presented with stay alive, reproduce. But one of the weird things about with the UFO things is that you always see like, “Oh, they all look like humans, they’re just basically humans with triangular heads.” And that’s where we get to contingency.
Another problem is they got to get away from predators. You’ve seen wings, we’ve seen wings, the line that went through dinosaurs to birds involved wings, insects evolved wings, mammals evolved wings. If the gas is dense enough that a curved surface, if you move through the curved surface, it’s going to produce lift. Yeah, there you go, evolutionary trip on that. So, I think you can expect certain classes of solutions to the basic problems that life is going to be presented with stay alive, reproduce. But one of the weird things about with the UFO things is that you always see like, “Oh, they all look like humans, they’re just basically humans with triangular heads.” And that’s where we get to contingency.
So, what we’ve been talking about is convergence. You expect that evolution will converge on wings multiple times when presented with the problems that wings can solve. But contingency is accidents that you’ve got something that’s evolving a certain kind of wing, a leathery wing. And then the climate changes and they all die out, end of story or an asteroid, total accident, asteroid hits. And so, contingency accidents play also a huge role in evolution. And one of the things that lots of evolutionary biologists have talked about is the idea that if you ran the tape of Earth’s history over again, would you get the same creatures? Now, Stephen Jay Gould was of the opinion that no way, you wouldn’t find anything on Earth that resembled any species today.
They’ve done experiments actually on this with E. coli. You take a bunch of E. coli, you let them evolve for a while, you take a bunch of them out, freeze them, let one, let that population continue to evolve, the other one’s frozen. Now, started over again with the frozen. And it seems to be that contingency tends to win. At least from what we can tell, that’s not a hard result, but in those experiments, what you find is that accidents really do matter. And this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks, how many joints they’re going to be? Anybody’s guess.
Do you expect humanoids, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That’s probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
Lex Fridman
I guess what is a brain versus the nervous system? Where is most of the cognition competition going on?
I guess what is a brain versus the nervous system? Where is most of the cognition competition going on?
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
You could see that in organisms. Actually, I don’t know how the brain evolved. Why does it have to be in one place?
You could see that in organisms. Actually, I don’t know how the brain evolved. Why does it have to be in one place?
Adam Frank
It doesn’t have to be. So, my favorite word, word of the day is liquid brains. This idea of distributed cognition, which fascinating idea, and we’ve come to understand how much distributed cognition there is. Obviously, you social animals like termites, and ants, that’s an example of distributed cognition, the organism is the whole colony. This is one thing that’s been really interesting in the state of the study for aliens, is that when we’ve come to recognize that human intelligence, the kinds of things that go into intelligence are distributed all across the biosphere. Lots of different examples of things show various pieces of what we have. Jason Wright described it as a deck of cards. The cards are all there, we got the hand that actually led to the technological progress that we see. But the basic idea of using tools, the basic idea of recognizing each other eye to eye, all the things that we define as intelligence. You can find many places in many other places across many other lineages across the earth. So, they could be very, very different with something like, yeah, maybe the hive mind idea or bacterial colonies that actually managed to come to their own version of high cognition.
It doesn’t have to be. So, my favorite word, word of the day is liquid brains. This idea of distributed cognition, which fascinating idea, and we’ve come to understand how much distributed cognition there is. Obviously, you social animals like termites, and ants, that’s an example of distributed cognition, the organism is the whole colony. This is one thing that’s been really interesting in the state of the study for aliens, is that when we’ve come to recognize that human intelligence, the kinds of things that go into intelligence are distributed all across the biosphere. Lots of different examples of things show various pieces of what we have. Jason Wright described it as a deck of cards. The cards are all there, we got the hand that actually led to the technological progress that we see. But the basic idea of using tools, the basic idea of recognizing each other eye to eye, all the things that we define as intelligence. You can find many places in many other places across many other lineages across the earth. So, they could be very, very different with something like, yeah, maybe the hive mind idea or bacterial colonies that actually managed to come to their own version of high cognition.
Lex Fridman
Well, I wonder if we stretch out time across 10s, 20 billion years, whether there’s an Darwinian evolution stops working at some point in terms of the biology or the chemistry of the organisms, and it switches to ideas for example. It’s much more rapidly you’re operating maybe, I guess it’s a kind of Darwinian evolution on the space of memes or whatever, as [inaudible 02:02:36]-
Well, I wonder if we stretch out time across 10s, 20 billion years, whether there’s an Darwinian evolution stops working at some point in terms of the biology or the chemistry of the organisms, and it switches to ideas for example. It’s much more rapidly you’re operating maybe, I guess it’s a kind of Darwinian evolution on the space of memes or whatever, as [inaudible 02:02:36]-
Adam Frank
Technology seems to operate, but certainly markets can operate in ways that look very Darwinian.
Technology seems to operate, but certainly markets can operate in ways that look very Darwinian.
Lex Fridman
So, basically a planet is working hard to get to the first kind of organism that’s able to be a nice platform for ideas to compete.
So, basically a planet is working hard to get to the first kind of organism that’s able to be a nice platform for ideas to compete.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And then it stops evolving there, and then these ideas that take off.
And then it stops evolving there, and then these ideas that take off.
Adam Frank
Right. Because yeah, cultural Lex it’s true. It’s amazing that cultural evolution totally disconnects from the Darwinian process. But I’d be careful to say that a planet is working hard to do this. Because really looking at us, what we think of as ideas and culture, and it’s quite possible we’re going to make it another 200 years, and this is gone because it actually wasn’t a very good idea long-term, we just don’t know.
Right. Because yeah, cultural Lex it’s true. It’s amazing that cultural evolution totally disconnects from the Darwinian process. But I’d be careful to say that a planet is working hard to do this. Because really looking at us, what we think of as ideas and culture, and it’s quite possible we’re going to make it another 200 years, and this is gone because it actually wasn’t a very good idea long-term, we just don’t know.
Lex Fridman
So, maybe the idea generation organism is actually the thing that destroys.
So, maybe the idea generation organism is actually the thing that destroys.
Adam Frank
Not the biosphere, because again, but it destroys itself. It may not be very long- term, it may be very potent for a short period of time but that it’s not sustainable. It doesn’t become, like we were talking about before, mature. It’s very hard to make it into integrated into a mature bio/technosphere. And of course, evolution that is not working for anything. Well, here’s the actually interesting thing, so people are very much evolutionary biologists will get their hair will stand on end if you start talking about evolution, having a purpose or anything.
Not the biosphere, because again, but it destroys itself. It may not be very long- term, it may be very potent for a short period of time but that it’s not sustainable. It doesn’t become, like we were talking about before, mature. It’s very hard to make it into integrated into a mature bio/technosphere. And of course, evolution that is not working for anything. Well, here’s the actually interesting thing, so people are very much evolutionary biologists will get their hair will stand on end if you start talking about evolution, having a purpose or anything.
But the very interesting thing about purpose is that once you do get to a idea generating species or collective organism, yeah, then all bets are off and there is goals, there is teleology. Now suddenly, absolutely, there’s a direction implied. So that’s a cool interesting thing that once you get to that, evolution stops being goalless and directionless and suddenly, yeah, we’re the ones who supply or any kind of creature like us has an absolute direction that way they decide on.
Lex Fridman
Although you could argue that from a perspective of the entire human civilization, we’re also directionless. We have a sense that there’s a direction in this cluster of humans.
Although you could argue that from a perspective of the entire human civilization, we’re also directionless. We have a sense that there’s a direction in this cluster of humans.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And then there’s another cluster has a different sense of direction, there’s all kinds of religions that are competing. There’s different ideologies that are competing.
And then there’s another cluster has a different sense of direction, there’s all kinds of religions that are competing. There’s different ideologies that are competing.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And when you just zoom out across, if we survive across thousands of years, it will seem directionless. It will seem like a pinball.
And when you just zoom out across, if we survive across thousands of years, it will seem directionless. It will seem like a pinball.
Adam Frank
It’s an unholy mess. But at some point, the expansion into the solar system say, that would be both direction. Depending on how you look at it, it was directional. There was a decision that the collective of human beings made to like anti-accrete, to start spreading out into the solar system. So, that was definitely a goal there that may have been reached in some crazy nonlinear way, but it still a goal was set and it was achieved.
It’s an unholy mess. But at some point, the expansion into the solar system say, that would be both direction. Depending on how you look at it, it was directional. There was a decision that the collective of human beings made to like anti-accrete, to start spreading out into the solar system. So, that was definitely a goal there that may have been reached in some crazy nonlinear way, but it still a goal was set and it was achieved.
Alien contact
Lex Fridman
If there’s advanced civilizations out there, what do you think is the proper protocol for interacting with them? Do you think they would be peaceful? Do you think they would be warlike? What do we do next? We detect the civilizations through all the technosignatures we’ve been talking about, maybe direct imaging, maybe there’s really strong signal. We come up with a strategy of how to actually get there.
If there’s advanced civilizations out there, what do you think is the proper protocol for interacting with them? Do you think they would be peaceful? Do you think they would be warlike? What do we do next? We detect the civilizations through all the technosignatures we’ve been talking about, maybe direct imaging, maybe there’s really strong signal. We come up with a strategy of how to actually get there.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
But then the general says, they always do, the military industrial complex-
But then the general says, they always do, the military industrial complex-
Adam Frank
We’ve watched that movie.
We’ve watched that movie.
Lex Fridman
What kind of rockets and do we bring rockets?
What kind of rockets and do we bring rockets?
Adam Frank
Right. Well, this general question also leads to many messaging, extraterrestrial intelligence, and I’m definitely of the opinion of you should be very careful. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea to have your head below the grass. The people who advocate like, “Oh yeah, we should be sending powerful messages that are easily detectable into interstellar space.” I’m like, “Why would you?” Because we just don’t know, I’m not going to say they are warlike. I’m not going to say they’re not warlike, I have no idea. But we sure as hell, well, first of all, who gets to decide that? The idea that a bunch of astronomers who happen to have a radio telescope, Who Speaks for Earth, which I think was a great book somebody wrote.
Right. Well, this general question also leads to many messaging, extraterrestrial intelligence, and I’m definitely of the opinion of you should be very careful. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea to have your head below the grass. The people who advocate like, “Oh yeah, we should be sending powerful messages that are easily detectable into interstellar space.” I’m like, “Why would you?” Because we just don’t know, I’m not going to say they are warlike. I’m not going to say they’re not warlike, I have no idea. But we sure as hell, well, first of all, who gets to decide that? The idea that a bunch of astronomers who happen to have a radio telescope, Who Speaks for Earth, which I think was a great book somebody wrote.
So, definitely we should be cautious, I would say, because we just have zero information. And the idea, you used to have this idea of, well, if they’re advanced, they’ve managed to survive. So of course, they’re going to be wearing togas and be singing kumbaya, but I just wouldn’t assume that. It’s also possible though that their cognitive structure is so different that we’re not even living in the same universe in a certain way. I think we have to be prepared for that. We may not even be able to recognize each other in some way as cognizing beings. One of my favorite movies is Arrival, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that one.
I really love that one because they literally, they have a different language. They have a different cognitive structure in terms of their language, and they’re literally living in a different physics.
Lex Fridman
Different physics, different language, different everything. But in the case of Arrival, it can at least recognize that they’re there.
Different physics, different language, different everything. But in the case of Arrival, it can at least recognize that they’re there.
Adam Frank
And they managed to cross the language barrier. Yeah.
And they managed to cross the language barrier. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
But that’s, both sides have an interest in communicating, which you suppose that an advanced civilization would have a curiosity. Because how do you become advanced without curiosity about the mysteries about the other.
But that’s, both sides have an interest in communicating, which you suppose that an advanced civilization would have a curiosity. Because how do you become advanced without curiosity about the mysteries about the other.
Adam Frank
But also, if they’re long-lived, they may just be like, “We’re not even interested. Say 10 million years ago, we were really interested in this, in communicating with you youngins, but now we’re not at all.” And that’s just one of the beauties of this again, is how to think about this systematically because you’re so far past the hairy edge of our experience of what we know that you want to think about it. You don’t want to be like, “Don’t know, can’t say anything,” because that’s not fun. But you also have to systematically go after your own biases. So, one of the things I loved about Arrival too was Carl Sagan always had this idea, “We’ll teach them math, we’ll teach them our math, then they’ll teach us their math, and then we’ll be telling each other, knock-knock jokes and swapping cures for cancer.”
But also, if they’re long-lived, they may just be like, “We’re not even interested. Say 10 million years ago, we were really interested in this, in communicating with you youngins, but now we’re not at all.” And that’s just one of the beauties of this again, is how to think about this systematically because you’re so far past the hairy edge of our experience of what we know that you want to think about it. You don’t want to be like, “Don’t know, can’t say anything,” because that’s not fun. But you also have to systematically go after your own biases. So, one of the things I loved about Arrival too was Carl Sagan always had this idea, “We’ll teach them math, we’ll teach them our math, then they’ll teach us their math, and then we’ll be telling each other, knock-knock jokes and swapping cures for cancer.”
And in the movie, they send a Carl Sagan guy in and a linguist, and the Carl Sagan guy fails immediately. And it’s the linguist who understands that language is actually embodied. Language is not just something that happens in your head, it’s actually the whole experience and she’s the one who breaks through. And it just points to the idea that how utterly different the cognitive structures of a different species should be. So somehow, we have to figure out how to think about it, but be so careful of our biases or figure out a systematic way to break through our biases and not just make science fiction movies. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Speaking of biases, do you think aliens have visited Earth? You’ve mentioned that they could have visited and started civilizations and we wouldn’t even know about it if it was 100 million years ago. How can we even begin to answer this question, whether-
Yeah. Speaking of biases, do you think aliens have visited Earth? You’ve mentioned that they could have visited and started civilizations and we wouldn’t even know about it if it was 100 million years ago. How can we even begin to answer this question, whether-
Adam Frank
Got to look, got to figure out ways to look. So, it’s not high on my list of things that I think are probable, but it certainly, it needs to be explored. And unless you look, you never know. So, looking on the moon, where would we find if aliens had passed through the solar system anytime in the last 3 billion years, where might we find artifacts? Where might artifacts still be around? Earth? Probably not because of weathering and resurfacing. The moon’s a good place. Certain kinds of orbits, maybe they parked a probe in an orbit that was stable. So, you got to figure out which orbits actually you could put something there and it’ll last for a billion years.
Got to look, got to figure out ways to look. So, it’s not high on my list of things that I think are probable, but it certainly, it needs to be explored. And unless you look, you never know. So, looking on the moon, where would we find if aliens had passed through the solar system anytime in the last 3 billion years, where might we find artifacts? Where might artifacts still be around? Earth? Probably not because of weathering and resurfacing. The moon’s a good place. Certain kinds of orbits, maybe they parked a probe in an orbit that was stable. So, you got to figure out which orbits actually you could put something there and it’ll last for a billion years.
So, those are the kind of questions. Like I said, it’s not high on my list of thinking this could happen, but it could happen. Unless you look, you don’t know.
Lex Fridman
Speaking of biases, what about if aliens visiting Earth is the elephant in the room? Meaning the potential of aliens, say seeding life on earth?
Speaking of biases, what about if aliens visiting Earth is the elephant in the room? Meaning the potential of aliens, say seeding life on earth?
Adam Frank
You mean in that directed panspermia, [inaudible 02:10:33]-
You mean in that directed panspermia, [inaudible 02:10:33]-
Lex Fridman
Directed panspermia.
Directed panspermia.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Or seeding some aspect of the evolution.
Or seeding some aspect of the evolution.
Adam Frank
Like 2001.
Like 2001.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Frank
Yeah. It’s a great story, but always with Occam’s razor or whatever with science. If I can answer that question without that extra very detailed hypothesis, then I should. And the idea that evolution is a natural process, that’s what I would go for first. That just seems it’s so much easier to do it that way than adding, because it’s kind of a duo sex machina thing of like, “Oh, then the aliens came down and they solved that problem that you’re trying to solve by just coming down and putting their finger on the scales.”
Yeah. It’s a great story, but always with Occam’s razor or whatever with science. If I can answer that question without that extra very detailed hypothesis, then I should. And the idea that evolution is a natural process, that’s what I would go for first. That just seems it’s so much easier to do it that way than adding, because it’s kind of a duo sex machina thing of like, “Oh, then the aliens came down and they solved that problem that you’re trying to solve by just coming down and putting their finger on the scales.”
Lex Fridman
So, to you, the origin of life is a pretty simple thing that doesn’t require an alien?
So, to you, the origin of life is a pretty simple thing that doesn’t require an alien?
Adam Frank
I wouldn’t say that, it’s not a simple thing. Because all you’re doing is kicking the can down the road. The aliens formed, right? So, you’re just saying like, ” All right, I’m just kicking the can down the road to the aliens. What was their abiogenesis event?
I wouldn’t say that, it’s not a simple thing. Because all you’re doing is kicking the can down the road. The aliens formed, right? So, you’re just saying like, ” All right, I’m just kicking the can down the road to the aliens. What was their abiogenesis event?
Lex Fridman
Well, so from a different perspective, I’m just saying, it seems to me that there’s obviously advanced civilizations everywhere throughout the galaxy and through the universe from the Drake equation perspective. And then if I was an alien, what would I do? I’ve gotten a chance to learn about the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. I recently went to the Amazon, and you get to understand how they function and how the humans in the Amazon, they’re in contact with the civilized world, how they interact with the uncontacted tribes. First of all, the uncontacted tribes are very violent towards the outside world, but everybody else tried to stay away from them. They try to protect them, don’t talk about them, don’t talk about their location and all this kind of stuff.
Well, so from a different perspective, I’m just saying, it seems to me that there’s obviously advanced civilizations everywhere throughout the galaxy and through the universe from the Drake equation perspective. And then if I was an alien, what would I do? I’ve gotten a chance to learn about the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. I recently went to the Amazon, and you get to understand how they function and how the humans in the Amazon, they’re in contact with the civilized world, how they interact with the uncontacted tribes. First of all, the uncontacted tribes are very violent towards the outside world, but everybody else tried to stay away from them. They try to protect them, don’t talk about them, don’t talk about their location and all this kind of stuff.
And I’ve begun to internalize and understand that perspective of why you’re doing that. And if I was an alien civilization, I probably would be doing a similar kind of thing. And of course, there’s always the teenager or the troll who’s going to start messing with this stuff or the scientists.
Adam Frank
Yeah, right.
Yeah, right.
Lex Fridman
And so, from our perspective, yes. And if you’re in the Truman Show like Occam’s razor, but also the Occam’s razor from the perspective of the alien civilization, we have to have the humility to understand that that interaction will be extremely difficult to detect, that it would not be obvious.
And so, from our perspective, yes. And if you’re in the Truman Show like Occam’s razor, but also the Occam’s razor from the perspective of the alien civilization, we have to have the humility to understand that that interaction will be extremely difficult to detect, that it would not be obvious.
Adam Frank
Right. I understand the logic of what you’re saying, but the problem for me with that is that first you have to assume that alien civilizations are common, which I’m not sure about it, that most of them may be dead or they’re not. While I think that life is common, and again, this is just my biases. So now, the problem is how do we sort out the biases we’re bringing or the assumptions we’re bringing in from the causal chain that comes out of that? I would first want to try and do this without, if we’re looking at the origin of life or the evolution of life on Earth. I’d want to do it just on its own without asking for this other layer because it requires a bunch of these other assumptions which also have their own breaking of causal chains.
Right. I understand the logic of what you’re saying, but the problem for me with that is that first you have to assume that alien civilizations are common, which I’m not sure about it, that most of them may be dead or they’re not. While I think that life is common, and again, this is just my biases. So now, the problem is how do we sort out the biases we’re bringing or the assumptions we’re bringing in from the causal chain that comes out of that? I would first want to try and do this without, if we’re looking at the origin of life or the evolution of life on Earth. I’d want to do it just on its own without asking for this other layer because it requires a bunch of these other assumptions which also have their own breaking of causal chains.
Because the idea that when you ask, what would you do if you were an alien? But again, alien minds could be so unbelievably different that they wouldn’t even recognize the question you just posed.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Adam Frank
Because it’s just like we have a very particular cognitive structure or cognitive, and we’re very governed by, even if you went and talked to, this is an interesting thing to think about. If I could suddenly magically appear 100,000 years ago and talked to a hunter-gatherer about their worldview and their motivations, I might find something that, or no resemblance to things that I think are sort of, “Oh, that’s what naturally humans do.”
Because it’s just like we have a very particular cognitive structure or cognitive, and we’re very governed by, even if you went and talked to, this is an interesting thing to think about. If I could suddenly magically appear 100,000 years ago and talked to a hunter-gatherer about their worldview and their motivations, I might find something that, or no resemblance to things that I think are sort of, “Oh, that’s what naturally humans do.”
Lex Fridman
Well, let me ask you this question. Let’s together do the thought experience.
Well, let me ask you this question. Let’s together do the thought experience.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
If we either create a time machine that allows us to travel back and to talk to them.
If we either create a time machine that allows us to travel back and to talk to them.
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Or we discover maybe a primitive alien civilization on a nearby star system, what would we do?
Or we discover maybe a primitive alien civilization on a nearby star system, what would we do?
Adam Frank
Yeah. I think that’s a great question. It’s interesting how that even brings up the ethical questions. Let’s say that we’d have to first sort out what are the consequences for them and what do we feel our ethical responsibilities are to them?
Yeah. I think that’s a great question. It’s interesting how that even brings up the ethical questions. Let’s say that we’d have to first sort out what are the consequences for them and what do we feel our ethical responsibilities are to them?
Lex Fridman
And also, sorry, from a capitalist perspective, what are we to gain from this interaction?
And also, sorry, from a capitalist perspective, what are we to gain from this interaction?
Adam Frank
Right. You look at the way the missionaries, missionaries had these interactions because they thought converting them to whatever religion they were was the most important, that’s what the gain was. So, from our perspective, we’d have to sort that out. I think given if we’re doing this thought experiment, we are curious, and I think eventually we’d want to reach out to them.
Right. You look at the way the missionaries, missionaries had these interactions because they thought converting them to whatever religion they were was the most important, that’s what the gain was. So, from our perspective, we’d have to sort that out. I think given if we’re doing this thought experiment, we are curious, and I think eventually we’d want to reach out to them.
Lex Fridman
I think when you say we, let’s start with the people in this room, right?
I think when you say we, let’s start with the people in this room, right?
Adam Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
I wonder who the dominant forces are in the world, because I think there’s a lot of people, the military they’ll probably move first so they can steal whatever advantage they can from this new discovery so they can hurt China or China hurt America. That’s one perspective. Then there’s the capitalist school will see how the benefits and the costs here, and how can I make money off of this? There’s opportunity here, there’s gold in them hills. And I wonder, and I think the scientist is just not going to, unlike the movies-
I wonder who the dominant forces are in the world, because I think there’s a lot of people, the military they’ll probably move first so they can steal whatever advantage they can from this new discovery so they can hurt China or China hurt America. That’s one perspective. Then there’s the capitalist school will see how the benefits and the costs here, and how can I make money off of this? There’s opportunity here, there’s gold in them hills. And I wonder, and I think the scientist is just not going to, unlike the movies-
Adam Frank
We’re not going to get much say.
We’re not going to get much say.
Lex Fridman
They’re going to put them-
They’re going to put them-
Adam Frank
“Hey guys, wait a minute.”
“Hey guys, wait a minute.”
Lex Fridman
They would engage probably. Just as a human society as we are now, we would engage and we would be detectable, I think.
They would engage probably. Just as a human society as we are now, we would engage and we would be detectable, I think.
Adam Frank
In our engagement.
In our engagement.
Lex Fridman
In our engagement.
In our engagement.
Adam Frank
Yeah, probably.
Yeah, probably.
Lex Fridman
So, using that trivial bias logic, it just feels like aliens would need to be engaging in a very obvious way. Just brings up that old direct for me paradox for me. What do you make of all the UFO sightings?
So, using that trivial bias logic, it just feels like aliens would need to be engaging in a very obvious way. Just brings up that old direct for me paradox for me. What do you make of all the UFO sightings?
UFO sightings
Adam Frank
I am all in favor of an open, agnostic, transparent, scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs. But the idea that there’s any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology, I just think the standards, none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence. So, let’s just take a moment on that idea of standards of evidence, because I made a big deal about this both in the book and elsewhere whenever I talk about this. So, what people have to understand about science is we are really, our scientists, we are really mean to each other, we are brutal to each other.
I am all in favor of an open, agnostic, transparent, scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs. But the idea that there’s any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology, I just think the standards, none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence. So, let’s just take a moment on that idea of standards of evidence, because I made a big deal about this both in the book and elsewhere whenever I talk about this. So, what people have to understand about science is we are really, our scientists, we are really mean to each other, we are brutal to each other.
Because we have this thing that we call standards of evidence, and it’s the idea of you have a piece of evidence that you want to link to a claim. And under what conditions can you say, “Oh, look, I’ve got evidence of this claim X, Y, and Z.” And in science, we are so mean to each other about whether or not that piece of evidence lives up to the standards that we have. And we spent 400 years determining what those standards are, and that is why cell phones work. If you didn’t have super rigorous standards about what you think that’s, “Oh, this little antenna, I’ve invented a new kind of antenna that I can slip into the cell phone and I can show you that it works.”
If you didn’t have these standards, every cell phone would be a brick. And when it comes to UFOs and UAPs, the evidence you have and the claim that though this shows that we are being visited by non-human, advanced civilization just doesn’t even come close to the same standards. I’m going to have to obey or whatever live under. If my team, the group I work with is one of them says, “Look, we’ve discovered and he wants to announce that, oh, we’ve discovered a technosignature on an alien planet.” We’re going to get shredded as we expect to be, we expect to be beaten up. And the UAP, UFO community should expect the same thing. You don’t get a pass because it’s a really cool topic.
So, that’s where I am right now. I just don’t think any of the evidence is even close to anything that could support that claim.
Lex Fridman
Well, I generally assign a lot of value to anecdotal evidence from pilots. Not scientific value, but just like it’s always nice to get anecdotal evidence as a first step. Because I was like, “I wonder if there’s something there.” But unfortunately, with this topic, there’s so much excitement around that there’s a lot of people that are basically trying to make money off of it. There’s hoaxes all this kind of stuff. So, even if there’s some signal, there’s just so much noise it’s very difficult to operate with. So, how do we get better signal? So, you’ve talked about if we wanted to really search for UFOs on Earth and maybe detect things like weird physics, what kind of instruments would we be using?
Well, I generally assign a lot of value to anecdotal evidence from pilots. Not scientific value, but just like it’s always nice to get anecdotal evidence as a first step. Because I was like, “I wonder if there’s something there.” But unfortunately, with this topic, there’s so much excitement around that there’s a lot of people that are basically trying to make money off of it. There’s hoaxes all this kind of stuff. So, even if there’s some signal, there’s just so much noise it’s very difficult to operate with. So, how do we get better signal? So, you’ve talked about if we wanted to really search for UFOs on Earth and maybe detect things like weird physics, what kind of instruments would we be using?
Adam Frank
Yeah, so in the book, I talked about the idea that this is really stupid, but you want to look up, you want to look down and you want to look all around.
Yeah, so in the book, I talked about the idea that this is really stupid, but you want to look up, you want to look down and you want to look all around.
Lex Fridman
I think that’s brilliant. It’s simple, not stupid. It’s like literally.
I think that’s brilliant. It’s simple, not stupid. It’s like literally.
Adam Frank
Yeah, right. So, you want to do ground-based detectors, upward-looking, ground-based detectors of the kind we’re already building for meteors, for tracking meteors. You want to have space-based detectors, put them on satellites, this is what the NASA UAP panel was thinking about. And then probably on, we have lots of people in the sky there should be detectors on the planes, or at least some kind of alert system that if a pilot says, “Oh, look, I’m seeing something I don’t understand.” Boop presses the red button, and that triggers the ground.
Yeah, right. So, you want to do ground-based detectors, upward-looking, ground-based detectors of the kind we’re already building for meteors, for tracking meteors. You want to have space-based detectors, put them on satellites, this is what the NASA UAP panel was thinking about. And then probably on, we have lots of people in the sky there should be detectors on the planes, or at least some kind of alert system that if a pilot says, “Oh, look, I’m seeing something I don’t understand.” Boop presses the red button, and that triggers the ground.
Adam Frank
I’m seeing something I don’t understand. Boop. Presses the red button and that triggers the ground-based and space-based data collectors. And then the data collectors themselves, this is something that people really don’t understand and it’s so important. In order to actually do science with anything, the data you have, you have to understand where it came from down to the nth degree. You have to know how that camera behaves in a bunch of different wavelengths. You have to have characterized that. You have to know what the software does, what the limits of the software are possible. You have to know what happened to the camera. Was it refurbished recently? In every spectral wavelength in all of its data collection and processing, you have to know all of those steps and have them all characterized because especially if you want to claim like, “Oh my God, I saw something, take a right-hand turn at Mach-500.” Right?
I’m seeing something I don’t understand. Boop. Presses the red button and that triggers the ground-based and space-based data collectors. And then the data collectors themselves, this is something that people really don’t understand and it’s so important. In order to actually do science with anything, the data you have, you have to understand where it came from down to the nth degree. You have to know how that camera behaves in a bunch of different wavelengths. You have to have characterized that. You have to know what the software does, what the limits of the software are possible. You have to know what happened to the camera. Was it refurbished recently? In every spectral wavelength in all of its data collection and processing, you have to know all of those steps and have them all characterized because especially if you want to claim like, “Oh my God, I saw something, take a right-hand turn at Mach-500.” Right?
You better have all of that nailed down before you make that kind of claim. So we have to have characterized detectors looking up, down, and maybe on planes themselves, we need a rational search strategy. So let’s say you want to lay out these ground-based detectors. Where do you put them? Right? There’s only so much money in the world, so do you want to put them near places where you’ve seen a lot of things beforehand or do you want to have them try and do sparse coverage of the entire country?
And then you need the data analysts analysis, right? You’re going to have so much data, so many false positives or false triggering that you need a way of sorting through enormous amounts of data and figuring out what you’re going to throw out and what you’re going to keep, and all of these things we’re used to doing in other scientific enterprises. And without that, if we don’t do that, we’re going to be having the same damn argument about these things for the next 100 years.
Lex Fridman
But if I asked you, I give you $1 trillion and asked you to allocate to one place looking out, SETI or looking at Earth, should you allocate it?
But if I asked you, I give you $1 trillion and asked you to allocate to one place looking out, SETI or looking at Earth, should you allocate it?
Adam Frank
Oh God, looking out. Looking out. Because that’s the, as I always like to say, here’s my codification of this. If you said, “Hey, Adam, I’d like to find some Nebraskans.” And I said, “Oh, good, let’s go to the Himalayas.” You’d be like, “Why am I going there?” I’m like, “Well, maybe there’s some Himalayas, some Nebraskans in Himalayas.” You’d say, “No, no. Let’s go to Nebraska.” If we’re looking for aliens, why don’t we look on alien planets where they live? We have that technology now as opposed to the bucket of assumptions that you have to come up with in order to say like, “Oh, they’re here right now. They just happen to be here right now.” And also the very important thing, I called this the high beam argument to deal with the UFO stuff, you have to answer these weird, irrational things that are happening.
Oh God, looking out. Looking out. Because that’s the, as I always like to say, here’s my codification of this. If you said, “Hey, Adam, I’d like to find some Nebraskans.” And I said, “Oh, good, let’s go to the Himalayas.” You’d be like, “Why am I going there?” I’m like, “Well, maybe there’s some Himalayas, some Nebraskans in Himalayas.” You’d say, “No, no. Let’s go to Nebraska.” If we’re looking for aliens, why don’t we look on alien planets where they live? We have that technology now as opposed to the bucket of assumptions that you have to come up with in order to say like, “Oh, they’re here right now. They just happen to be here right now.” And also the very important thing, I called this the high beam argument to deal with the UFO stuff, you have to answer these weird, irrational things that are happening.
Like, okay, there’s an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly. They don’t want to be detected. They’ve got super powerful technology, but they really suck at using it because we keep seeing them, we keep seeing them, but then they disappear. I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under. So there’s that whole sort of argument. You’ve got to explain why if they want to stay hidden, are they so bad at it? So that’s why I take that level of difficulty and then I put it on top of where should I look? I should look at where they’re from. That makes me want to look at do the telescopic stuff.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think the more likely explanation is either the sensors are not working correctly or it’s secret military technology being tested.
Yeah, I think the more likely explanation is either the sensors are not working correctly or it’s secret military technology being tested.
Adam Frank
Absolutely. I mean, listen, that’s why again, I think UAP, absolutely UAP should be studied scientifically, but if I had to make a bet and it’s just a bet, I would say this is pure state adversary stuff. When I did, I did a New York Times op-ed for this in 2021, which blew up, and so I had a lot of people talking to me. While I was doing that. I sort of looked at the signals intelligence people, the SIGINT and EINT, electronic intelligence communities, and what they were saying about the New York Times articles and the various videos, and really none of them were talking about UFOs. They were all talking about pure state. That’s why I learned the word pure state adversaries, how even simple drone technologies and you purposely want to do this. You want to fake signals into the electronics of their adversary, so they crank it up so then you can just soak up all the electromagnetic radiation and know exactly what those advanced radars can do.
Absolutely. I mean, listen, that’s why again, I think UAP, absolutely UAP should be studied scientifically, but if I had to make a bet and it’s just a bet, I would say this is pure state adversary stuff. When I did, I did a New York Times op-ed for this in 2021, which blew up, and so I had a lot of people talking to me. While I was doing that. I sort of looked at the signals intelligence people, the SIGINT and EINT, electronic intelligence communities, and what they were saying about the New York Times articles and the various videos, and really none of them were talking about UFOs. They were all talking about pure state. That’s why I learned the word pure state adversaries, how even simple drone technologies and you purposely want to do this. You want to fake signals into the electronics of their adversary, so they crank it up so then you can just soak up all the electromagnetic radiation and know exactly what those advanced radars can do.
Lex Fridman
That said, I’m not saying that’s what this is. If I was the head of an alien civilization and I chose not to minimize the amount of contact I’m doing, I would try to figure out what would these humans, what would these aliens like to see? That’s why the big heads in the humanoid form, I mean, that’s kind of how I would approach communication. If I was much more intelligent, I would observe them enough. It’s like, all right, if I wanted to communicate with an ant colony, I would observe it long enough to see what are the basic elements of communication. And maybe I would do a trivial thing, do a fake ant in there.
That said, I’m not saying that’s what this is. If I was the head of an alien civilization and I chose not to minimize the amount of contact I’m doing, I would try to figure out what would these humans, what would these aliens like to see? That’s why the big heads in the humanoid form, I mean, that’s kind of how I would approach communication. If I was much more intelligent, I would observe them enough. It’s like, all right, if I wanted to communicate with an ant colony, I would observe it long enough to see what are the basic elements of communication. And maybe I would do a trivial thing, do a fake ant in there.
Adam Frank
Right. A robot ant.
Right. A robot ant.
Lex Fridman
A robot ant, but then it’s not enough to just do a robot ant. You have to do a robot ant that moves in the way they do, and maybe aliens are just shitty at doing the robot ants. But no, I just wanted to make the case for that,
A robot ant, but then it’s not enough to just do a robot ant. You have to do a robot ant that moves in the way they do, and maybe aliens are just shitty at doing the robot ants. But no, I just wanted to make the case for that,
Adam Frank
This is the plot actually of a great science fiction book called Eon by Greg Baer, and the idea was these sort of, this is actually where my first, I became sort of more than agnostic, anti-medy, because the idea is that yes, our aliens come, they sort of make their arrival and really their point is to get rid of us. It’s the dark forest hypothesis. And what they do is they literally, the way they present themselves is in this sort of classic UFO thing, and they do it and they arrive at, this was during the Soviet Union. They arrive at the USSR, they arrive in China, and they’re kind of faking us out so that we never can organize ourselves against… So it was really, they did exactly what you’re talking about, but for nefarious purposes.
This is the plot actually of a great science fiction book called Eon by Greg Baer, and the idea was these sort of, this is actually where my first, I became sort of more than agnostic, anti-medy, because the idea is that yes, our aliens come, they sort of make their arrival and really their point is to get rid of us. It’s the dark forest hypothesis. And what they do is they literally, the way they present themselves is in this sort of classic UFO thing, and they do it and they arrive at, this was during the Soviet Union. They arrive at the USSR, they arrive in China, and they’re kind of faking us out so that we never can organize ourselves against… So it was really, they did exactly what you’re talking about, but for nefarious purposes.
Lex Fridman
Okay, let me ask the pothead question. Yet another pothead-
Okay, let me ask the pothead question. Yet another pothead-
Adam Frank
Another pothead. The whole conversation-
Another pothead. The whole conversation-
Lex Fridman
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
Adam Frank
Boggs before breakfast.
Boggs before breakfast.
Lex Fridman
It’s signs and pothead questions back and forth. Okay, what if aliens take a form that’s unlike what we kind of traditionally envision in analyzing physical objects? What if they take the form of say ideas? What if real pothead, if it’s consciousness itself, like the subjective experience as an alien being, maybe ideas and is an easier one to visualize? Because we can think of ideas as entities traveling from human to human.
It’s signs and pothead questions back and forth. Okay, what if aliens take a form that’s unlike what we kind of traditionally envision in analyzing physical objects? What if they take the form of say ideas? What if real pothead, if it’s consciousness itself, like the subjective experience as an alien being, maybe ideas and is an easier one to visualize? Because we can think of ideas as entities traveling from human to human.
Adam Frank
I made the claim that the most important, that finding life any kind of life would be the most important discovery in human history. And one of the reasons is, again, as I said, that life, if we’re not an accident and there’s other life, then there’s probably lots of other life. And because the most significant thing about life is it can innovate, right? If I give you a star and tell you the mass and the composition, you can basically pretty much use the laws of physics, tell exactly what’s going to happen to that star over its entire lifetime. Maybe not the little tiny details, but overall it’s going to be a white dwarf, if it’s going to be a black hole end of story. If I gave you a single cell and said, “What’s going to happen in a few billion years?” You’d never be able to predict a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face, right?
I made the claim that the most important, that finding life any kind of life would be the most important discovery in human history. And one of the reasons is, again, as I said, that life, if we’re not an accident and there’s other life, then there’s probably lots of other life. And because the most significant thing about life is it can innovate, right? If I give you a star and tell you the mass and the composition, you can basically pretty much use the laws of physics, tell exactly what’s going to happen to that star over its entire lifetime. Maybe not the little tiny details, but overall it’s going to be a white dwarf, if it’s going to be a black hole end of story. If I gave you a single cell and said, “What’s going to happen in a few billion years?” You’d never be able to predict a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Frank
A kangaroo.
A kangaroo.
So life has this possibility of innovating, of being creative. So what it means is, and that’s kind of a fundamental definition of what it means to be alive. It goes past itself. So give life enough time and what are the end result? That’s why I love science fiction so much. At some point, does life reach a point where it climbs into the laws of physics itself. It becomes the laws of physics or these sort of lie at the extreme limits of thinking about what we mean by reality, what we mean by experience. But I’m not sure there was much we can do with them scientifically, but they’re open-ended question about the open-ended nature of what it means to be alive and what life can do.
Physics of life
Lex Fridman
Since you said it’s the biggest question, which is an interesting thought experiment, what is the biggest scientific question we can possibly answer? Some people might say about what happened before the Big Bang, some big physics questions about the universe. I could see the argument for how many alien civilizations or if there’s other life out there? You want to speak to that a little bit? Why is it the biggest question in… Why is it number one in your top five?
Since you said it’s the biggest question, which is an interesting thought experiment, what is the biggest scientific question we can possibly answer? Some people might say about what happened before the Big Bang, some big physics questions about the universe. I could see the argument for how many alien civilizations or if there’s other life out there? You want to speak to that a little bit? Why is it the biggest question in… Why is it number one in your top five?
Adam Frank
I’ve evolved in this, right? I started off as a theoretical physicist. I went into computational astrophysics, magnetohydrodynamics of star formation, but I always was a philosophy minor. I always had these sort of bigger questions sort of floating around the back of my mind. And what I’ve come to now is the most important question for physics is, what is life? What the hell is the difference between a rock and a cell, fundamentally? And what I really mean by this, this is where I’m going to go non-traditional, is that really the fundamental question that is agency. What does it mean to be an autonomous agent? How the hell does that happen? I’m not a reductionist. I’m not somebody who’s just like, well, you just put together enough chemicals and bing, bang, boom, and it suddenly appears there’s something that really is going to demand a reconception of what nature itself is.
I’ve evolved in this, right? I started off as a theoretical physicist. I went into computational astrophysics, magnetohydrodynamics of star formation, but I always was a philosophy minor. I always had these sort of bigger questions sort of floating around the back of my mind. And what I’ve come to now is the most important question for physics is, what is life? What the hell is the difference between a rock and a cell, fundamentally? And what I really mean by this, this is where I’m going to go non-traditional, is that really the fundamental question that is agency. What does it mean to be an autonomous agent? How the hell does that happen? I’m not a reductionist. I’m not somebody who’s just like, well, you just put together enough chemicals and bing, bang, boom, and it suddenly appears there’s something that really is going to demand a reconception of what nature itself is.
And so yeah, black holes are super cool. Cosmology is super cool. But really this question of what is life? Especially, from by viewing it from the inside, because it’s really about the verb to be. Really what is the most impressing philosophical question beyond science? Is the verb to be, what is being? This is what Stephen Hawking said when he talked about, “What puts the fire in the equations? The fire.” The fire is this presence and this is where it touches things like whatever you want to say it, the sacred, spirituality, whatever you want to talk about. My first book was about science and human spirituality. So this question of life, what makes life as a physical system so different is to me much more because that is where being appears. Being doesn’t appear out there. The only place that ever appears to any of us is us. I can do this kind of projection into this third person thing, but nobody ever has that, that God’s eye view. That’s a story we tell. This is where, this between us is where the verb to be, appears.
Lex Fridman
So this is something that you write about in The Blind Spot, why science cannot ignore human experience, sort of trying to pull the fire into the process of science. And it’s a kind of critique of materialism. Can you explain the main thesis of this book?
So this is something that you write about in The Blind Spot, why science cannot ignore human experience, sort of trying to pull the fire into the process of science. And it’s a kind of critique of materialism. Can you explain the main thesis of this book?
Adam Frank
Yeah. So the idea of The Blind Spot is that there is this thing that is central to science. So we’re using the blind spot as a metaphor. So the eye has an optic nerve, and the optic nerve is what allows vision to happen. So you can’t have vision without the optic nerve, but actually you’re blind to the optic nerve. There’s a little hole in your vision where the optic nerve is. And what we’re saying is that science has something like this. There’s something that without which science would not be possible, but that science, the way it’s been configured, and actually, when we mean the blind spot, I’ll get into exactly what I mean what it is, but it’s not really science. It is a set of ideas that got glued onto science. It’s a metaphysics that got glued on science. And so what is that thing? What is the blind spot? It’s experience. It is presence. And if I experience, people have to be very careful. I’m not talking about being an observer. There’s lots of words for it. There’s direct experience. There is presence. Being. The life world. Within the philosophy called phenomenology. There’s the life world.
Yeah. So the idea of The Blind Spot is that there is this thing that is central to science. So we’re using the blind spot as a metaphor. So the eye has an optic nerve, and the optic nerve is what allows vision to happen. So you can’t have vision without the optic nerve, but actually you’re blind to the optic nerve. There’s a little hole in your vision where the optic nerve is. And what we’re saying is that science has something like this. There’s something that without which science would not be possible, but that science, the way it’s been configured, and actually, when we mean the blind spot, I’ll get into exactly what I mean what it is, but it’s not really science. It is a set of ideas that got glued onto science. It’s a metaphysics that got glued on science. And so what is that thing? What is the blind spot? It’s experience. It is presence. And if I experience, people have to be very careful. I’m not talking about being an observer. There’s lots of words for it. There’s direct experience. There is presence. Being. The life world. Within the philosophy called phenomenology. There’s the life world.
It’s this sort of raw presence that you can’t get away from until you die. And then who the hell knows that as long as you’re around, it’s there. And what we’re saying is that, that is the way to say this, that is the precondition for the possibility of science and the whole nature of science, the way it has evolved is that it purposely pushed that out. It pushed that out. So it could make progress, and that’s fine for a certain class of problems. But when we try to answer, when we try and go deeper, there’s a whole other class of problems. The nature of consciousness, the nature of time, quantum mechanics, that comes back to bite us. And that if we don’t learn how to take, understand that, that is always the background, that experience is always the background. Then we just end up with these paradoxes and that require this intellectual yoga to get out of.
Lex Fridman
I think you give a bunch of examples of that. Looking at temperature as a number is a very objective, scientific way of looking at that. And then there’s the experience of the temperature.
I think you give a bunch of examples of that. Looking at temperature as a number is a very objective, scientific way of looking at that. And then there’s the experience of the temperature.
Adam Frank
And how you build the parable of temperature that we call it. So what is the blind spot? We use the term it’s a constellation. It’s not just materialism. It’s a constellation of ideas that are all really sort of philosophical views. They’re not what science says, but because of the evolution of the history of science and culture got like pin the tail on the donkey, they were sort of pinned on and to tell us that this is what science says.
And how you build the parable of temperature that we call it. So what is the blind spot? We use the term it’s a constellation. It’s not just materialism. It’s a constellation of ideas that are all really sort of philosophical views. They’re not what science says, but because of the evolution of the history of science and culture got like pin the tail on the donkey, they were sort of pinned on and to tell us that this is what science says.
So what is it? One is reductionism that you are nothing but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry, which is nothing but all the way down to quarks. That’s it. So that’s reductionism.
The objective frame that science gives us this god’s eye view, this third-person view of the world to view the world from the outside. That’s what science bequeaths to us, that view.
Physicalism, that everything in the world is basically made of stuff. There’s nothing else to talk about that, that’s all there is. And everything can be reduced to that.
And then also the reification of mathematics, that mathematics is somehow more real than this.
And there’s a bunch of other things. But all these together, what they all do is they end up pushing experience out and saying experience is an epiphenomena. Consciousness. I tend not to use the word consciousness. I think it leads us in the wrong direction. We should focus on experience because it is a verb kind of in a way. It is verb-like and by being blind to that, we end up with these paradoxes and problems that really not only block science, but also have been detrimental to society as a whole, especially where we’re at right now.
Lex Fridman
So you actually say that, that from a perspective of detrimental society, that there’s a crisis of meaning, and then we respond to that in a way that’s counterproductive to these bigger questions, scientific questions. So the three ways responses you mentioned is scientific triumphalism, and then on the other side is rejecting science completely, both on the left and the right. I think the postmodernist on the left and the anti-establishment people on the right, and then just pseudoscience that kind of does this in-between thing. Can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis of meaning?
So you actually say that, that from a perspective of detrimental society, that there’s a crisis of meaning, and then we respond to that in a way that’s counterproductive to these bigger questions, scientific questions. So the three ways responses you mentioned is scientific triumphalism, and then on the other side is rejecting science completely, both on the left and the right. I think the postmodernist on the left and the anti-establishment people on the right, and then just pseudoscience that kind of does this in-between thing. Can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis of meaning?
Adam Frank
Right, right. So the crisis of meaning is that on the one hand, science wants to tell us that we’re insignificant. We’re not important. We’re just biological machines. And so we’re basically an insignificant part of the universe. On the other hand, we also find ourselves being completely significant. In cosmology, we have to figure out how to look from the inside. At cosmology, we’re always the observers. We’re at the center of this collapsing wavefront of light. Quantum mechanics, it really comes in, it comes the measurement problem just puts us front and center. And we’ve spent 100… Some people spent 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem. So on the one hand, we’re insignificant, and on the other hand, we’re central. So which one is it? And so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience, this inability, we can’t do science without already being present in the world.
Right, right. So the crisis of meaning is that on the one hand, science wants to tell us that we’re insignificant. We’re not important. We’re just biological machines. And so we’re basically an insignificant part of the universe. On the other hand, we also find ourselves being completely significant. In cosmology, we have to figure out how to look from the inside. At cosmology, we’re always the observers. We’re at the center of this collapsing wavefront of light. Quantum mechanics, it really comes in, it comes the measurement problem just puts us front and center. And we’ve spent 100… Some people spent 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem. So on the one hand, we’re insignificant, and on the other hand, we’re central. So which one is it? And so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience, this inability, we can’t do science without already being present in the world.
We can’t reduce what happens in science to some sort of formal… A lot of it is about we love our formal systems, our mathematics, and we’re substituting. That’s one of the things that, there’s two philosophers we really like for our heroes. One is Husserl, who is a mathematician, who invented phenomenology. And the other is Whitehead, who’s one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. And Husserl came up with this idea of the surreptitious substitution. Part of The Blind Spot is substituting a formal system, a calculus of data for actual experience that that’s more important.
And so let me just do, before I go to those three responses, let’s just do the parable of temperature because I think people can… It’ll help them understand what we mean. So think about degree Celsius. We have in the modern scientific culture we live in, we think like, oh yeah, degree Celsius. They’re out there. The universe, the molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees Kelvin. The way we got there is we’ve forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience. We started off with science by, we had the subjective experience of hot and cold. I feel hot, I feel cold, you feel hot, you feel cold. Science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what Michel Bitbol philosopher calls, “The structural invariance.” The things that we could both kind of agree on. So we figured out like, oh, we could make a gradiated little cylinder that’s got mercury in it and that hot things will be higher in on that gradiated cylinder, cold things will be lower, and we can both kind of figure out what we’re going to agree on are our standards for that. And then we have thermometry, yay. We have a way of having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal experience of hot or cold.
And then from that, we can come up with thermodynamics, etc. And then we end up at the bottom of that with this idea of everyday I wake up and I check my phone and I’m like, oh, it’s going to be 60 degrees out. Great. And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold. That thermodynamics, the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from. It required that bodily experience that also, not just me, I have to tell you, it’s part of my communication with you, cold today, isn’t it? That from that basic irreducible experience of being in the world with everything that it involves, I developed degree Celsius, but then I forgot about it. I forgot the experience. So that’s called the amnesia of experience.
So that’s what we mean by how the blind spot emerges, how we end up, how science purposely pushes experience out of the way so it can make progress, but then it forgets that experience was important. So where does this show up? Why is this? What are the responses to trying to get this back in and where this crisis of meaning emerge? So scientific triumphalism is the idea that the only thing that’s true for us are scientific truths. Unless it can be codified in a formal system and represented as data, captured in some kind of scientific causal network, it doesn’t even exist. And anything else that’s not part of it that can be formalized in that way is an epiphenomenon. It’s not real.
So scientific triumphalism is this response to the weirdness of, I could call it the mystery, the weirdness of experience by just ignoring it completely. So there’s no other truth. Art, music, human spirituality, it’s all actually reducible it neural correlates. So that’s one way that it’s been dealt with.
The other way is this sort of, right, you’ve got on the postmodern, the left academic left, you get this thing, science is just a game. It’s just a game from the powerful come up with, which is also not true. Science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening. So that’s another way to push science away or respond to it. The denial, science denial that happens. That’s also another way of not understanding the balance that science is trying, that we need to establish with experience.
And then there’s just pseudoscience, which wants to sort of say, oh, the new age movement or whatever, which wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it in this weird pseudo spiritual way or that doesn’t have the rigor of science.
So all of these ways, all of these responses, we have this difficulty about experience. We need to understand how experience fits into the web of meaning, and we don’t really have a good way of doing it yet. And the point of the book was to identify very clearly how the problem manifests, what the problem is, and what its effects are in the various sciences.
Lex Fridman
And by the way, we should mention that at least the first two responses, they kind of feed each other just to observe the scientific community, those who gravitate a little bit towards the scientific triumphalism, is an arrogance that builds in the human soul. I mean, it has to do with PhDs, it has to do with sitting on an academic throne, all those things. And the human nature with the egos and so on, it builds. And of course, that nobody likes arrogance. And so those that reject science, the arrogance is fuel for the people that reject science.
And by the way, we should mention that at least the first two responses, they kind of feed each other just to observe the scientific community, those who gravitate a little bit towards the scientific triumphalism, is an arrogance that builds in the human soul. I mean, it has to do with PhDs, it has to do with sitting on an academic throne, all those things. And the human nature with the egos and so on, it builds. And of course, that nobody likes arrogance. And so those that reject science, the arrogance is fuel for the people that reject science.
Adam Frank
I absolutely agree.
I absolutely agree.
Lex Fridman
It just goes back and is this divide that builds.
It just goes back and is this divide that builds.
Adam Frank
Yeah, no, and that was a problem when you saw, so like I said, my first book was about science and human spirituality. So I was trying to say that science is actually, if we look at what happens in human spirituality, not religion. Religion is about politics, but about for the entire history of the species, we’ve had this experience of, for lack of a better word, the sacredness. I’m not connecting this God or anything. I’m just saying this experience of the more, and then with the new atheist movement, you got people saying that, “Anybody who feels that is an idiot.” They just can’t handle the hardcore science. When in fact their views of the world are so denuded of, they can’t even see the role that experience plays in how they came up with their formal systems. And experience fundamentally is weird, mysterious, it’s, it kind of goes down forever in some sense. There is always more. So yeah, that arrogance then just if you’re telling everybody who’s not hardcore enough to do the standard model of cosmology, that they’re idiots, that’s not going to bode well for the advance of your project.
Yeah, no, and that was a problem when you saw, so like I said, my first book was about science and human spirituality. So I was trying to say that science is actually, if we look at what happens in human spirituality, not religion. Religion is about politics, but about for the entire history of the species, we’ve had this experience of, for lack of a better word, the sacredness. I’m not connecting this God or anything. I’m just saying this experience of the more, and then with the new atheist movement, you got people saying that, “Anybody who feels that is an idiot.” They just can’t handle the hardcore science. When in fact their views of the world are so denuded of, they can’t even see the role that experience plays in how they came up with their formal systems. And experience fundamentally is weird, mysterious, it’s, it kind of goes down forever in some sense. There is always more. So yeah, that arrogance then just if you’re telling everybody who’s not hardcore enough to do the standard model of cosmology, that they’re idiots, that’s not going to bode well for the advance of your project.
Lex Fridman
So you’re proposing at least to consider the idea that experience is fundamental, experience is not just an illusion that emerges from the set of quirks, that there could be something about the conscious experience of the world that is at the core of reality?
So you’re proposing at least to consider the idea that experience is fundamental, experience is not just an illusion that emerges from the set of quirks, that there could be something about the conscious experience of the world that is at the core of reality?
Adam Frank
But I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t because there is panpsychism, right? Which wants to say-
But I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t because there is panpsychism, right? Which wants to say-
Lex Fridman
Right. So that’s all the way there. So panpsychism is, that’s literally one of the laws of physics is consciousness.
Right. So that’s all the way there. So panpsychism is, that’s literally one of the laws of physics is consciousness.
Adam Frank
Right. But see what all those do is just the idea of say, physicalism versus idealism, which are kind of the two philosophical schools you can go with. Physicalism says, “All that exists as physical.” Idealism says, “All that exists is mind.” We’re actually saying, “Look, both of these to take either of those positions is already to project out into that third-person view. And that third-person view we want to really emphasize is a fiction.” It’s a useful fiction when you’re doing science. If I want to do the Newtonian physics of billiard balls on a pool table, great. I don’t want to have to think about experience at all, right? But if I’m asking deeper questions, I can’t ignore the fact that there really is no person view and that any story I tell about the world is coming from, it’s not just first person, but it’s literally because I’m going to argue that experience always involves all of us. Experience always originates out of a community.
Right. But see what all those do is just the idea of say, physicalism versus idealism, which are kind of the two philosophical schools you can go with. Physicalism says, “All that exists as physical.” Idealism says, “All that exists is mind.” We’re actually saying, “Look, both of these to take either of those positions is already to project out into that third-person view. And that third-person view we want to really emphasize is a fiction.” It’s a useful fiction when you’re doing science. If I want to do the Newtonian physics of billiard balls on a pool table, great. I don’t want to have to think about experience at all, right? But if I’m asking deeper questions, I can’t ignore the fact that there really is no person view and that any story I tell about the world is coming from, it’s not just first person, but it’s literally because I’m going to argue that experience always involves all of us. Experience always originates out of a community.
That you are always telling those stories from the perspective of already existing, of already being in experience. So whatever account we want to give of the world is going to have to take that as experience as being irreducible and the irreducible starting point. So ultimately, we don’t have an answer. That’s when people are like, “Well, what are you suggesting is the alternative?” It’s like, look, that’s the good work of the next science to come. Well, our job was to point out the problem with this, but what we would argue with is, and we’re thinking about the next book, is this is really going to require a new conception of nature. That doesn’t sort of jump to that third-person… That fictional third-person view and somehow figures out how to do science. Recognizing that it always starts from experience. It always starts from this field of experience. Or in phenomenology, the word is the life world that you’re embedded in. You can’t un-embed yourself from it.
So how do you do… So one of the things that Whitehead said was, “We have to avoid the bifurcation of nature.” And what he meant by that is the bifurcation into scientific concepts, wavelength. Think about seeing a sunset. You can say like, “Oh look, it’s just wavelengths and scattering particles.” And your experience of the redness, the actual experience of the redness and all the other things. It’s not just red. There’s no qualia, there’s no pure redness. Everything that’s happening in the experiential part is just an epiphenomena. It’s just brain states, whatever. He said, “You can’t do that. They’re both real. They’re both accounts. They both need to be integrated.” And so that required, I think, really a different of what we mean by nature.
Lex Fridman
Is it something like incorporating in the physics, in the study of nature, the observer, the experiencing observer, or is that still also looking from a third-person?
Is it something like incorporating in the physics, in the study of nature, the observer, the experiencing observer, or is that still also looking from a third-person?
Adam Frank
I think that that’s what we have to figure out. And so actually a great place to think about this is quantum mechanics, because one of the things we’re arguing is look.. In the chapter that I wrote on, because I wrote on, because I wrote this with Evan Thompson, who’s a wonderful philosopher, and Marcelo Gleiser, who’s a theoretical physicist. When I was writing the chapter on the origin of The Blind Spot, sort of how this emerged out of history, the subheader was like, “Well, it made sense at the time.” Because it did. It really, there was a reason why people adopted this third person, God’s eye deterministic view. This view of sort of like, yeah, the perfect clockwork of the universe. Yeah, totally made sense. But by the time you got to the beginning of the 20th century, science itself was telling you, “Eh-eh.” And no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics, right?
I think that that’s what we have to figure out. And so actually a great place to think about this is quantum mechanics, because one of the things we’re arguing is look.. In the chapter that I wrote on, because I wrote on, because I wrote this with Evan Thompson, who’s a wonderful philosopher, and Marcelo Gleiser, who’s a theoretical physicist. When I was writing the chapter on the origin of The Blind Spot, sort of how this emerged out of history, the subheader was like, “Well, it made sense at the time.” Because it did. It really, there was a reason why people adopted this third person, God’s eye deterministic view. This view of sort of like, yeah, the perfect clockwork of the universe. Yeah, totally made sense. But by the time you got to the beginning of the 20th century, science itself was telling you, “Eh-eh.” And no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics, right?
Quantum mechanics slams you with the idea of the measurement problem. And most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamical equation, the Schrodinger equation, which you put in, like we talked about before, you have initial conditions and now you’ve got a differential equation and you crank out the differential equation and it makes predictions for the future, right? Exactly like Newtonian physics or its higher versions of the Lagrange or Hamiltonians. But then this other thing happens where it’s like, oh, by the way, as soon as you look at it, as soon as the measurement is made, I have a whole nother set of rules for you. That’s what we call the born rule. And it was telling you right from the beginning that measurement matters, right? So when you’re asking, how will we do this? Quantum mechanics is actually pointing to how to do it.
So there’s been all these different interpretations of the quantum mechanics. Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn’t there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter. And then you get something like QBism, which is I’m going to advocate for, is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, which puts the Born rule at the center. Instead of focusing on the Schrodinger equation and the weird things that come out of it, like Schrodinger’s cat and all that other stuff. It says, “No, no, actually the real mystery is the Born rule. Let’s think about the Born rule.” And like you said, that puts the agent, the agent and information at the center of the whole thing.
Lex Fridman
So that’s not a thing you’re trying to get rid of? That’s the thing you’re trying to integrate at the center of the thing in quantum mechanics, it becomes super obvious, but maybe the same kind of thing should be incorporated in every layer of study of nature.
So that’s not a thing you’re trying to get rid of? That’s the thing you’re trying to integrate at the center of the thing in quantum mechanics, it becomes super obvious, but maybe the same kind of thing should be incorporated in every layer of study of nature.
Adam Frank
Absolutely. That’s exactly it. So one of the things that’s really interesting to me, so we have a project, I’m part of a big project that Chris Fuchs and Jacques Pienaar on QBism. So I’ve been part of that. And what I’ve been amazed by is the language they use. So what’s cool about QBism is it comes from quantum information theory. It’s a pretty modern version of thinking about quantum mechanics. And it’s always about do you have an agent who makes an action on the world? And then the information they get from that action through the experiment, that’s the action on the world. Updates, their priors updates, their Bayesian, that’s why it’s called QBism. Quantum Bayesianism updates how the information they’ve gotten from the world. Now, this turns out to be, it’s kind of the same language that we’re using in a project that’s about the physics of life, where we have a grant from the Templeton Foundation to look at semantic information and the role of semantic information in living systems like cells.
Absolutely. That’s exactly it. So one of the things that’s really interesting to me, so we have a project, I’m part of a big project that Chris Fuchs and Jacques Pienaar on QBism. So I’ve been part of that. And what I’ve been amazed by is the language they use. So what’s cool about QBism is it comes from quantum information theory. It’s a pretty modern version of thinking about quantum mechanics. And it’s always about do you have an agent who makes an action on the world? And then the information they get from that action through the experiment, that’s the action on the world. Updates, their priors updates, their Bayesian, that’s why it’s called QBism. Quantum Bayesianism updates how the information they’ve gotten from the world. Now, this turns out to be, it’s kind of the same language that we’re using in a project that’s about the physics of life, where we have a grant from the Templeton Foundation to look at semantic information and the role of semantic information in living systems like cells.
So we have Shannon information, which is a probability distribution that tells you basically how much surprise there is in a message. Semantic information focuses on meaning, right? Focuses on in a very simple way, just how much of the information that the agent, the critter is getting from the world actually helps it survive. That’s the most basic idea of meaning. We can get all philosophical about meaning, but this is it. Does it help me stay alive or not? And the whole question of agency and autonomy that occurs in this setting of just asking about how do cells move up a chemical gradient to get more food? Kind of has the feel the same sort of architecture as what’s going on in quantum mechanics. So I think what you said is exactly it, how do we bring this sort of recognition? That there’s always us, the agent or life the agent interacting with the world and drawing both giving information and passing information back as a way of doing science, doing hardcore science with experiments, but never forgetting that agency, which also means experience in some sense, is at the center of the whole thing.
Lex Fridman
So you think there could be something like QBism, Quantum Bayesianism that creates a theory, like a Nobel Prize winning theory, sort of hardcore real theories that put the agent at the center.
So you think there could be something like QBism, Quantum Bayesianism that creates a theory, like a Nobel Prize winning theory, sort of hardcore real theories that put the agent at the center.
Adam Frank
Yes. That’s what we’re looking for. I think that is really, that’s the exciting part. And it’s a move, the scientific triumphalist thing says, you understand why people love this? I have these equations. And these equations represent, there’s this platonic ideal that they are, they exist eternally on their own. It’s kind of quasi-religious, right? It’s sort of somehow, look, these equations are the, you’re reading the mind of God, but this other approach to me is just as exciting because what you’re saying is there’s us and the world, they’re inseparable. It’s always us and the world. And what we’re now finding about is this co-creation, this interaction between the agent and the world such that these powerful laws of physics that need an account. In no way am I saying these laws aren’t important. These laws are amazing, but they need an account, but not an account that strips, that turns the experience, turns the agent into just an epiphenomena, that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem as if the agent’s not the most important part of the story.
Yes. That’s what we’re looking for. I think that is really, that’s the exciting part. And it’s a move, the scientific triumphalist thing says, you understand why people love this? I have these equations. And these equations represent, there’s this platonic ideal that they are, they exist eternally on their own. It’s kind of quasi-religious, right? It’s sort of somehow, look, these equations are the, you’re reading the mind of God, but this other approach to me is just as exciting because what you’re saying is there’s us and the world, they’re inseparable. It’s always us and the world. And what we’re now finding about is this co-creation, this interaction between the agent and the world such that these powerful laws of physics that need an account. In no way am I saying these laws aren’t important. These laws are amazing, but they need an account, but not an account that strips, that turns the experience, turns the agent into just an epiphenomena, that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem as if the agent’s not the most important part of the story.
Lex Fridman
So if you pull on this thread and say, there’s a whole discipline born of this, putting the agent as the primary thing in a theory, in a physics theory, is it possible it just breaks the whole thing open? So there’s this whole effort of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics of coming up with a theory of everything. What if these are the tip of the iceberg? What if the agent thing is really important?
So if you pull on this thread and say, there’s a whole discipline born of this, putting the agent as the primary thing in a theory, in a physics theory, is it possible it just breaks the whole thing open? So there’s this whole effort of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics of coming up with a theory of everything. What if these are the tip of the iceberg? What if the agent thing is really important?
Adam Frank
So listen, that would be kind of my dream. I’m not going to be the one to do it because I’m not smart enough to do it. Marcelo and I have for a while have been sort of critical of where foundational physics has been for a while. With string theory, I’ve spent my whole life listening to talks about, “String theory, real soon.” And it’s gotten ever more disconnected from data, observations. There were people talking for a while that it is post-empirical. I always wanted to write a paper or an article that was like, physicists have been smoking their own stash. There’s this way we’ve gotten used to, you have to out-weird the other person, my theory has 38 dimensions. My theory is 22 dimensions, but it’s got psychedelic squirrels in it. And so there’s a problem. I don’t need to tell you there’s a crisis in physics or there’s a crisis in cosmology. Other people have used that. That’s been the headline on scientific American stories.
So listen, that would be kind of my dream. I’m not going to be the one to do it because I’m not smart enough to do it. Marcelo and I have for a while have been sort of critical of where foundational physics has been for a while. With string theory, I’ve spent my whole life listening to talks about, “String theory, real soon.” And it’s gotten ever more disconnected from data, observations. There were people talking for a while that it is post-empirical. I always wanted to write a paper or an article that was like, physicists have been smoking their own stash. There’s this way we’ve gotten used to, you have to out-weird the other person, my theory has 38 dimensions. My theory is 22 dimensions, but it’s got psychedelic squirrels in it. And so there’s a problem. I don’t need to tell you there’s a crisis in physics or there’s a crisis in cosmology. Other people have used that. That’s been the headline on scientific American stories.
So clearly another direction has to be found, and maybe it has nothing to do with this, but I suspect that because so many times the agent or having to deal with the view from the inside or the role of agency. When it comes to time thinking that you can replace the block universe with the actual experience of time. Clocks don’t tell time. We use clocks to tell time. So maybe that even the fundamental nature of time can’t be viewed from the outside, that there’s a new physics theory that is going to come from, that comes from this agential, informational, computational view. I don’t know. But that’s kind of what I think it would be fertile ground to explore.
Nature of time
Lex Fridman
Yeah, time is really interesting one. Time is really important to us humans. What is time?
Yeah, time is really interesting one. Time is really important to us humans. What is time?
Adam Frank
Yeah, right. What is time? So the way we have tended to view it is we’ve taken, this is what, when Husserl talks about the surreptitious substitution, we’ve taken Einstein’s beautiful, powerful, formal system for viewing time, and we substituted that for the actual experience of time. So the block universe, where next Tuesday is already written down in the block universe, the four dimensional universe, all events are already there. Which is very potent for making certain kinds of predictions within the scientific framework. But it is not lived time. And this was pointed out to Einstein, and he eventually recognized it. Very famous meeting between Henri Bergson, who was the most famous philosopher of the early 20th century and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity-
Yeah, right. What is time? So the way we have tended to view it is we’ve taken, this is what, when Husserl talks about the surreptitious substitution, we’ve taken Einstein’s beautiful, powerful, formal system for viewing time, and we substituted that for the actual experience of time. So the block universe, where next Tuesday is already written down in the block universe, the four dimensional universe, all events are already there. Which is very potent for making certain kinds of predictions within the scientific framework. But it is not lived time. And this was pointed out to Einstein, and he eventually recognized it. Very famous meeting between Henri Bergson, who was the most famous philosopher of the early 20th century and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity-
Adam Frank
The 20th century and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity and Berkson, whose whole thing was about time and it was about duration. He wanted to separate the scientific image of time, the map of time from the actual terrain, which he used the word duration like we humans where duration for us is full. It’s stretched out. It’s got a little bit of the past, a little bit of the future, a little bit of the present. Music is the best example, right? You’re hearing music, you’re both already anticipating what’s going to happen and you are remembering what’s going on.
The 20th century and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity and Berkson, whose whole thing was about time and it was about duration. He wanted to separate the scientific image of time, the map of time from the actual terrain, which he used the word duration like we humans where duration for us is full. It’s stretched out. It’s got a little bit of the past, a little bit of the future, a little bit of the present. Music is the best example, right? You’re hearing music, you’re both already anticipating what’s going to happen and you are remembering what’s going on.
There’s a kind of phenomenal structure there, which is different from the representation of time that you have with the formal mathematics. And the way we would look at this is that the problem with the surreptitious substitution, the problem with the blind spot is it says, “Oh, no, no, the formal system is time,” but really the only place time appears is with us, where we’re so having a theory that actually could start with us and then stretch out into the universe rather than imposing this imaginary third-person view back on us. Could, that’s a route towards a different way of approaching the whole problem.
Lex Fridman
I just wonder who is the observer? I mean, define what the agent is in any kind of frame is difficult.
I just wonder who is the observer? I mean, define what the agent is in any kind of frame is difficult.
Adam Frank
Is difficult, but that’s the good work of the science ahead of us. So what happened with this idea of the structural invariance I was talking about? So we start with experience, which is irreducible. There’s no atoms of experience. It’s a whole, and we go through the whole process, which is a communal process, by the way. There’s a philosopher, Robert Crease, who talks about the workshop that started in the 1700s, 1600s, we developed this communal space to work in, sometimes it was literally a physical space, a laboratory where these ideas would be pulled apart, refined, argued over, and then validated. And we want to the next step.
Is difficult, but that’s the good work of the science ahead of us. So what happened with this idea of the structural invariance I was talking about? So we start with experience, which is irreducible. There’s no atoms of experience. It’s a whole, and we go through the whole process, which is a communal process, by the way. There’s a philosopher, Robert Crease, who talks about the workshop that started in the 1700s, 1600s, we developed this communal space to work in, sometimes it was literally a physical space, a laboratory where these ideas would be pulled apart, refined, argued over, and then validated. And we want to the next step.
So this idea of pulling out from experience, these thinner, abstract, structural invariance, the things that we could actually do science with, and it’s kind of like, we call it an ascending spiral of abstraction. So the problem with the way we do things now is we take those abstractions, which came from experience, and then with something like a computational model of consciousness or experience, we think we can put it back in. You literally pulled out these super thin things, these abstractions neglecting experience because that’s the only way to do science. And then you think somehow, oh, I’m going to jam experience back in and have an explanation for experience.
Lex Fridman
So do you think it’s possible to show that something like free will is quote, unquote real if you integrate experience back into into the physics model of the world?
So do you think it’s possible to show that something like free will is quote, unquote real if you integrate experience back into into the physics model of the world?
Adam Frank
What I would say is that free will is a given. And that’s the thing about experience. So one of the things that Whitehead said, I really love this quote. It says, “It’s not the job of either science or philosophy to account for the concrete. It’s the job to account for the abstract.” The concrete, what’s happening between us right now, is just given. It’s presented to us every day. It’s presented to me. If you want an explanation, fine, but the explanation actually doesn’t add anything to it. So that free will in some sense is the nature of being an agent. To be an agent agency and autonomy are sort of the two things that are, they’re equivalent. And so in some sense, to be an agent is to be autonomous. And so then the question really to ask is, can you have an account for agency and autonomy that captures aspects of it’s arising in the world or the way it and the world sort of co-arise.
What I would say is that free will is a given. And that’s the thing about experience. So one of the things that Whitehead said, I really love this quote. It says, “It’s not the job of either science or philosophy to account for the concrete. It’s the job to account for the abstract.” The concrete, what’s happening between us right now, is just given. It’s presented to us every day. It’s presented to me. If you want an explanation, fine, but the explanation actually doesn’t add anything to it. So that free will in some sense is the nature of being an agent. To be an agent agency and autonomy are sort of the two things that are, they’re equivalent. And so in some sense, to be an agent is to be autonomous. And so then the question really to ask is, can you have an account for agency and autonomy that captures aspects of it’s arising in the world or the way it and the world sort of co-arise.
But the idea why we argue about free will often is because we already have this blind spot view that the world is deterministic because of our equations, which themselves, we treat the equations as if they’re more real than experience. And the equations are a paler… They don’t corral experience. They are a thinner representation. As we like to say, “Don’t confuse the map for the terrain.” What’s happening between us right now and all the weirdness of it. That’s the terrain. The map is what I can write down on equations. And then in the workshop, do experiments on. Super powerful, needs an account, but experience overflows that.
Lex Fridman
What if the experience is an illusion? How do we know what if the agency that we experience is an illusion?
What if the experience is an illusion? How do we know what if the agency that we experience is an illusion?
Adam Frank
An illusion looking from where? Because that already requires to take that stance is you’ve already pushed yourself into that third person view. And so what we’re saying is that third person view, which now you’re going to say like, “Oh, I’ve got a whole other set of entities, of ontological entities,” meaning things that I think exist in God’s living room in spite that are independent of me and the community of living things I’m part of.
An illusion looking from where? Because that already requires to take that stance is you’ve already pushed yourself into that third person view. And so what we’re saying is that third person view, which now you’re going to say like, “Oh, I’ve got a whole other set of entities, of ontological entities,” meaning things that I think exist in God’s living room in spite that are independent of me and the community of living things I’m part of.
Lex Fridman
So you’re pushing it elsewhere just like there’s a stack of turtles is probably, if this experience, the human experience is an illusion, maybe there’s an observer for whom it’s not an illusion. So you always have to find an observer somewhere.
So you’re pushing it elsewhere just like there’s a stack of turtles is probably, if this experience, the human experience is an illusion, maybe there’s an observer for whom it’s not an illusion. So you always have to find an observer somewhere.
Adam Frank
And that’s why fundamentally the blind spot, especially the scientific triumphalist part is following a religious impulse. It’s wanting the god’s eye view. And what’s really interesting, and when we think about this and the way this gets talked about, especially publicly, there’s a line of philosophical inquiry that this language gets couched in and it is actually a pretty, it’s only one version of philosophy. So it is pretty much what we call the analytic tradition. But there’s even in Europe or in the Western tradition for Western, what we’ll call western philosophy, there’s phenomenology. And Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which took an entirely different track. They were really interested in the structure of experience. They spent all their time trying to understand, trying to develop a language that could kind of climb into the circle. That is experience, right experience. You’re not going to be able to start with axioms and work your way to it.
And that’s why fundamentally the blind spot, especially the scientific triumphalist part is following a religious impulse. It’s wanting the god’s eye view. And what’s really interesting, and when we think about this and the way this gets talked about, especially publicly, there’s a line of philosophical inquiry that this language gets couched in and it is actually a pretty, it’s only one version of philosophy. So it is pretty much what we call the analytic tradition. But there’s even in Europe or in the Western tradition for Western, what we’ll call western philosophy, there’s phenomenology. And Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which took an entirely different track. They were really interested in the structure of experience. They spent all their time trying to understand, trying to develop a language that could kind of climb into the circle. That is experience, right experience. You’re not going to be able to start with axioms and work your way to it.
It’s given. So you have to kind of jump in and then try and find a language to account for its structure. But then, so that has not been part of this discussion about you’ll never, good luck finding a YouTube video where someone, a famous scientist is talking about science from a phenomenological point of view, even though it’s a huge branch of philosophy. And then you get the philosophies that occurred from other cores of civilization. So there’s the western core out of which comes the Greeks and the Judeo- Christian Islamic tradition. But then you get India and you get Asia and they developed their own. They were highly complex societies that developed their own responses to these questions. And they, for reasons they had contemplative practice. They were very focused on direct, trying to directly probe attention and experience. They asked questions in ways that the West never really did.
Phenomenology kind of started it, but there’s philosophers like Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu. They’re like the Plato and the Aristotle of those philosophies. And they were really focused on experience in the West. I think maybe because we had the Judeo-Christian tradition where we already had this kind of God who was going to be the frame on which you could always point to that frame in the traditions that came from the classical philosophies of India and Asia. They started always with this. They wanted to know about experience. Their whole philosophies and their logic and their argumentation was based on, I’ve got this experience, I can’t get out of this experience. How do I reason from it? So I think there’s a lot of other philosophical traditions that we could draw from. Not slavishly, we don’t all have to become Buddhists to do it, but there are traditions that really tried to work this out in a way that the Western traditions just didn’t.
Lex Fridman
But there’s also the practical fact that it’s difficult to build a logical system on top of experience. It’s difficult to have the rigor of science on top of experience. And so as science advances, we might get better and better. The same is it’s very difficult to have any kind of mathematical or kind of scientific rigor to why complexity emerges from simple rules and simple objects, sort of the Santa Fe questions.
But there’s also the practical fact that it’s difficult to build a logical system on top of experience. It’s difficult to have the rigor of science on top of experience. And so as science advances, we might get better and better. The same is it’s very difficult to have any kind of mathematical or kind of scientific rigor to why complexity emerges from simple rules and simple objects, sort of the Santa Fe questions.
Adam Frank
But I think we can do it. I think there’s aspects of it. I mean, as long as you’re never trying to, “This is what experience is,” I think that’s kind of where you’re never going to have a causal account of experience just given. But you can do lots about, and that’s what the good work is to how do I approach this? How do I approach this in a way that’s rigorous that I can do experiments with also? But so for example, I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about in this is what we’re counting with our semantic information too. Causal closure. Love this idea. The idea that… So we talked about autopoiesis a while back, the idea that living systems, they are self creating and self maintaining. And so the membrane, cell membrane is a great example of this, right? The cell membrane, you can’t have a cell without a cell membrane.
But I think we can do it. I think there’s aspects of it. I mean, as long as you’re never trying to, “This is what experience is,” I think that’s kind of where you’re never going to have a causal account of experience just given. But you can do lots about, and that’s what the good work is to how do I approach this? How do I approach this in a way that’s rigorous that I can do experiments with also? But so for example, I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about in this is what we’re counting with our semantic information too. Causal closure. Love this idea. The idea that… So we talked about autopoiesis a while back, the idea that living systems, they are self creating and self maintaining. And so the membrane, cell membrane is a great example of this, right? The cell membrane, you can’t have a cell without a cell membrane.
The cell membrane lets stuff through, keeps other stuff out. But the cell membrane is part of the processes and it’s a product of the processes that the cell membrane needs, right? In some sense, the cell membrane creates itself. So there’s this strange, it’s always with life, there’s always this strange loop. And so somehow figuring out how to jump into that strange loop is the science that’s ahead of us. And so this idea of causal closure accounting for how the, we talk about downward causation. So reductionism says everything only depends on the microstate. Everything just depends on the atoms. That’s it. If you know the Lagrangian for the standard model, you are done. Of course, in principle, you need God’s computer, but fine. In principle, it could be done. Causal closure, and I was just reading this great paper that sort of argues for this.
There’s ways in which using Epsilon machines and all this machinery from information theory, that you can see ways in which the system can organize itself so that it decouples from the microstates. Now, the macrostate fundamentally no longer needs the microstate for its own description, its own account of the laws, whether that paper is true or not. It’s an example of heading down that road. There’s also Robert Rosen’s work. He was a theoretical biologist who he talked about closure to efficient cause that living systems are organizationally closed, are causally closed so that they don’t depend anymore on the microstate. And he had a proof, which is very contentious. Nobody knows if it’s some argue it’s true, some argue it’s not. But he said that because of this, living systems are not church-turing complete, they cannot be represented as formal systems. So in that way, they’re not axioms, they’re not living systems will not be axioms.
They can only be partially captured by algorithms. Now again, people fight back and forth about whether or not his proof is valid or not. But I’m saying them giving you examples of when you see the blind spot, when you acknowledge the blind spot, it opens up a whole other class of kinds of scientific investigations. The book we thought was going to be really heretical. Obviously most public facing scientists are very sort of in that, especially scientific triumphant. So we were just waiting for the fight. Then the review from science came out and it was totally pro… It was very positive. We’re like, “Oh my God.” Then a review came out in Nature Physics and it was totally positive.
Then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal, kind of criticized, not capitalism, but we criticized all industrial economies for that they had been touched by the blind spots, socialism, communism. It doesn’t matter. These extractive sort of had that sort of view that the is just reducible to resources. The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review. So it feels like there’s actually out there, there is some, among working scientists in particular, there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist view and a recognition that we need to shift something in order to jump past these hurdles that we’ve been arguing about forever and we’re sort of stuck in a vortex.
Lex Fridman
Well, it is. I mean, I think there is a hunger to acknowledge that there’s an elephant in the room, that we’re just removing the agent. Everyone is doing it and it’s like, yeah, yeah, there’s the experience and then there’s the third-person perspective on the world. And so, man, science from, applying scientific rigor from a first-person perspective is very difficult. I mean, it’s fascinating.
Well, it is. I mean, I think there is a hunger to acknowledge that there’s an elephant in the room, that we’re just removing the agent. Everyone is doing it and it’s like, yeah, yeah, there’s the experience and then there’s the third-person perspective on the world. And so, man, science from, applying scientific rigor from a first-person perspective is very difficult. I mean, it’s fascinating.
Adam Frank
I think we can do it. Also, the thing, what’s really interesting is I think it’s not just first-person, first and second, because one idea is that, the idea that, oh, science gives us this objective third-person view. That’s one way of talking about objectivity. There’s a whole other way is that I do the experiment. You do the experiment, we talk to each other, we agree on methods, and we both get the same result. That is a very different way of thinking about objectivity, and it acknowledges that when we talk about agents, agency and individuality are flexible.
I think we can do it. Also, the thing, what’s really interesting is I think it’s not just first-person, first and second, because one idea is that, the idea that, oh, science gives us this objective third-person view. That’s one way of talking about objectivity. There’s a whole other way is that I do the experiment. You do the experiment, we talk to each other, we agree on methods, and we both get the same result. That is a very different way of thinking about objectivity, and it acknowledges that when we talk about agents, agency and individuality are flexible.
So there’s a great paper, speaking of Santa Fe by David Krakauer, where they looked at sort of information, theoretic measures of individuality. And what you find is it’s actually pretty fluid. My liver cell is an individual, but really it’s part of the liver. And my liver is a separate system, but really it’s part of me. So I’m an individual, yay. But actually I’m part of a society and I couldn’t be me without the entire community of say, language users. I wouldn’t even be able to frame any questions. And my community of language users is part of ecosystems that are alive, that I am a part of, a lineage of. This is like Sarah Walker stuff, and then those ecosystems are part of the biosphere. We’re never separable as opposed to this very atomizing, the triumphal, this science view is wants like Boltzmann brains, you’re just a brain floating in the space.
Lex Fridman
There is a fascinating degree to which agency is fluid. You are an individual, but you and I talking is the kind of individual, and then the person listening to this right now is also an individual. I mean, that’s a weird thing too.
There is a fascinating degree to which agency is fluid. You are an individual, but you and I talking is the kind of individual, and then the person listening to this right now is also an individual. I mean, that’s a weird thing too.
Adam Frank
That’s a weird thing, right?
That’s a weird thing, right?
Lex Fridman
Because there’s a broadcast nature too.
Because there’s a broadcast nature too.
Adam Frank
This is why information theoretic. So the idea that we’re pursuing now, which I get really excited about, is this idea of information architecture or organization. Organizational organization. Because physicalism is like everything’s atoms, but Kant recognized, Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism. He recognized that life has a weird organization that would see specifically different from machines. And so this idea that how do we engage with the idea that organization, which is often I can be cast in information theoretic terms or computational terms even. It’s not really quite physical. It’s embodied in physical, in the physical. It has to instantiate in the physical, but it also has this other realm of design, not design like intelligent design, but there’s a… The organization itself is a relationship of constraints and information flow. And I think again, that’s an entirely new interesting way that we might get a very different kind of science that would flow out of that.
This is why information theoretic. So the idea that we’re pursuing now, which I get really excited about, is this idea of information architecture or organization. Organizational organization. Because physicalism is like everything’s atoms, but Kant recognized, Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism. He recognized that life has a weird organization that would see specifically different from machines. And so this idea that how do we engage with the idea that organization, which is often I can be cast in information theoretic terms or computational terms even. It’s not really quite physical. It’s embodied in physical, in the physical. It has to instantiate in the physical, but it also has this other realm of design, not design like intelligent design, but there’s a… The organization itself is a relationship of constraints and information flow. And I think again, that’s an entirely new interesting way that we might get a very different kind of science that would flow out of that.
Cognition
Lex Fridman
So going back to Kant and organism versus machine. So I showed you a couple of legged robots.
So going back to Kant and organism versus machine. So I showed you a couple of legged robots.
Adam Frank
Very cool.
Very cool.
Lex Fridman
Is it possible for machines to have agency?
Is it possible for machines to have agency?
Adam Frank
I would not discount that possibility. I think there’s no reason I would say that it’s impossible that machines could, whatever it manifests that strange loop that we’re talking about that autopoiesis I don’t think there’s a reason to say it can’t happen in silicon. I think whatever, it would be very different from us, the idea that it would be like, oh, it would be just like us. But now it’s instantiated and I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature. I don’t think what we have now, the LLMs are really there, but yeah, I’m not going to say that it’s not possible.
I would not discount that possibility. I think there’s no reason I would say that it’s impossible that machines could, whatever it manifests that strange loop that we’re talking about that autopoiesis I don’t think there’s a reason to say it can’t happen in silicon. I think whatever, it would be very different from us, the idea that it would be like, oh, it would be just like us. But now it’s instantiated and I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature. I don’t think what we have now, the LLMs are really there, but yeah, I’m not going to say that it’s not possible.
Lex Fridman
I wonder how far you can get with imitation, which is essentially what LLMs are doing. So imitating humans, and I wouldn’t discount either the possibility that through imitation you can achieve what you would call consciousness or agency or the ability to have experience. I think for most of us humans to think, oh, that’s just fake. That’s copying. But there’s some degree to which us, we humans are just copying each other. We just are really good imitation machines coming from babies. We were born in this world and we’re just learning to imitate each other. And through the imitation and the tension in the disagreements in the imitations. We gain personality, perspective, all that kind of stuff.
I wonder how far you can get with imitation, which is essentially what LLMs are doing. So imitating humans, and I wouldn’t discount either the possibility that through imitation you can achieve what you would call consciousness or agency or the ability to have experience. I think for most of us humans to think, oh, that’s just fake. That’s copying. But there’s some degree to which us, we humans are just copying each other. We just are really good imitation machines coming from babies. We were born in this world and we’re just learning to imitate each other. And through the imitation and the tension in the disagreements in the imitations. We gain personality, perspective, all that kind of stuff.
Adam Frank
Yeah, it’s possible, right? It’s possible. But I think probably the view I’m advocating would say that one of the most important parts of agency is there’s something called, E-four. The E-four theory of cognition, embodiment, enaction, embedding, and there’s another one, extension. But so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body which is itself part of an environment that is the physical nature of it and of the extension with other living systems as well is essential.
Yeah, it’s possible, right? It’s possible. But I think probably the view I’m advocating would say that one of the most important parts of agency is there’s something called, E-four. The E-four theory of cognition, embodiment, enaction, embedding, and there’s another one, extension. But so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body which is itself part of an environment that is the physical nature of it and of the extension with other living systems as well is essential.
So that’s why I think the LLMs are not going to, it’s not imitation. It’s going to require, this goes to the brain in the VAT thing. I did an article about the brain in the vat, which was really Evans, I was reporting on Evans. Where they did the brain in the VAT argument. But they said, “Look, in the end, actually the only way to actually get a real brain in the VAT is actually to have a brain in a body.” And it could be a robot body, but you still need a brain in the body. So I don’t think LLMs will get there because they can’t. You really need to be embedded in a world, at least that’s the E-four idea.
Lex Fridman
The E-four, the 4E approach to cognition argues that cognition does not occur solely in the head, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. And by way of extra cranial processes and structures, they’re very much in vogue. 4E cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations. This is a paper, but reflecting on two recent collections, this article reviews the four E paradigm with a view to assessing the strengths and weaknesses. It’s fascinating. I mean, yeah, the branches of what is cognition extends far, and it could go real far.
The E-four, the 4E approach to cognition argues that cognition does not occur solely in the head, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. And by way of extra cranial processes and structures, they’re very much in vogue. 4E cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations. This is a paper, but reflecting on two recent collections, this article reviews the four E paradigm with a view to assessing the strengths and weaknesses. It’s fascinating. I mean, yeah, the branches of what is cognition extends far, and it could go real far.
Adam Frank
Right. There’s a great story about an interaction between Jonas Salk, who was very much a reductionist, the great biologist, and Gregory Bateson, who was a cyberneticist, and Bateson always loved to poke people. And he said to Salk, he said, “Where’s your mind?” And Salk went, “Up here,” and Bateson said, “No, no, no, out here.” And what he really meant was this extended idea. It’s not just within your cranium to have experience. Experience in some sense is not a thing you have. It is a thing you do. Almost perform it in a way, which is why both actually having a body, but having the body itself be in a world with other bodies is, from this perspective, is really important. And it’s very attractive to me. And again, if we’re really going to do science with them, we’re going to have to have these ideas crash up against data, crash up against, we can’t just armchair it or couch quarterbacking it, but I think there’s a lot of possibility here. It’s a very radically different way of looking at what we mean by nature.
Right. There’s a great story about an interaction between Jonas Salk, who was very much a reductionist, the great biologist, and Gregory Bateson, who was a cyberneticist, and Bateson always loved to poke people. And he said to Salk, he said, “Where’s your mind?” And Salk went, “Up here,” and Bateson said, “No, no, no, out here.” And what he really meant was this extended idea. It’s not just within your cranium to have experience. Experience in some sense is not a thing you have. It is a thing you do. Almost perform it in a way, which is why both actually having a body, but having the body itself be in a world with other bodies is, from this perspective, is really important. And it’s very attractive to me. And again, if we’re really going to do science with them, we’re going to have to have these ideas crash up against data, crash up against, we can’t just armchair it or couch quarterbacking it, but I think there’s a lot of possibility here. It’s a very radically different way of looking at what we mean by nature.
Mortality
Lex Fridman
What do you make of the fact that this individual observer, you as an individual observer only get a finite amount of time to exist in this world? Does it make you sad?
What do you make of the fact that this individual observer, you as an individual observer only get a finite amount of time to exist in this world? Does it make you sad?
Adam Frank
No, actually it doesn’t make me sad. Okay, so full reveal, I have been doing contemplative practice in the zen tradition for 30 years. I’ve been staring at a wall for 30 years, and it’s taught me a lot. I really value what that practice has given me about the nature of experience. And one of the things it’s taught me is I don’t really matter that very much. This thing I call Adam Frank is really, it’s kind of a construct. There’s this process going on of which I am actually fundamentally, and that’s super cool, but it’s going to go. I don’t know where it came from. It’s going to go, I don’t really need it to, and then who the hell knows? I’m not an advocate for an afterlife, but just that what I love, zen, has this idea of beyond birth and death, and they don’t mean reincarnation. What they mean is, “Dude, you don’t even really understand what life is.” You know what I mean? I’m like this core level of your own experience. So your ideas about what death is are equally ill-formed.
No, actually it doesn’t make me sad. Okay, so full reveal, I have been doing contemplative practice in the zen tradition for 30 years. I’ve been staring at a wall for 30 years, and it’s taught me a lot. I really value what that practice has given me about the nature of experience. And one of the things it’s taught me is I don’t really matter that very much. This thing I call Adam Frank is really, it’s kind of a construct. There’s this process going on of which I am actually fundamentally, and that’s super cool, but it’s going to go. I don’t know where it came from. It’s going to go, I don’t really need it to, and then who the hell knows? I’m not an advocate for an afterlife, but just that what I love, zen, has this idea of beyond birth and death, and they don’t mean reincarnation. What they mean is, “Dude, you don’t even really understand what life is.” You know what I mean? I’m like this core level of your own experience. So your ideas about what death is are equally ill-formed.
The contemplative practice really tries to focus on experience itself. Spend five days at a zen session doing contemplative practice from 7:00 AM. until 9:00 PM, obviously with breaks. And you’ll really get a much deeper understanding of what my own experience is. What is it really like? It forces you to learn how to stabilize your attention because attention is kind of like this thing. It’s usually just like, “Oh, over there. Oh, my foot hurts. Oh, I got to do my taxes. Oh, what’s that guy over there? Why is he wearing those stupid shoes?” And with a contemplative practice, you learn how to stabilize it.
And once you stabilize it, you can now begin to sort of explore the phenomenal nature of it. So what I think I’ve learned from that is kind of whatever, I’m not really kind of real to begin with. The Adam Frank part, the identity, the thing, and the part of me that is real is everything’s coming and going. It’s all coming and going. Well, how could I ever not come and go? And the entire world is just, Buddhism has this idea of co-dependent arising. Nothing exists, nothing has self-nature. Nothing exists by itself. It’s an endless, infinitely connected web.
Lex Fridman
But still, there’s a deliciousness to the individual experience. You get attached to it and it ends and it’s good while it last, and it sucks that it ends. You can just be like, “Ah, well, everything comes and goes,” but I was eating ice cream yesterday. I found this awesome low-carb ice cream called, Delights here in Austin, and it ends. And I was staring at the empty container, and it was-
But still, there’s a deliciousness to the individual experience. You get attached to it and it ends and it’s good while it last, and it sucks that it ends. You can just be like, “Ah, well, everything comes and goes,” but I was eating ice cream yesterday. I found this awesome low-carb ice cream called, Delights here in Austin, and it ends. And I was staring at the empty container, and it was-
Adam Frank
That’s beautiful, man. I love that.
That’s beautiful, man. I love that.
Lex Fridman
You could say, “Yeah, well, that’s how it all is, but…”
You could say, “Yeah, well, that’s how it all is, but…”
Adam Frank
Can I say that what I’ve learned from, because I love your idea of the deliciousness of it. But what I think happens with contemplative practice when it deepens is that you’re not just saying, this is I do koan practice. So this is a tradition in zen that it was established, it was a teaching method that was established a thousand years ago. They’re these book of koans. And every koan, if you’ve ever read Godel, he’s got a whole chapter on koans. They’re kind of non-logical problems that you have to work on. One of my favorite one was, “Stop the sound of the distant temple bell.”
Can I say that what I’ve learned from, because I love your idea of the deliciousness of it. But what I think happens with contemplative practice when it deepens is that you’re not just saying, this is I do koan practice. So this is a tradition in zen that it was established, it was a teaching method that was established a thousand years ago. They’re these book of koans. And every koan, if you’ve ever read Godel, he’s got a whole chapter on koans. They’re kind of non-logical problems that you have to work on. One of my favorite one was, “Stop the sound of the distant temple bell.”
You’re like, “What?” Every time my teacher gives it to him, I’m like, “What are you talking about?” This is the whole zen thing of up is down, but down is up. You must understand this. So your job with these koans is to sit with them, is to sit with them until you realize what the thing is trying to teach you what aspect of experience it’s trying to teach you. So there’s no answer. No. And in fact, actually, you don’t give an answer. You actually usually have to demonstrate. The first time when I did a call on and the guy was like, “Don’t tell me the answer, show me the answer.” I was like, what are you talking about? But after doing these for years now, I’ve kind of learned the language of them. So I could never tell you. If I told you the answer, I could give you a call and tell you the answer. You’d be like, “What?”
It’s not the words, it’s the So your experience of like, yeah, the cup is empty. With a contemplative practice as it deepens over years, it really does take years. Just like anything in math, it took me years to understand the Lagrangians. You kind of come to a deeper understanding with yeah, the words of, it’s not just like, oh, everything changes. You actually feel that movement. You feel it with breath to breath, and it really becomes, sometimes I have this feeling, this is messed up, but of just joy and it’s not connected to anything. That’s what I’ve kind of gotten from practice. It’s just like, yeah, that passage, that infinite passage of moment to moment that is truly the way things are. And it’s okay. It’s not okay because I have a feeling about it. Okay. I want it to be okay. It just is okay. And so really, it’s a pretty awesome thing.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Maybe it’s the genetics, maybe it’s the biochemistry in my brain, but I generally have that joy about experience, amorphous joy. But it seems like, again, maybe it’s my Eastern European roots, but there’s always a melancholy that’s also sitting next to the joy, and I think it always feels like they’re intricately linked. So the melancholy is about, maybe about the finiteness of experience, and the joy is just about the beauty of experience, and they’re just kind of sitting there.
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Maybe it’s the genetics, maybe it’s the biochemistry in my brain, but I generally have that joy about experience, amorphous joy. But it seems like, again, maybe it’s my Eastern European roots, but there’s always a melancholy that’s also sitting next to the joy, and I think it always feels like they’re intricately linked. So the melancholy is about, maybe about the finiteness of experience, and the joy is just about the beauty of experience, and they’re just kind of sitting there.
Adam Frank
Which is cool actually, because I’m also, I come from Eastern, my roots are Eastern European as well, going back, and I get it right, but that’s also the cool thing. I think one of the things is, well, that is what it is. That is what it is. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to manipulate it or move it around or yeah, this is the experience.
Which is cool actually, because I’m also, I come from Eastern, my roots are Eastern European as well, going back, and I get it right, but that’s also the cool thing. I think one of the things is, well, that is what it is. That is what it is. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to manipulate it or move it around or yeah, this is the experience.
Lex Fridman
Can you speak to just the practical nature of sitting there from 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM?
Can you speak to just the practical nature of sitting there from 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM?
Adam Frank
I’m like, what the hell are you doing, bro?
I’m like, what the hell are you doing, bro?
Lex Fridman
What’s powerful? What’s fascinating to you? What have you learned from just the experience of staring at a wall?
What’s powerful? What’s fascinating to you? What have you learned from just the experience of staring at a wall?
Adam Frank
Yeah. Yeah. So not really. I mean, you’re staring. You’re facing a wall, and what you’re doing is you’re just sitting with, there’s different meditative practices, there’s counting breaths. So that’s usually what I do. I sit down and I start counting breaths, and for the first half hour it’s just like, blah, blah, blah. Like I said, I’m thinking about my taxes. I’m thinking about what I got to do later on, yada, yada, yada. First time I ever did a full session, a two-day session, I swear to God, I had Bruce Springsteen’s, Born To Run album track through from the beginning to the end with the pauses. This was back in when there were LPs with the fricking pauses.
Yeah. Yeah. So not really. I mean, you’re staring. You’re facing a wall, and what you’re doing is you’re just sitting with, there’s different meditative practices, there’s counting breaths. So that’s usually what I do. I sit down and I start counting breaths, and for the first half hour it’s just like, blah, blah, blah. Like I said, I’m thinking about my taxes. I’m thinking about what I got to do later on, yada, yada, yada. First time I ever did a full session, a two-day session, I swear to God, I had Bruce Springsteen’s, Born To Run album track through from the beginning to the end with the pauses. This was back in when there were LPs with the fricking pauses.
Lex Fridman
Nice.
Nice.
Adam Frank
My mind was just like, I need to do something. So it literally played the whole album in order.
My mind was just like, I need to do something. So it literally played the whole album in order.
Lex Fridman
That’s pretty cool, actually.
That’s pretty cool, actually.
Adam Frank
Yeah, it was pretty amazing to see because you really do, you see the dynamics of your mind. But what happens is, and this took me a while, I used to hate sitting. I do it, but after a while the mind gets exhausted. That part of the mind, the upper level, the roof brain chatter is just like, there’s nothing else to do. And then you get bored. And now I realize that’s when something interesting is going to happen. You drop down and now it’s a very physical practice. People think you’re just sitting there not thinking or thinking about not thinking. Actually, it becomes a very physical process where you’re really just following the breath, you’re kind of riding the breath and it gets very quiet. And within that quietness, there’s a path. Because obviously there’s been, Buddhism is always not about thinking, but there’s a huge literature.
Yeah, it was pretty amazing to see because you really do, you see the dynamics of your mind. But what happens is, and this took me a while, I used to hate sitting. I do it, but after a while the mind gets exhausted. That part of the mind, the upper level, the roof brain chatter is just like, there’s nothing else to do. And then you get bored. And now I realize that’s when something interesting is going to happen. You drop down and now it’s a very physical practice. People think you’re just sitting there not thinking or thinking about not thinking. Actually, it becomes a very physical process where you’re really just following the breath, you’re kind of riding the breath and it gets very quiet. And within that quietness, there’s a path. Because obviously there’s been, Buddhism is always not about thinking, but there’s a huge literature.
So these guys are always about, don’t think. I’ve written all this stuff, but they’re guideposts. They’re like the finger pointing at the moon. And there’s the idea of first, your mind is usually scattered. Right now, when I walk out, I’m going to go get the Uber and everything. My mind’s going to be all over the place, but with sitting, first, you concentrate the mind so that there’s no more scatter anymore. The thoughts are still happening, but you’re just not there happening up there. You’re not even paying attention to them. And then as time goes on, you unify the mind, which is this very powerful thing where kind of the self drops away and there’s just this presence.
It’s kind of like a raw presence, and that’s often where the joy up wells from, but you sit with whatever, maybe you’re going to sit and maybe you’re going to go through an hour of being bummed out about your mom who died or something. You’re just going to sit with whatever comes up you’re going to make. That’s why the sitting part, you’re making the commitment. I’m going to sit here with whatever comes up, I will not be moved. And then what You come away with it actually over time, it actually changes kind of who you are. I’m still the asshole I was from New Jersey growing up, but I just have more space now for things.
Lex Fridman
Once Jersey, always Jersey.
Once Jersey, always Jersey.
Adam Frank
Always Jersey.
Always Jersey.
Lex Fridman
But I love the Bruce Springsteen is just blasting in your head.
But I love the Bruce Springsteen is just blasting in your head.
Adam Frank
Yeah, that was amazing.
Yeah, that was amazing.
Lex Fridman
Why are we here? What do you think is the purpose, the meaning of human existence?
Why are we here? What do you think is the purpose, the meaning of human existence?
Adam Frank
It’s good that we just had the last conversation because I’m going to give this answer, which is so corny. It’s love, and I’m not messing around. Because really actually, what happens, so within Buddhism, there’s the idea of the Bodhisattva principle. You’re here to help. You’re just here to help, right? Compassion. That’s a really essential part of this path, of the Dharma path. And when I first started, I was like, “I don’t care about compassion. I’m here for knowledge.” I started contemplative practice because of the usual thing I was suffering. The reason everybody comes to things like this, life was hard. I was going through stuff, but I also wanted knowledge. I wanted to understand the foundational nature of reality. So it was like compassion or whatever. But then I found out that you can’t get that. You can’t get those. You can’t go to this level without compassion.
It’s good that we just had the last conversation because I’m going to give this answer, which is so corny. It’s love, and I’m not messing around. Because really actually, what happens, so within Buddhism, there’s the idea of the Bodhisattva principle. You’re here to help. You’re just here to help, right? Compassion. That’s a really essential part of this path, of the Dharma path. And when I first started, I was like, “I don’t care about compassion. I’m here for knowledge.” I started contemplative practice because of the usual thing I was suffering. The reason everybody comes to things like this, life was hard. I was going through stuff, but I also wanted knowledge. I wanted to understand the foundational nature of reality. So it was like compassion or whatever. But then I found out that you can’t get that. You can’t get those. You can’t go to this level without compassion.
Somehow in this process, you realize that it really is about helping all sentient beings. That’s the way they frame, just being here to help. So I know that sounds cornball, but especially for a guy from Jersey, which is the main thing is to get over. Your job is to get over. But that’s really what I found. It is actually kind… And so that joy, the joy, some of that joy is just, it’s like this. One of the things I have when I have really, there’s a kind of experience I’ll have in contemplative practice, which will carry out into the world, which is just this gratitude for the fact that the world gives you everything, and there’s a certain way, just the blue sky and the breath, the world is just giving you itself completely unhindered. It holds nothing back. And yeah, that’s kind of the experience. And then you kind of like, “Oh, I need to be helpful, because who’s not having this experience.”
Lex Fridman
So just love for the world as it is?
So just love for the world as it is?
Adam Frank
Love for the, and all the beings who are suffering. Everybody’s suffering, everybody’s suffering. Your worst political opponent, they’re suffering. And our job is just to try and drop our biases and our stories and see this fundamental level at which life is occurring.
Love for the, and all the beings who are suffering. Everybody’s suffering, everybody’s suffering. Your worst political opponent, they’re suffering. And our job is just to try and drop our biases and our stories and see this fundamental level at which life is occurring.
Lex Fridman
And hopefully there’s many alien civilizations out there going through the same journey, out of suffering, towards love.
And hopefully there’s many alien civilizations out there going through the same journey, out of suffering, towards love.
Adam Frank
That may be a universal thing about what it means to be alive.
That may be a universal thing about what it means to be alive.
Lex Fridman
I hope so.
I hope so.
Adam Frank
I hope so too. Either that or they’re coming to eat us.
I hope so too. Either that or they’re coming to eat us.
Lex Fridman
Especially if they’re a type three civilization.
Especially if they’re a type three civilization.
Adam Frank
That’s right. And they got really big guns.
That’s right. And they got really big guns.
Lex Fridman
Well, this was truly mind-blowing. Fascinating. Just awesome conversation. Adam, thank you for everything you do, and thank you for talking today.
Well, this was truly mind-blowing. Fascinating. Just awesome conversation. Adam, thank you for everything you do, and thank you for talking today.
Adam Frank
Oh, thank you. This was a lot of fun.
Oh, thank you. This was a lot of fun.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Adam Frank. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. “The cosmos is all that is or ever was, or ever will be. Our feeblest, contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Adam Frank. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. “The cosmos is all that is or ever was, or ever will be. Our feeblest, contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #454
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #454 with Saagar Enjeti.
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So what does America take away from that? Every single time, if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was, really, part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression. He’s such an inspirational figure.
I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of FDR, I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had. I think they had a really, really good judgment and I’m not sure how intrinsic their own personal character was to their exploration and thinking about the world.
Actually, JFK might be our best example because he had the best judgment out of anybody in the room as a brand new president in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that.
And I encourage people out there, this is a brutal text, we were forced to read it in graduate school, The Essence of Decision by Graham Allison, I’m so thankful we did. It’s one of the foundations of political science because it lays out theories of how government works.
People really need to understand Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don’t care about you, they don’t even really care about the president. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes a great, shocking event like World War II to change really anything beyond the marginal.
Every once in a while, you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who’s actually able to take peacetime presidency and transform the country, but it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done.
So the question around The Essence of Decision was the theory behind the Cuban Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various different schools of thought, but one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three, the organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then, kind of the great man theory as well.
You and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT-109 and about how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II and how he literally swam miles with a wounded man’s life jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back and he saved him and he ended up on the cover of Life Magazine, he was a war hero.
And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called Why England Slept, which, to this day, is considered a text, which, at the moment, was able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement. I actually have a original copy, it’s one of my most prized possessions.
And from 1939… Because this is a 23-year-old kid, who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy? Turns out he’s a brilliant man.
And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody, so in the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who will succeed him, 26-year-old John F. Kennedy as a journalist, and all three of those presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that’s the story of America right there. It’s kind of amazing.
I’m going to give you one of the most depressing quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius, shout out to The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too because it really made me understand media. “People don’t want to be informed, they want to feel informed.”
In this podcast, we trace out the history of the various ideological movements that led up to the current political moment. In doing so, we mention a large number of amazing books. We’ll put a link to them in the description for those interested to learn more about each topic.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Saagar Enjeti.
The individual level in the United States, there’s a very simple explanation as well, which is that Joe Biden was very old, he was very unpopular, inflation was high. Inflation is one of the highest determiners of people switching their votes and of putting their primacy on that ahead of any other issue at the ballot box. So that’s that.
But I think it’s actually much deeper, at a psychological level, for who America is and what it is. And fundamentally, I think what we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about today is the evolution of the modern left and its collapse in the Kamala Harris candidacy, and eventually, the loss to Donald Trump in the popular vote where, really, is like an apotheosis of several social forces. So we’re going to talk about The Great Awakening or so-called Awokening, which is very important to understanding all of this.
There’s also really Donald Trump himself who is really one of the most unique individual American politicians that we’ve seen in decades. At this point, Donald Trump’s victory makes him the most important and transformative figure in American politics since FDR. And a thought process for the audience is in 2028, there will be an 18-year-old who’s eligible to vote who cannot remember a time when Donald J. Trump was not the central American figure.
And there’s stories in World War II where troops were on the front line, some were 18, 19 years old, FDR died, and they literally said, “Well, who’s the president?” And they said, “Harry Truman, you dumb ass.” And they go, “Who?” They couldn’t conceive of a universe where FDR was not the president of the United States. And Donald Trump, even during the Biden administration, he was the figure. Joe Biden defined his entire candidacy and his legacy around defeating this man, and obviously, he’s failed. We should talk a lot about Joe Biden as well for his own failed theories of the presidency.
So I think at a macro level, it’s easy to understand. At a basic level, inflation, it’s easy to understand. But what I really hope that a lot of people can take away is how fundamentally unique Donald Trump is as a political figure and what he was able to do to realign American politics really forever. In the white working class realignment originally of 2016, the activation, really, of a multiracial kind of working class coalition and of really splitting American lines along a single individual question of did you attend a four-year college degree institution or not?
And this is a crazy thing to say, Donald Trump is one of the most racially depolarizing electoral figures in American history. We lived in 2016 at a time when racial groups really voted in blocks, Latinos, Blacks, whites. There was some, of course, division between the white working class and the white college educated, white collar workers. But by and large, you could pretty fairly say that Asians, Indians, everyone, 80, 90% were going to vote for the Democratic Party, Latinos as well. I’m born here in the state of Texas. George W. Bush shocked people when he won some 40% of the Latino vote. Donald Trump just beat Kamala Harris with Latino men and he ran up the table for young men.
So really, fundamentally, we have witnessed a full realignment in American politics, and that’s a really fundamental problem for the modern left. It’s erased a lot of the conversation around gerrymandering, around the Electoral College, the so-called Electoral College bias towards Republicans. Really, being able to win the popular vote for the first time since 2004 is shocking and landmark achievement by a Republican.
In 2008, I have a book on my shelf and I always look at it to remind myself of how much things can change, James Carville, and it says 40 More Years, How Democrats Will Never Lose An Election Again. 2008, they wrote that book after the Obama coalition and the landslide. And something I love so much about this country, people change their minds all the time.
I was born in 1992, I watched red states go blue. I’ve seen blue states go red. I’ve seen swing states go red or blue. I’ve seen millions of people pick up and move, the greatest internal migration in the United States since World War II. And it’s really inspiring because it’s a really dynamic, interesting place. And I love covering it and I love thinking about it, talking about it, talking to people. It’s awesome.
The problem again that I have is that that is much more a proxy for four-year college degree and for education. And so, one of my favorite books is called Coming Apart by Charles Murray. And that book, really, really underscores how the cultural milieu that people swim in when they attend a four-year college degree and the trajectory of their life, not only on where they move to, who they marry, what type of grocery store they go to, their cultural, what television shows that they watch.
One of my favorite questions from Charles Murray’s is called a Bubble Quiz. I encourage people to go take it by the way. It asks you a question. It’s like what does the word Branson mean to you? And it has a couple of answers. One of them is Branson is Sir Richard Branson. Number two is Branson, Missouri, which is like a country music tourist style destination. Three is, it means nothing. So you are less in a bubble if you say country music. And you’re very much in the bubble if you say Richard Branson. And I remember taking that test for the first time, I go, “Obviously, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic. Like what?” And then, I was like, “Wait.” I’m like, “I’m in the bubble.”
And there are other things in there like can you name various different military ranks? I can because I’m a history nerd, but the vast majority of college educated people don’t know anybody who served in the United States military, they don’t have family members who do… The most popular shows in America are like The Big Bang Theory and NCIS, whereas people in our, probably, cultural milieu, our favorite shows are White Lotus, The Last of Us, this is prestige television with a very small audience, but high income, high education.
So the point is that culture really defines who we are as Americans, where we live. And rural, urban is one way to describe it, but honestly, with the work from home revolution and more rich people and highly educated people moving to more rural suburban or areas they traditionally weren’t able to commute in, that’s changing. And so, really, the internet is everything.
The stuff that you consume on the internet, the stuff that you spend your time doing, type of books you read, whether you read a book at all, frankly, whether you travel to Europe, whether you have a passport, all the things that you value in your life, that is the real cultural divide in America. And I actually think that’s what this revolution of Donald Trump was activating and bringing people to the polls, bringing a lot of those traditional working class voters of all races away from the Democratic Party along the lines of elitism, of sneering, and of a general cultural feeling that these people don’t understand me and my struggles in this life.
And what I mean by that is going to watch a TV show, and just for some reason, there’s like two trans characters. And it’s never particularly explained why, they just are there. Or watching a commercial, and it’s the same thing. Watching, I don’t know, I remember I was watching, I think it was Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It was a terrible movie, by the way. Don’t recommend it. But one of the characters, I think her name was like America and she wore a gay pride flag. Look, many left-wingers would make fun of me for saying these things, but that is obviously a social agenda to the point as in they believe it is deeply acceptable that it’s used by Hollywood and cultural elites who really value those progress in sexual orientation and others and really believe it’s important to, quote-unquote, “showcase it for representation.” So that’s one way that we may encounter, quote-unquote, woke-ism.
But the more important ways, frankly, are the ways that affirmative action, which really has its roots in American society all the way going back to the 1960s, and how those have manifested in our economy and in our understanding of, quote-unquote, “discrimination.” So two books I can recommend, one is called The Origins of Woke, that’s by Richard Hanania. There’s another one, The Age of Entitlement, by Christopher Caldwell. And they make a very strong case, Caldwell in particular, he calls it like a new founding of America, was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it created an entire new legal regime and understanding of race in the American character and how the government was going to enforce that.
And that really ties in with another one of the books that I recommended to you about the origins of Trump by Jim Webb. And Senator Jim Webb, incredible, incredible man. He’s so under appreciated. Intellectual. He was anti-war. And people may remember him from the 2016 primary and they had asked him a question, I don’t exactly remember, about one of his enemies, and he’s like, “Well, one of them was a guy I shot in Vietnam.” And he was running against Hillary.
And that guy, he wrote the book, Born Fighting, I think it’s history of the Scots-Irish people, something like that. And that book really opened my eyes to the way that affirmative action and racial preferences that were playing out through the HR, managerial elite really turned a lot of people within the white working class away from the Democratic Party and felt fundamentally discriminated against by the professional, managerial class.
So there’s a lot of roots to this, The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham. And in terms of the origin of how we got here, but the crystallization of DEI and/or affirmative action, I prefer to use the term affirmative action, in the highest echelons of business. And there became this idea that representation itself was the only thing that mattered. And I think that right around 2014, that really went on steroids, and that’s why it’s not an accident that Donald J. Trump elected in 2016.
I think that the next Democratic nominee will not do that. However, Kamala Harris actually did move as much as she could away from, quote-unquote, “woke,” but she basically was punished for a lot of the sins of both herself from 2019, but a general cultural feeling that her and the people around her do not understand me and not only do not understand me, but have racial preferences or a regime or an understanding that would lead to a, quote-unquote, “equity mindset,” equal outcomes for everybody as opposed to equality of opportunity, which is more of a colorblind philosophy. So I can’t say, I think it’s way too early.
And again, you can not use the word Latinx, but do you still believe in an effective affirmative action regime in terms of how you would run your Department of Justice, in terms of how you view the world, in terms of what you think the real dividing lines in America are? Because I would say that’s still actually kind of a woke mindset, and that’s part of the reason why the term itself doesn’t really mean a whole lot. And we have to get, actually, really specific about what it looks like in operations.
In operation, it means affirmative action, it means the NASDAQ passing some law that if you want to go public or something, that you have to have a woman and a person of color on your board. This is a blatant and extraordinary, look, racialism that they’ve enshrined in their bylaws. So you can get rid of ESG, that’s great, you can get rid of DEI, I think that’s great, but it’s really about a mindset and a view of the world, and I don’t think that’s going anywhere.
But in America, fundamentally, we really believe that, no matter where you are from, that you come here, and basically, within a generation, especially if you migrate here legally and you integrate, that you leave a lot of that stuff behind. And the story, the American dream that is ingrained in so many of us is, one, that really does not mesh well with any sort of racial preference regime or anything that’s not meritocratic.
And I will give the left-wingers some credit in the idea that meritocracy itself could have preference for people who have privileged backgrounds, I think that’s true. And so, the way I would like to see it is to increase everybody’s equality of opportunity to make sure that they all have a chance at, quote-unquote, “willing out the American dream.” But that doesn’t erase meritocracy, hard work, and many of the other things that we associate with the American character, with the American frontier.
So these are two ideologies which are really at odds. In a lot of ways, woke-ism, racialism and all this is a third world ideology. It’s one that’s very prevalent in Europe and all across Asia, but it doesn’t mix well here, and it shouldn’t. And I’m really glad that America feels the same way.
So there’s the principles of fierce individualism, the principles of a deep distrust of government, the elites, the authorities, bottom-up governance, over 2,000 years of a military tradition. They made up 40% of the Revolutionary War Army and produced numerous military leaders including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, and a bunch of presidents, some of the more gangster presidents, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Just the whole cultural legacy of country music.
And the reason I recommend that book is if you read that book and you understand then how exactly could this group of white working class voters go from 2012 voting for a man named Barack Hussein Obama to Donald J. Trump? It makes perfect sense if you combine it with a lot of the stuff I’m talking about here, about affirmative action, about distrust of the elites, about feeling as if institutions are not seeing through to you and specifically also not valuing your contribution to American history, and in some cases actively looking down.
I’m glad you pointed out not only their role in the Revolutionary War, but in the Civil War as well, and just how much of a contribution culturally really that we owe them for the groundwork that so many of us who came later could build upon and adopt some of their own ideas and their culture as our own. It’s one of the things that makes America great.
And JD, to his credit, talks about Scots-Irish heritage, about Appalachia and the legacy of what that culture looks like today and how a lot of these people voted for Donald Trump. But we got to give credit to Jim Webb who wrote the history of these people and taught me and you about their original fight against the oppressors in Scotland and Ireland and their militant spirit and how they were able to bring that over here. And they got their due in Andrew Jackson and some of our other populist presidents who set us up on the road to Donald Trump to where we are today.
One of my friends went back and dug up the email that we originally sent him, just like, “Hey, do you want to meet up?” And he was like, “Sure.” I was watching on television. The first time that it really hit me, I was like, whoa. It was like, name in a history book is whenever he became the vice presidential nominee. I was watching him on TV and the confetti was falling and he was waving with his wife, and I was like, “Wow, that’s it.” You’re in the history books now forever, especially now as the literal Vice President-elect of the US.
But his own evolution is actually a fascinating story for us too because I think a lot of the time I’ve spent right now is a lot of what I’m giving right now are 2016 kind of takes about why Trump won that time. But we just spent a lot of time on how Donald Trump won this election and what happened, some of the failures of the Biden administration, some of the payback for the Great Awokening. But also, if you look at the evolution of JD Vance, this is a person who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. And not a lot of people pay attention to this, but if you read Hillbilly Elegy, JD was much more of a traditional conservative at that time.
He was citing a report, I think the famous passage is about payday loans and why they’re good or something like that. I don’t know his position today, but I would assume that he’s probably changed that. But the point is that his ideological evolution from watching somebody who really was more of a traditional Republican with a deep empathy for the white working class than eventually become a champion and a disciple of Donald Trump, and to believe that he himself was the vehicle for accomplishing and bettering the United States, but specifically for working class Americans really of all stripes. And that story is really one of the rise of the modern left as it exists as a political project, as an ideology. It’s also one of the Republican Party which coalesced now with Donald Trump as a legitimate figure and as the single bulwark against cultural leftism and elitism that eventually was normalized to the point that majority of Americans decided to vote for him in 2024.
So Joe Biden has been the same person for his entire political career. He is a basically C student who thinks he’s an A student. The chip on his shoulder against the elites has played to his benefit in his original election to the United States Senate through his entire career as a United States Senator, where he always wanted to be the star and the center of attention and to his 1988 presidential campaign. And one of the most fascinating things about Biden and watching him age is watching him become even more of what he already was.
And so, a book recommendation, it’s called What It Takes, and it was written in 1988, and there’s actually a long chapter on Joe Biden and about the plagiarism scandal. One of the things that comes across is his sheer arrogance and belief in himself as to why he should be the center of attention.
Now, the reason I’m laying all this out is the arrogance of Joe Biden, the individual and his character is fundamentally the reason that his presidency went awry. This is a person who was elected in 2020, really because of a feeling of chaos of Donald Trump, of we need normalcy, decides to come into the office, portrays himself as a, quote-unquote, “transitional president,” slowly begins to lose a lot of his faculties and then surrounds himself with sycophants, the same ones who have been around him for so long that he had no single input into his life to tell him that he needed to stop and he needed to drop out of the race until it became truly undeniable to the vast majority of the American people.
And that’s why I’m trying to keep it as him as an individual, as a president, because we could separate him from some of his accomplishments and the things that happened on… Some of them I support, some I don’t, but generally, a lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the CHIPS Act. A lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the Build Back Better bill or whatever his Lina Khan antitrust policy. They’re going to look back on him and they’re going to remember high inflation. They’re going to remember somebody who fundamentally never was up to the job in the sense that, again, book recommendation Freedom From Fear by David Kennedy is about the Roosevelt years.
And one of the most important things people don’t understand is the New Deal didn’t really work in the way that a lot of people wanted it to. There was still high unemployment, there was still a lot of suffering, but you know what changed? They felt that they had a vigorous commander in chief who was doing everything in his power to attack the problems of the everyday American. So even though things didn’t even materially change, the vigor, that’s a term that was often associated with John F. Kennedy, he had vigor, in the Massachusetts accent. We had this young vibrant president in 1960, and he was running around and he wanted to convince us that he was working every single day tirelessly. And when you have an 80-year-old man who is simply just eating ice cream and going to the beach while people’s grocery prices and all these things go up-
That is fundamentally part of the reason why the Democrats lost the election and also why I think that he missed his moment in such a dramatic way. And he had the opportunity, he could have done it if he wanted to, but maybe 20 years ago. But the truth is that his own narcissism, his own misplaced belief in himself and his own accidental rise to the presidency ended up in his downfall.
And it’s amazing because again, if we look back to his original campaign speech 2019, why I’m running for president, it was Charlottesville, and he said, “I want to defeat Donald Trump forever and I want to make sure that he never gets back in the White House again.” By his own metric he did fail. It was the only thing he wanted to do, and he failed from.
But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place. We’ve had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House, and he was a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has fireside chats. He’s passing legislation, but more importantly, so he tries various different programs.
Then they get ruled unconstitutional. He tries even more. What does America take away from that? Every single time if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was a really part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression. He’s such an inspirational figure. He really is.
And people think of him for World War II, of course, we can spend forever on that. But in my opinion, the early years are not studied enough. 33 to 37 is one of the most remarkable periods in American history. We were not ruled by a president. We were ruled by a king, by a monarch. And people liked it. He was a dictator and he was a good one.
Every night, you’re not spending it with your wife. You’re spending it at dinner with potential donors, with friends, with people who can connect you. Even after you get elected, that’s even moreso now you got to raise money and now you’re onto the next thing. Now you want to get your political thing through. You’re going to spend all your time on your phone. You and your staff are going to be more like this.
Your entire life revolves around your career. It’s honestly, you need an insane level of narcissism to do it because you have to believe that you are better than everybody else, which is already pretty crazy. And not only that, your own personal characteristics and foibles lead you to the pursuit of this office and to the pursuit of the idolatry of the self and everything around you.
There’s a famous story of Lady Bird Johnson after Johnson becomes the president and he’s talking to the White House Butler. She was like, “Everything in this house revolves around my husband. Whatever’s left goes to the girls,” her two children, “And I’ll take the scraps.” Everything revolved around Johnson’s political career and his daughters, when they’re honest, because they like to paper over some of the things that happened under him, but they didn’t spend any time with him.
Saturday morning was for breakfast with Richard Russell, I forget. These are all in the Robert A. Caro books. Sunday was for Rayburn. There was no time for his kids. That’s what it was. And by the way, he’s one of the greatest politicians to ever live. But he also died from a massive heart attack and he was a deeply sad and depressed individual.
And he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that. But how did he arrive to good judgment? Some of it certainly was his character, and we can go again though into his laundry list of that. But most of it was around being with his father, seeing some of the mistakes that he would make. And he was also had a deeply inquisitive mind and he experienced World War II at the personal level after PT 109.
Look, I get it. I actually could steal, man. The response to what I’m saying is judgment is not divisible from personal character, but just because I know a lot of politicians and I’ve read enough with the really great ones, the people who I revere the most, there’s really bad personal stuff basically every single time.
Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don’t care about you. They don’t even really care about the president. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes a great shocking event like World War II to change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who’s actually able to take peacetime presidency and transform the country, but it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done.
The question around the essence of decision was the theory behind the Cuban Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various different schools of thought. But one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three, the organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of The Great Man Theory as well. you and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT 109 and about how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II as this, I think it was a First Lieutenant or something like that. And how he literally swam miles with a wounded man’s life jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back, and he saved him and he ended up on the cover of Life Magazine and he was a war hero. And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called Why England Slept, which to this day is considered a text, which at the moment was able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement.
I actually have a original copy is one of my most prized possessions. And from 1939, because this is a 23-year-old kid, who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy? Turns out he’s a brilliant man. And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody. In the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general, who will succeed him. 26-year-old John F. Kennedy as a journalist, some shit head journalists on the side, and all three of those presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that’s the story of America right there. It’s kind of amazing. I loved people to say that because you never know about who will end up rising to power.
At a very intuitive level, a lot of people can understand that, and then they can rationalize, while there are picks that Donald Trump has brought into his White House, people like Mike Waltz and others that have espoused views that are directly at odds with a “anti-neocon anti-Liz Cheney agenda”. Now, Trump’s theory of this is that he likes to have “psychopaths” like John Bolton in the room with him while he’s sitting across from Kim Jong Un because it gets scared.
What I think Trump never understood when he was president, and I honestly question if he still does now, is those two theories that you laid out, which are not about the rational interest as the government is one model, but the bureaucratic theory and the organizational theory of politics. And because what Trump I don’t think quite gets is that there are 99% of the decisions that get made in government never reached the president’s desk. One of the most important Obama quotes ever is, “By the time it gets to my desk, nobody else can solve it. All the problems here are hard. All the problems here don’t have an answer. That’s why I have to make the call.”
The theory that Trump has that you can have people in there who are, let’s say warmongers, neocons or whatever, who don’t necessarily agree with you, is that when push comes to shove at the most important decisions, that I’ll still be able to rein those people in as an influence. Here’s the issue. Let’s say for Mike Waltz, who’s going to be the National Security Advisor, a lot of people don’t really understand there’s this theory of national security advisor where you call me into your office and you’re the president and you’re like, “Hey, what do we think about Iran?” I’m like, “I think you should do X, Y, and Z.”
No, that’s not how it works. The national security advisor’s job is to coordinate the inter-agency process. His job is to actually convene meetings, him and his staff, where in the situation room, CIA, state Department, SECDEF, others before the POTUS even walks in, we have options. We’re like, “Hey, Russia just invaded Ukraine. Weed a package of options. Those packages of options are concede of three things. We’re going to have one group, we’re going to call it the dovish option. Two, we’re going to call it the middle ground. Three, the hardcore package.”
Trump walks in, this is how it’s supposed to work. Trump walks in and he goes, “Okay, Russia invaded Ukraine. What do we do?” “Mr. President, we’ve prepared three options for you. We got one, two, and three.” Now, who has the power? Is it Trump when he picks one, two, or three? Or is the man who decides what’s even in option one, two, and three? That is the part where Trump needs to really understand how these things happen.
And I watched this happen to him in his first administration. He hired a guy, Mike Flynn, who was his national security advisor. You could say a lot about Flynn, but him and Trump were at least like this on foreign policy. Flynn gets outed because what I would call an FBI coup, whatever. 33 days, he’s out as a national security advisor, H.R McMaster, he’s got a nice shiny uniform, four star, all of this. McMaster doesn’t agree with Donald Trump at all. And so Trump says, “I ran on pulling out of Afghanistan, I want to get out of Afghanistan.” They’re like, “Yeah, we’ll get out of Afghanistan, but before we get out, we got to go back in.” As in we need more troops in there. And he’s like, “Oh, okay.” It’s like all this and proves a plan and effectively gives a speech in 2017 where he ends up escalating and increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan. And it’s only until February, 2020 that he gets to sign a deal, the Taliban peace deal, which in my opinion, he should have done in 2017.
But the reason why that happened was because of that organizational theory, of that bureaucratic politics theory where H.R McMaster is able to guide the inter-agency process, bring the uniform recommendations of the joint chiefs of staff and others to give Donald Trump no option but to say, “We must put troops.” Another example of this is a book called Obama’s War by Bob Woodward. I highly encourage people to read this book because this book talks about how Obama comes into the White House in 2009 and he says, “I want to get out of Iraq and I don’t want to increase… I want to fight the Good War in Afghanistan.” Obama’s a thoughtful guy, too thoughtful actually. And so he sits there and he’s working out his opinions. And what he starts to watch is that very slowly his options began to narrow because strategic leaks start to come out from the White House situation room about what we should do in Afghanistan.
And pretty soon David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal and the entire national security apparatus has Obama pegged where he basically politically at the time decides to take the advantage position of increasing troops in Afghanistan, but then tries to have it both ways by saying, “But in two years, we’re going to withdraw.” That book really demonstrates how the deep state can completely remove any of your options to be able to move by presenting you with ones which you don’t even want, and then making it politically completely infeasible to travel down the extreme directions.
That’s why when Trump says things like, “I want to get out of Syria,” that doesn’t compute up here for the Pentagon. Because first of all, if I even asked you how many troops we have in Syria, and you could go on the DOD website, it’ll tell you a number. The number’s bullshit because the way that they do it is if you’re only there for 179 days, you don’t count as active, military contracts. The real numbers, let’s say five times.
And so Trump would be like, “Hey, I want to get out of Syria.” They’re like, “Yeah, we’ll do it. Six months, we need six months.” And after six months ago, he goes, “So, are we out of Syria yet?” And they’re like, “No. Well, we got to wrap this up. We got this base, we got that, and we have this important mission.” And next thing you know, you’re out of office and it’s over. That there’s all these things which I don’t think he quite understands. I know that some of the people around him who disagree with these picks do is the reason why these picks really matter, it’s not only are the voices in the situation room for the really, really high profile stuff, it’s where all little things to never get to that president’s desk of which can shape extraordinary policy.
And I’ll give you the best example. There was never a decision by FDR as President of the United States to oil embargo Japan. One, which he thought about as deeply as you and I would want. It was a decision made within the State Department. It was a decision that was made by some of his advisors. I think he eventually signed off on it. It was a conscious choice, but it was not one which ever was understood the implications that by doing that, we invite a potential response like Pearl Harbor. So think about what the organizational bureaucratic model can tell us about the extraordinary blowback that we can get and why we want people with great judgment all the way up and down the entire national security chain in the White House.
Also, I just realized I did not talk about immigration, which is so insane. One of the reasons Donald Trump won in 2024, of course, was because of the massive change to the immigration status quo. The truth is is that it may actually be second to inflation in terms of the reason that Trump did win the presidency was because Joe Biden fundamentally changed the immigration status quo in this country. That was another thing about the Scots-Irish people and others that we need to understand is that when government machinery and elitism and liberalism appears to be more concerned about people who are coming here in a disorderly and illegal process and about their rights and their ability to “pursue the American dream,” while the American dream is dying for the native-born population, that is a huge reason why people are turning against mass immigration. Historically as well, my friend, Reihan Salam, wrote a book called Melting Pot or Civil War? And one of the most important parts about that book is the history of mass migration to the United States.
If we think about the transition from Scots-Irish America to the opening of America to the Irish and to mass European immigration, what a lot of people don’t realize is it caused a ton of problems. There were mass movements at the time, the no nothings and others in the 1860s who rose up against mass European migration. They were particularly concerned about Catholicism as the religion of a lot of the new immigrants.
But really what it was is about the changing of the American character by people who are not have the same traditions, values and skills as the native-born population. And their understanding of what they’re owed and their role in American society is very different from the way that people previously had. One of the most tumultuous periods of US politics was actually during the resolution of the immigration question where we had massive waves of foreign-born population come to the United States. We had them integrated, luckily actually at the time with the Industrial Revolution. So we actually did have jobs for them.
One of the problems is that today in the United States, we have one of the highest levels of foreign-born population than ever before, actually since that time in the early 1900s. But we have all of the same attendant problems. But even worse is we don’t live in an industrial economy anymore. We live in a predominantly service-based economy that has long moved past manufacturing.
Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t bring some of that back, but the truth is that manufacturing today is not what it was to work in a steel mill in 1875. I think we can all be reasonable and we can agree on that. And part of the problems with extremely high levels of foreign-born population, particularly unskilled, and the vast majority of the people who are coming here and who are claiming asylum are doing so under fraudulent purposes. They’re doing so because they are economic migrants and they’re abusing asylum law to basically gain entrance to the United States without going through a process of application or of merit. And this has all of its traces back to 1965 where the Immigration Naturalization Act of 1965 really reversed and changed the status quo of immigration from the 1920s to 1960, which really shut down levels of immigration to the United States. In my opinion, it was one of the most important things that ever happened. And one of the reasons why is it forced and caused integration. It also forced by slowing down the increase in the number of foreign-born population, it redeveloped an American character and an understanding that was more homogenous and was the ability for you and me to understand despite the difference in our background.
If you accelerate and you continue this trend of the very high foreign-born unskilled population, you unfortunately are basically creating a mass… It’s basically it’s a non-citizen population of illegal immigrants, people who are not as skilled. I think I read 27% of the people who’ve come under Joe Biden illegally don’t even have a college degree. That means that we are lucky if they’re even literate in Spanish, let alone English. So there are major problems about integrating that type of person. Even in the past, whenever we had a mass industrial economy, now imagine today the amount of strain that would put on social services if mass citizenship happened to that population would be extraordinary.
I don’t think it’s a good idea, but even if we were to do so, we would still need to pair it with a dramatic change. And part of the problem right now is I don’t think a lot of people understand that immigration system. The immigration system in the United States, effectively they call it family-based migration. I call it chain migration. Chain migration is the term which implies that let’s say you come over here and you get your green card. You can use sponsorship and others by gaming the quota system to get your cousin or whatever to be able to come. The problem with that is who is your cousin? Is he a plumber? Is he a coder? That doesn’t actually matter because he’s your cousin si he actually has preference.
The way that it should work is it should be nobody cares if he’s your cousin. What does he do? What does she do? What is she going to bring to this country? All immigration in the United States, in my opinion, should be net positive without doing fake statistics about, “Oh, they actually increased the GDP or whatever.” It’s like we need a merit-based immigration system. We are the largest country in the world and one of the only Western countries in the world that does not have a merit-based points-based immigration system like Australia and, or Canada.
And I mean, I get it because a lot of people did come to this country under non-merit-based purposes, so they’re really reluctant to let that go. But I do think that Biden, by changing the immigration status quo and by basically just allowing tens of millions, potentially tens of millions, at the very least 12 million new entrants to come to the US under these pretenses of complete disorder and of no conduct, really broke a lot of people’s understanding and even mercy in that regard. And so that was obviously a massive part of Trump’s victory.
Czar in and of itself is frankly a very flawed position in the White House, and it’s one that I really wish we would move away from. I understand why we do it. It’s basically to do a national security advisor inter-agency convener to accomplish certain goals. That said, there is a person, Stephen Miller, who will be in the White House, the Deputy White House chief of staff who has well-founded beliefs, experience in government and rock solid ideology on this, which I think would also give him the ability to work with Homan to pull that off.
That said, a corollary to this, and frankly this is the one I’m the most mystified yet, is Kristi Noem as the Department of Homeland Security Secretary. Let me just lay this out for people because people don’t know what this is. The Department of Homeland Security, 90% of the time the way you’re going to interact with them is TSA. You don’t think about it. But people don’t know. The Department of Homeland Security is one of the largest law enforcement if maybe the largest law enforcement agency in the world. It’s gigantic. You have extraordinary statutory power to be able to prove investigations. You have border patrol, ICE, TSA, CBP, all these other agencies that report up to you. But most importantly for this, you will be the public face of mass deportation.
I was there in the White House briefing room last time around when Kirstjen Nielsen, who was the DHS secretary under Donald Trump, and specifically the one who enforced child separation for a limited period of time. She was a smart woman. She has long experience in government. And honestly, she melted under the criticism. Kirsti Noem is the governor of South Dakota. I mean, that’s great. You have a little bit of executive experience, but to be honest, I mean you have no law enforcement background. You have no, frankly, with understanding of what it is going to be like to be the secretary of one of the most controversial programs in modern American history.
You have to go on television and defend that every single day, a literal job requirement under Donald Trump. And you will have to have extraordinary command of the facts. You have to have a very high intellect. You have to have the ability to really break through. And I mean, we all watch how she handled that situation with her dog and her interviews. And that does not give me confidence that she will be able to do all that well in the position.
The thing is that you need to be able to have extraordinary oversight. You need a great team with you. You need to make sure that everything is being done by the book. The way that the media is being handled is that you throw every question back in their face and you say, “Well, you either talk about crime or you talk about the enforceability of the law, the necessity.” I mean, I just I think articulated a very coherent case for why we need much less high levels of immigration to the United States. And I am the son of people who immigrated to this country.
But one of the favorite phrases I heard from this, from a guy named Mark Corcoran, who’s a center for immigration studies, is, “We don’t make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandparents. We make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandchildren.” And that is an extraordinary and good way to put it. And in fact, I would say it’s a triumph of the American system that somebody whose family benefited from the immigration regime and was able to come here. My parents had PhDs, came here legally, applied, spent thousands of dollars through the process. Can arrive at the conclusion that actually we need to care about all of our fellow American citizens. I’m not talking about other Indians or whatever. I’m talking about all of us. I care about everybody who is here in this country. But fundamentally, that will mean that we are going to have to exclude some people from the US.
And another thing that the open borders people don’t ever really grapple with is that even within their own framework, it makes no sense. for example, a common left-wing talking point is that it’s America’s fault that El Salvador and Honduras and Central America is fucked up. And so because of that, we have a responsibility to take all those people in because our fault. Or Haiti, right? But if you think about it, America is responsible, and I’m just being honest, for destroying and ruining a lot of countries. They just don’t benefit from the geographic ability to walk to the United States.
I mean, if we’re doing grievance politics, Iraqis have way more of a claim to be able to come here than anybody from El Salvador who’s talking about something that happened in 1982. Within its own logic, it doesn’t make any sense. Even under the-
One of the things that whenever you visit India and you see a country with over a billion people, you’re like, “Holy shit. This is crazy,” and you understand both the sheer numbers of the amount of people involved, and also, there is nothing in the world you could ever do to solve all problems for everybody. It’s a very complex and dynamic problem, and it’s really nice to be bleeding heart and to say, “Oh, well, we have responsibility to this and to all mankind and all that,” but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with the nation state. It doesn’t work with the sovereign nation. We’re the luckiest people in the history of the world to live here in this country, and you need to protect it and protecting it requires really thinking about the fundamentals of immigration itself and not telling us stories.
There’s a famous moment from the Trump White House where Jim Acosta, CNN white House correspondent, got into it with Stephen Miller, who will be the current deputy chief, and he was like, “What do you say,” something along the lines, “to people who say you’re violating that quote on the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me you’re tired, you’re poor, you’re hungry,’?” all of that,” the Emma Lazarus quote. And Stephen very logically was like, “What level of immigration comports with the Emma Lazarus quote? Is it 200,000 people a year? Is it 300? Is it 1 million? Is it 1.5 million?”
And that’s such a great way of putting it because there is no limiting principle on Emma Lazarus quote. There is, when you start talking, honestly, you’re like, “Okay. We live in X, Y, and Z society with X, Y, and Z GDP. People who are coming here should be able to benefit for themselves and us not rely on welfare, not be people who we have to take care of after because we have our own problems here right now and who are the population and the types of people that we can study and look at who will be able to benefit, and based on that, yeah, immigration is great,” but there are a lot of economic, legal and societal reasons for why you definitely don’t want the current level.
But another thing is even if we turn the switch and we still let in 1,000,005 people a year under the chain family-based migration, I think it would be a colossal mistake because it’s not rooted in the idea that people who are coming to America are explicitly doing so at the benefit of America. It’s doing so based on the familial connections of people who already gamed the immigration system to be able to come here.
I have a lot of family in India and I love them, and some of them are actually very talented and qualified. If they wanted to come here, I think they should be able to apply on their own merit and that should have nothing to do with their familial status of the fact that I’m a US citizen.
The point about assimilation is twofold. One is that you should have the capacity to inherit the understanding of the American character that has nothing to do with race, and that’s so unique that I can sit here as a child of people from India and has such a deep appreciation for the Scots Irish. I consider myself American first, and one of the things that I really love about that is that I have no historical relationship to anybody who fought in the Civil War, but I feel such kinship with a lot of the people who did and reading the memoirs and the ideas of those that did because that same mindset of the victors and the values that they were able to instill in the country for 150 years later gives me the ability to connect to them. And that’s such an incredible victory on their part and that’s such a unique thing.
In almost every other country in the world, in China and India or wherever, you’re kind of like what you are. You’re a Hindu, you’re a Jew, you’re a Han Chinese, you’re a Uyghur or you’re Tibetan, something like that. You’re born into it. But really here, it was one of the only places in the world where you can really connect to that story and that spirit and the compounding effect of all of these different people who have come to America, and that is a celebration of immigration as an idea.
But immigration is also a discrete policy, and that policy was really screwed up by the Biden administration. And so we can celebrate the idea and also pursue a policy for all of the people in the US, our citizens to actually be able to benefit. And look, it’s going to be messy, and honestly, I still don’t know yet if Trump will be able to pursue actual mass deportation just because I think that I’m not sure the public is ready for it. I do support mass deportation. I don’t know if the public is ready for it. I think, I don’t know. I’ll have to see because there’s a lot of different ways that you can do it.
There’s mandatory E-Verify, which requires businesses to basically verify you’re a US citizen or you’re here legally whenever they employ you, which is not the law of the land currently, which is crazy, by the way. You can cut off or tax remittance payments, which are payments that are sent back to other countries like Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. Again, illustrating my economic migrant point. There are a lot of various different ways where you can just make it more difficult to be illegally here in the US so people will self-deport, but if he does pursue real mass deportation, that will be a flashpoint in America.
The truth is is America right now is built on cheap labor. It’s not fair to the consumer, it’s not fair to the immigrants, the illegal immigrants themselves, and it’s not fair to the natural born citizen. The natural born citizen has his wages suppressed for competition by tens of millions of people who are willing to work at lower wages. They have to compete for housing, for social services. I mean, just even basic stuff at a societal level, it’s not fair to them. It’s definitely not fair to the other person because, I mean, whenever people say who’s going to build your houses or whatever, you’re endorsing this quasi-legal system where uninsured laborers from Mexico, they have no guarantee of wages, they’re getting paid cash under the table, they are living 10 to a room, they’re sending Mexican remittance payments back just so that their children can eat. That’s not really fair to that person either.
So that’s the point. The point is is that it will lead to a lot of social upheaval, but this gets to my Kristi Noem point as well is you need to be able to articulate a lot of what I just said here because if you don’t, it’s going to go south real quick.
One of the things they always say there, “Oh, they’re law-abiding, they’re great people,” and all that. I agree. Okay? By and large, I’m not saying these are bad people, but I am saying if they’re not bad and they’re law-abiding and they’re citizens and thoughtful and all that, they can fix their own countries and they did in El Salvador. That’s the perfect example.
Look at the dramatic drop in their crime rate. Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in all of South America. That is proof positive that you can change things around despite perhaps the legacy of US intervention. So to just say this idea that because it’s America’s fault that they’re screwed up, it takes agency away from them.
Another really key part of this dishonesty, this really gets to Springfield and the whole Haitian thing because everybody, beyond the eating cats and dogs, everybody does not even acknowledge because when they’re like, “The Haitians are here legally,” they need to actually think about the program. The program is called TPS. So let me explain that. TPS is called Temporary Protected Status. Note, what’s the first word on that? Temporary. What does that mean? TPS was developed under a regime in which let’s say that there was a catastrophic … I think this is a real example. I think there was a volcano or an earthquake or something where people were granted TPS to come to the United States, and the idea was they were going to go back after it was safe. They just never went back.
There are children born in the United States today who are adults, who are the descendants of people who are still living in the US under TPS. That’s a perfect example of what Vivek says is dishonest. You can’t mass de facto legalize people by saying that they’re here temporarily because of a program or because of something that happened in their home country when the reality is that for all intents and purposes, we are acknowledging them as full legal migrants. So even the term migrant to these Haitians in Springfield makes no sense because they’re supposed to be here under TPS. Migrant implies permanency.
So the language is all dishonest and people don’t want to tell you about the things I just said about chain migration. The vast majority of Americans don’t even know how the immigration system works. They don’t understand what I just said about TPS. They don’t really understand the insanity of asylum law, where you can just literally throw up your hands and say, “I fear for my life,” and you get to live here for four or five years before your court date even happens, and by that time, you get a work permit or whatever, you can get housing, like you just said, in substandard conditions, and you can kind of just play the game and wait before a deportation order comes, and even if it does, you never have to leave because there’s no ice agent or whatever who’s going to enforce it. So the whole system is nuts right now, and we need complete systematic reform that burns it all to the ground.
And in fact, a lot of people were bringing children here who weren’t even theirs, who they weren’t even related to or couldn’t even prove it, were bringing them to get around the prosecution for illegal entry. So I’m not defending child separation. I think it was horrible or whatever, but if I gave you the context, it does seem like a very tricky problem in terms of do we enforce the law or not, how are we able to do that, and the solution, honestly, is what Donald Trump did was remain in Mexico and then pursue a complete rewrite of the way that we have US asylum law applied and of asylum adjudication and really just about enforcing our actual laws.
So what I try to explain to people is the immigration system right now is a patchwork of this deeply dishonest, such a great word, deeply dishonest system in which you use the system and set it up in such ways that illegal immigration is actually one of the easiest things to do to accomplish immigration to the United States. That is wrong. My parents had to apply. It wasn’t easy.
Do you know in India there’s a temple called the Visa Temple where you walk 108 times around it, which is like a lucky number, and you do it when you’re applying for a visa to the United States. It costs a lot of money and it’s hard. People get rejected all the time. There’s billions of people across the world who would love to be able to come here, and many of them want to do so legally and they should have to go through a process. The current way it works is it’s easier to get here illegally than it is legally. I think that’s fundamentally right. It’s also unfair to people like us whose parents did come here legally.
The other thing is is that, like I just said, the biggest beneficiary of illegal immigration is big business. So if you think they’re going to take this one lying down, absolutely not. They will fight for everything that they have to keep their pool of cheap labor because it’s great for them. I think JD said a story. I think he was on Rogan about how he talked to a hotelier chain guy and he was like, “Yeah, it’s just terrible. They would take away our whole workforce.” And he was like, “Do you hear yourself in terms of what you’re talking, you’re bragging about?” but that’s real. That’s a real thing.
And that, Tyson Foods and all these other people, that’s another really sad part is … What I mean by second class citizenship is this presumption, first of all, that Americans think it’s too disgusting to process meat or to work in a field. I think anybody will do anything for the right wage, first of all, but second is the conditions in a lot of those facilities are horrible and they’re covered up for a reason, not only in terms of the way that businesses, they actually conduct themselves, but also to cover up their illegal immigrant workforce. So honestly, I think it could make things better for everything.
And don’t forget, Congress has to pay for all of this. So we can have DOGE or we can have mass deportation. So those two things are kind of irreconcilable, actually. There’s a lot of competing influences at play that people are not being real about at all.
Now, two things. Number one is, as I predicted, DOGE would become a “Blue Ribbon Commission”. So this is a non-statutory Blue Ribbon Commission that has been given authority to Vivek Ramaswamy and to Elon Musk. Secondary, their recommendations to government should be complete by July of 2026 according to the press release released by Trump. First of all, what that will mean is they’re probably going to need private funding to even set all this up. That’s great, not a problem for Elon, but you’re basically going to be able to have to commission GAO reports, Government Accountability Office and other reports and fact-finding missions across the government, which is fantastic. Trump can even empower you to go through to every agency and to collect figures.
None of it matters one iota if Republican appropriators in the House of Representatives care what you have to say. Historically, they don’t give a shit what the executive office has to say. So every year, the president releases his own budget. It used to mean something, but in the last decade or so, it’s become completely meaningless. The House Ways and Means Committee and the People’s House are the ones who originate all appropriations and set up spending. So that’s one is that DOGE in and of itself has no power. It has no ability to compel or force people to do anything. Its entire case for being, really, if you think about it mechanically, is to try and convince and provide a report to Republican legislators to be able to cut spending. So that’s that. Now, we all know how Congress takes to government reports and whether they get acted on or not. So that’s number one.
Number two is the figures that Elon is throwing out there. Again, I want to give them some advice because people do not understand federal government spending. The absolute vast majority of government spending is entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are untouchable under Donald Trump and their most politically popular programs in the world, and military spending, discretionary non-military spending. I don’t have the exact figure in front of me. It’s a very, very small part of the federal budget.
Now, within that small slice, about 90% of that eight is bipartisan and is supported by everybody. NOAA, you know the hurricane guys? Like people like that, people who are flying into the eye of the hurricane, people who are government inspectors of X, Y and Z. The parts that are controversial that you’re actually able to touch, things like welfare programs like food stamps is an extraordinary small slice.
So what’s the number we put out there? Five trillion? Something like that? There is only one way to do that, and realistically under the current thing, you have to radically change the entire way that the Pentagon buys everything. And I support that, but I just want to be very, very clear, but I haven’t seen enough energy around that. There’s this real belief in the US that we spend billions on all of these programs that are doing complete bullshit, but the absolute vast majority of it is military spending and entitlements. Trump has made clear entitlements are off the table. It’s not going to happen.
So the way that you’re going to be able to cut realistically military spending over a decade long period is to really change the way that the United States procures military equipment, hands out government contracts. Elon actually does have the background to be able to accomplish this because he has had to wrangle with SpaceX and the bullshit that Boeing has been pulling for over a decade, but I really want everybody’s expectations to be very set around this. Just remember, non-statutory, Blue Ribbon.
So if he’s serious about it, I just laid out all of these hurdles that he’s going to have to overcome, and I’m not saying him and Vivek aren’t serious dudes, but you got to really know the system to be able to accomplish this.
Now, I’m not saying they can’t be pressured, but that example I just gave on Rick Scott is a very important one of he literally endorsed somebody for leader, so did Tucker Carlson, so did a lot of people online, and only 13 senators voted for Rick Scott. The truth is is that they don’t care. They’re set up where they’re marginally popular in their own home states, they’ll be able to win their primaries, and that’s all they really need to do to get elected, and they have six-year terms. They’re not even up for four years.
So will Elon still be interested in politics six years from now? That’s a legitimate question for a Republican senator. So maybe he could get the House of Representatives to sign off maybe on some of his things, but there’s no guarantee that the Senate is going to agree with any of that.
There’s a story that Caro tells in Master of the Senate book, which I love, where Thomas Jefferson was in Paris during the writing of the Constitution, and he asked Washington, he said, “Why did you put in a Senate, a bicameral legislature?” And Washington said, “Why did you pour your tea into a saucer?” and Jefferson goes, “To cool it,” and Washington says, “Just so,” to explain it. He was a man of very few words. He was a brilliant man.
So your ability as the executive to be a good steward of the taxpayer money and to redesign a system which I actually think Elon could be good at this and Vivek too in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit is the entire Pentagon procurement thing, it needs to be burned to the ground. Number one, it’s bad for the Pentagon. It gives them substandard equipment. It rewards very old weapons systems and programs and thinking that can be easily defeated by people who are studying that for vulnerabilities. The perfect example is all of this drone warfare in Ukraine and in Russia. I mean, drone warfare costs almost nothing, and yet drone swarms and hypersonic missiles pose huge dangers to US systems, which cost more than hundreds of billions of dollars.
So my point is that giving nimble procurement and systemic change in the way that we think about executing the mission that Congress does give you actually could save the most amount of money in the long run. That’s where I would really focus in on.
The other one is, counter to everything I just said, is maybe they would listen. Maybe the Republicans are like, “Yeah, okay. Let’s do it.” The problem again though is swing state people who need to get reelected, they need to do one thing. They need to deliver for their district. They need to run on stuff, and nobody has ever run on cutting money for your state. They have run on bringing money to your state. And that’s why earmarks and a lot of these other things are extraordinarily popular in Congress is because it’s such an easy way to show constituents how you’re working for them whenever it does come reelection time. So it’s a very difficult system.
And I also want to tell people who are frustrated by this, I share your frustration, but the system is designed to work this way. And for two centuries, the Senate has stood as a bulwark against literally every popular change, and because of that, it’s designed to make sure that it’s so popular for long enough that it has to become inevitable before the status quo can change. That’s really, really frustrating, but you should take comfort in that it’s always been that way, so it’s been okay.
What was it like to be alive in the United States in 1840? Right? Nobody thinks about that really because it’s kind of an in-between time in history. There are people who lived their entire lives, who were born, who had to live through those times, who were just as conscientious and intelligent as you and I are and were just trying to figure shit out and things felt really big. So the Age of Acrimony is a time where it’s almost completely ignored outside of the Gilded age aspect.
But like you just said, it was a time where progressive reform of government and of the tension between civil rights, extraordinary wealth and democracy and really the reigning in of big business, so many of our foundations happened exactly in that time. And I take a lot of comfort from that book because one of the things I learned from the book is that voter participation is highest when people are pissed off, not when they’re happy, and that’s such a counterintuitive thing, but voter participation goes down when the system is working.
So 2020, right? I think we can all agree it was very tense election. That’s also why it had the highest voter participation ever. 2024, very high rates of participation. Same thing. People are pissed off, and that’s actually what drives them to the vote, but something that I take comfort in that is that people being pissed off and people going out to vote, it actually does have major impact on the system because otherwise, the status quo is basically allowed to continue and so-
I mean, even in the party boss era, a lot of the people we revere really came out of that. People like Abraham Lincoln. I mean, I don’t think Abraham Lincoln would have won a party primary in 1860. There’s no chance. He won, luck, thank God, from an insane process in the 1860 Republican Convention. People should go read about that because that was wild. I think we were this close to not having Lincoln as president. And, yeah, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, there’s so many that I could point to who made great impacts on history. So the system does find a way to still produce good stuff.
And so even though that makes absolutely no sense, because they’re all work, there are literal legal statutes in place that prevent you from doing the most efficient thing possible. So for some reason, we have to have a ton of Spanish speakers in SouthCom, in the US Command that is responsible for South America, who literally cannot help with a crisis at the border. Now, maybe you can find some legal chicanery to make that work, but, man, you got to have an attorney general who knows what he’s doing. You need a White House counsel. You need to make sure that shit stands up in a court of law. I mean, it’s not so simple. Whereas let’s say you have a software right here and you want to get a new software, you can just do it. You can hire whoever you want. When you’re the government, there’s a whole process you got to go through about bidding, and it just takes forever and it is so inefficient.
But unfortunately, the inefficiency is really derivative of a lot of legal statutes, and that is something that, again, actually radically successful Doge, quote-unquote, would be study the law, and then change it. Instead of cost- cutting, cut this program or whatever, like I just said about why do different systems use payroll, just say that you can change the statute under which new software can be updated, let’s say, after 90 days. I’ve heard stories of people who work for the government who still have IBM mainframe in 2024 that they’re still working, because those systems have never been updated. There’s also a big problem with a lot of this clearance stuff. That’s where a lot of inefficiency happens because a lot of contractors can only work based upon previous clearance that they already got. Achieving a clearance is very expensive. It’s very lengthy process. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be, talking about security clearance, but it does naturally create a very small pool that you can draw some contracts fund.
And I even mean stuff like the janitor at the Pentagon needs a security service, right? So clearance. So there’s only five people who can even apply for that contract. Well, naturally, in an interim monopoly like that, he’s going to jack his price up because he literally has a moat around his product. Whereas if you were hiring a… Whatever, anybody for anything, that type of credentialism and legal regime, it doesn’t matter at all. So there are a million problems like this that people in government run into, and that is what I would see is the most successful.
So I talked previously about the professional managerial class and the managerial revolution. Elon is one of the few people who’s ever built a multi-billion-dollar company who has not actually fallen victim to the managerial revolution and against entrepreneurship and innovation that happens there. There are very few people who can do it. Elon, Steve Jobs. But what do we learn is that, unfortunately, after Steve died, Apple basically did succumb to the managerial revolution and has become the product… They make all their money by printing services and making it impossible to leave this ecosystem as opposed to building the most cool product ever. As much as I love my Vision Pro, don’t get me wrong.
Think about our cynical attitude towards politicians today. That is largely the fault of Lyndon Johnson and of Richard Nixon and that entire fallout period of Vietnam. Vietnam, in particular, really broke the American character and its ability and its relationship with government, and we’ve never recovered faith in institutions ever since that. And it’s really unfortunate. So what makes me hopeful, at least this time, is anytime a president wins a popular vote and an election is they have the ability to reset and to actually try and build something that is new. And so what I would hope is that this is different from the first Trump administration in which the mandate for Donald Trump is actually carried out competently. Yes, he can do his antics, which got him elected. At this point, we can’t deny it. The McDonald’s thing is hilarious. It’s funny. It is. People love it. People like the podcasting. People like-
Households under $100,000 voted for Donald Trump. Maybe they didn’t do so for economic reasons. I think a lot of them did for economic, a lot of them did for immigration, for cultural. But you still owe them something. And I would hope that they could carry something out in that respect that is not a similar continuation and chaotic vibe of the first time where everything felt like it’d explode at any time with staffing, with even his policy or what he cared about or his ability to pursue. And a lot of that does come back to personnel. So I’m concerned in some respects, I’m not thrilled in some respects, I’m happy in some respects, but it remains to be seen how he’s going to do it.
I once drove past… It was in rural Nevada, and I was driving and I drove past the biggest sign I’ve ever seen, political sign, to this day. And it was in 2020. It just said, “Trump, fuck your feelings.” And I still believe that is the most coherent MAGA thing I’ve ever seen. Because everyone’s always like, “How can a neocon, and Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK and all these other people, how can they all exist under the same umbrella?” And I’m like, “It’s very simple. All of them have rejected the cultural elite, in their own way, certainly, but they’ve arrived at the same place. It’s an umbrella. And it’s an umbrella fundamentally, which has nothing to do with the status quo and with the currently established cultural elite. That doesn’t mean they’re not elite and they’re not rich in their own regards, that doesn’t mean they don’t disagree, but that’s the one thing that unites the entire party.” And so that’s the way I would put it.
Trans, in particular, orientation about… Actually, immigration may be the biggest one. Because if you look at the history of Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders was a person who railed against open borders and against mass migration for years. There are famous interviews of him on YouTube with Lou Dobbs, who’s one of the hardcore immigration guys, and they agree with each other. And Lou is like, “Bernie’s one of the only guys out there.” Bernie, at the end of the day, he had to succumb to the cultural left, and it’s changing attitudes on mass immigration. There’s some famous clips from 2015 in a Vox interview that he gave where he started… I think he started talking about how open borders is a Koch brothers libertarian concept, right? Because Bernie is basically of a European welfare state tradition. European welfare states are very simply understood. We have high taxes, high services, low rates of immigration. Because we have high taxes and high services, we have a limited pool of people who can experience and take those services.
He used to understand that. He changed a lot of his attitude. Bernie also… I will say, look, he’s a courageous man and a courageous politician. As late as 2017, he actually endorsed a pro-life candidate because he said that that pro-life candidate was pro-worker. And he’s like, “At the end of the day, I care about pro-worker policy.” He took a ton of shit for it, and I don’t think he’s done it since. So the sad part that’s really happened is that a lot of left populist agenda and other has become subsumed in the hysteria around cultural leftism, wokeism, whatever the hell you want to call it. And ultimately, that cultural leftism was the thing that really united the two wings of that party. And that’s really why MAGA is very opposed to that. They’re really not the same, but the left populist can still be anti-establishment. That’s the key.
And so the point around this on question of whether Bernie could have won in 2016, I don’t know. Krystal seems to think so. I’m skeptical. I’m skeptical for a variety of reasons. I think the culture is honestly one of them. One of Trump’s core issues in 2016 was immigration. And Bernie and him did not agree on immigration. And if immigration, even if people did support Bernie Sanders and his vision for working class people, the debates and the understanding about what it would look like, like a healthcare system, which literally would pay for illegal immigrants, I think he would’ve gotten killed on that. But I could be wrong. I will never know what that looked like.
Obviously, it backfired in their face, which is really funny. But there were a million examples like that when they attacked Bernie for endorsing a pro-life politician. He never did it again. They attacked Bernie for having Bernie Bros. People online, the bros who were [inaudible 01:56:40] Bernie, and it was his fault. His supporters would say nasty things about Elizabeth Warren, and he would defend straight himself and be like, “Yes, I’m sorry. Please, my bros,” he was like, “Stop that.”
2016 is different because they didn’t full-on have that love and necessity of winning. By the way, this is a strategic advantage that the Democrats have. Democrats just care about winning. The current base of the party, all they want to do is win. Republican base? They don’t give a shit about winning. They just love Trump. So it’s nice to win. But one of those where they will express their id for what they really want. Now, it’s worked out for them because it turns out, that’s a very palpable political force. But one of the reasons why you won’t see me up here doing James Carville 40 more years is there is a law of something called thermostatic public opinion, where the thermostat, it changes a lot whenever you actually… So when you have a left-wing president in power, the country goes right. When you have a right-wing president in power, the country goes left.
Amazing. Right? You can actually look at a graph of economic attitudes from the two months where Joe Biden became president after Donald Trump. So Republicans, Trump was president in the last year in office, the economy’s great. Two months later, the economy is horrible. That is a perfect example of thermostatic opinion. And I’m not counting these Democrats out. 2004, George W. Bush wins the popular vote. He has a historic mandate to continue in Iraq. By ’06, he’s toasted. We have a massive midterm election. And by ’08, we’re writing books about 40 more years, and how there’s never going to be a Republican in the office ever again. So things can change a lot in a very short period of time.
And imagine the consequences of that. We would have no Iraq… I mean, I’m not saying he was a great man. We probably still would’ve had the financial crisis, and there’s still a lot of bad stuff that would’ve happened. But he was a popular dude, and I wouldn’t say he had the best judgment at times presidentially… Definitely not personally, but presidentially. But I’m pretty confident we would’ve not gone into the Iraq war. And so that’s where it really cost us. If you’re left wing and you’re talking about Obama, yeah, I think Obama probably would’ve won in 2016. Although it’s a counterfactual, because Obama was never challenged in the same way that MAGA was able to, to the liberal consensus. Romney really ran this awful campaign, honestly, about cutting spending. It was very traditional Republican. It was deeply unpopular. The autopsy of that election was we actually need to be more pro-immigration. That literally was the autopsy. But Trump understood the assignment.
There are two people who I so deeply respect for their political bets. Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. So one of the books that I recommended called The Unwinding by George Packer, he actually talks about Peter Thiel there. This is in 2013. And Thiel talks about, he was like, “Whoever runs for office next, they don’t need to run on an optimistic message. They need to run on a message that everything is fucked up and that we need to… And if you think about, that’s why Thiel’s endorsement of Trump with the American carnage message is… I mean, it was shocking at the time, but he had that fundamental insight that that’s what the American people wanted. Trump too comes out of an election in 2012 where the literal GOP autopsy, the report produced by the party, says, “We need to be pro-mass immigration.” What happens? Immediately after 2012, they start to go for mass immigrant… Basically, they go for these amnesty plans, the so-called Gang of Eight plan, Marco Rubio, and all of this in 2013, it falls apart, but Republicans get punished by their base in [inaudible 02:04:04]-
Then in 2015, Trump comes down the escalator, and he gives the message on immigration that the GOP base has been roaring and wanting to hear now but that nobody wanted to listen to them. That was his fundamental insight. That bet was a colossal and a Titanic political bet at a time when all political ideology and thought process would’ve said that you should come out on the other side, which is where Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and all these other guys were effectively there in varying different ways, like they were hawkish or whatever. But Trump just had such a monopoly on that as an idea.
That’s why he wins the 2016 primary. Then paired with immigration, a hard line position on immigration, is this American carnage idea that actually everything is wrong. The American dream has gone. “We will stop this American carnage.” I think American Carnage is one of the most important inaugural speeches ever given in American history. Put it up against every single other speech, there’s nothing else like it. But that was what the country wanted at the time.
That’s what great politicians are able to do, is they’re able to suss something out. That’s also why Peter Thiel is who he is because he saw that in 2000. Imagine what it takes to come out of the 2012 election and to be honestly totally contrarian to the entire national mood and this entire theory of Obama-esque star politics and say, “No, you need somebody who runs on the opposite of that to win.”
A moment I think about a lot with Trump and just being able to unleash the rage of the Republican base is in the 2012 debate, Candy Crowley was the moderator with Mitt Romney, and she fact-checked him famously. This was when fact checking was shocking in a presidential debate. She said something about Benghazi, and she was like, “No, he did say that.” She corrected Romney on behalf of Obama. To this day, it’s questionable whether she was even right. Romney was just like, “Oh, he did? Okay.” Trump would’ve been like, “Excuse me. Excuse me. Look at this woman.” He would’ve gone off.
I think about that moment because that’s what the Republican base wanted to hear. But also, it turns out, America had a lot of festering feelings about the mainstream media that it needed unleashed, and Trump was just this incredible vector to just blow up this system, which, if you asked me about optimism, that’s the thing I’m most optimistic about.
In 2008, Obama was the underdog. Actually, here’s the critical thing. Obama was losing with Black people. Why? Black Democrats simply did not believe that white people were vote for a Black guy. So Barack Obama goes to this white state, Iowa, all in on the Iowa caucuses, and shocks the world by winning the Iowa caucuses. Overnight, there is a shift in public amongst the Black population in South Carolina that says, “Oh, shit, he actually could win,” and he comes out, and he wins South Carolina. That’s basically was the death knell for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The problem is by moving South Carolina up and by making it first along with other more pro-establishment friendly places, what do we do? We make it so that Barack Obama can never happen again. We make it so that an older base of Democratic Party voters who listens to the elites can never have their assumptions challenged. That’s one of the worst things Joe Biden did. I talked about his arrogance. He was so arrogant, he changed the freaking primary system. He was so arrogant, he refused to do a debate. I mean, imagine history. How lucky are we honestly that Joe Biden agreed to do that debate with Donald Trump early? Again, that was his arrogance. I think we’re so lucky for it because if we hadn’t gotten… We got to understand as a country how cooked he was and how fake everything was behind the scenes in front of all of our eyes. They tried for three straight years to make sure that that would never happen. It’s still such a crime, honestly, against the American people.
Another one is John Adams. I love and revere John Adams. He’s my favorite Founding Father. Him and John Quincy, they don’t get nearly enough of their due. They were some of the most intelligent, well-considered. They were family men. The love and the relationship between John and Abigail Adams is literally legendary. I think it’s amazing, especially in the context of the 1700s, the way that he would take her counsel into conversations and her own ability. She would sit there and go toe-to-toe as much with Thomas Jefferson. There are some who are great, who are really, really good presidents, who have good judgment and who are really good people and really think deeply about the world and have really cool personal lives. But also the vast majority of them… I would say especially in the modern era and where the price of the presidency extracts everything that you have, you have to be willing to give everything. That’s not a price that most people want to pay.
I also think that, oh, God, just Washington as a system, it will burn you. It will extract absolutely everything that you can give it. At the end of the day, everyone always talks about this, it’s hilarious, how Trump is the only president not to age in office. I actually think it’s crazy when you look at the photos of how he actually looks better today than he did whenever he went into the office. That’s amazing, and it actually says a lot about how his mind works. I think Trump is pure id. Having observed him a little bit, both at the White House and having interviewed him, it’s calculating, but it’s also pure id, which is very interesting. The ones who are the thinkers, guys like Obama and others who are really in their heads, it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare. Apparently, Obama would only sleep four hours a night.
The other case would be is that in this modern era has been defined by access to money. She’s one of the greatest fundraisers in Democratic Party history. Again, consistently, Obama, Kamala, all those people come and go. But she’s always had a very central understanding of the ability to fundraise, to cultivate good relationships with Democratic Party elites all across the country, use that money and dole it out to her caucus.
She also was really good at making sure that legislation that came to the floor actually had the votes to do so. She ran an extremely well-ordered process in the House of Representatives, one in which you were able to reconcile problems within her office. It didn’t usually go public. Then it would make it to the floor, and it would pass so that there would be no general media frenzy and Democrats in disarray or any of that. Put that on display with the Republicans, and we’ve had multiple Speakers all resign or get fired in a 16-year period. That’s pretty remarkable. Basically, ever since John Boehner decided to leave in, what was it, 2012? I forget the exact year. My point is that if you compare her record to the longevity on the Republican side, it is astounding.
The other interesting thing is that she also has pulled off one of the real tests of political power is, can you rule even when you don’t have the title anymore? She gave up the leader position to Hakeem Jeffries, but everybody knows she pulled Joe Biden out of the race. That’s pretty interesting. She’s technically just a back-bencher, a nobody member of Congress, but we all know that’s bullshit. So that’s actually a very important case of political power is, can you rule without the title? If you can, then you truly are powerful. So I would make a good case for her, yeah. She’s done a lot of remarkable stuff for her party.
I will say they played Trump like a fiddle, man. Last time around, they were able to. They really got him. One of the craziest elements that I covered was Trump basically threatened to shut down the government and actually did shut down the government for a period of time over a dispute over border wall funding. Pelosi and Schumer, despite genuine mass hysteria in the Democratic Party with even some people who were willing to try and to strike a deal, never wavered and actually basically won and forced Trump to back down. Not a lot of MAGA people want to admit it, but that was honestly really embarrassing for the Trump administration at that time. The amount of discipline that it took for her, and Chuck to a lesser extent, but for the two of them to pull that off, it was honestly impressive that they were able to do that, even when the president has so much political power. It literally shut down the government over it.
For example, number one, all the seats in the Briefing Room, those seats are assigned by the White House Correspondents’ Association, not by the White House itself. The White House Correspondents’ Association requires you to apply for a seat. That adjudication process can take literally years for bylaws, elections, and all these things to do. This means that they can slow roll the entrance of new media online outlets who are allowed into the room. The reason it really matters not having a seat is if you don’t have a seat, you have to get there early and stand in the wings, like I used to, and raise your hand like this and just hope and pray that the press secretary can see. It’s extremely inconvenient. I’m talking, I have to get there hours early at a chance during a 15-minute briefing.
So one of the things is that Trump has is he owes a huge part of his election to coming on podcasts and to new media. Now, because of that, it’s really important that the White House Correspondents’ Association, which is a literal guild cartel that keeps people out of the White House and credentials itself and creates this opaque mechanism through which they control access to asking the press secretary questions, is destroyed. There are a lot of different ways you can do this. Because what nobody gets, too, is that all of these rules are unofficial. For example, they’re just traditions. The White House is like, “Yeah, it’s our building, but you guys figure it out,” because that’s a longstanding tradition.
Let me give you another insane tradition that currently exists in the White House. The Associated Press or the Associated Press correspondent gets to start the briefing, traditionally. They get the first question. They also get to end the briefing. When they think it’s been enough time, they’ll be like, “Okay, Karine Jean-Pierre, thank you,” and that calls the briefing over. What? You’re not even in the White House Correspondents’ Association. You literally just happen to work for the Associated Press. Why? Why do we allow that to happen? So number one, stop doing that. To their credit, the Trump people didn’t really do that, but it’s a longstanding tradition.
The other thing is that what nobody gets either is that the first row is all television networks for logistical reasons so that they can do their little stand-ups with their mic and say, “I’m reporting for [inaudible 02:27:00].” Well, what people don’t seem to know is that all the television networks are basically going to ask some version of the same question. The reason they do that is because they need a clip of their correspondent going after the White House press secretary all out, Robert Mueller, like whenever I was there. So you get the same goddamn version of the stupid political questions over and over again.
The Briefing Room is designed for traditional media, and they have all the access in the world. So in an election where you owe your victory, at least in part, to new media and recognizing the changing landscape, you need to change the conduit of information to the American people. And in an election, I don’t know if you saw this, but election night coverage on cable news was down 25%, just in four years, 25%. That’s astounding. Cable news had a monopoly on election night for my entire lifetime, and yet, my show had record ratings that night.
Look, I’m a small slice of the puzzle here. We’ve got Candice Owens, Patrick Bet-David, Tim Pool, David Pakman, TYT, all these other people. From what I understand, all of us blew it out that night because millions of Americans watched it on YouTube. We even partnered with some Decision Desk HQs, so we had live data. We could make state calls. We’re just a silly little YouTube show. My point, though, is that in an election where the vast majority of Americans under the age of 55 are listening to podcasts, consuming new media, and are not watching cable news, where the median age of CNN, which is the youngest viewership, is 68. 68 is the median. Statistically, what does that tell us? There’s a decent number of people who are watching CNN who are in their ’80s and in their ’90s.
Yeah, I’m glad you brought up Alex, because he deserves a tremendous shout out, Alex Bruesewitz. He was the pioneer of the podcast strategy for the Donald J. Trump campaign. He got on your show. He was able to get on Andrew Schulz’s show, Rogan. He was the internal force that pushed a lot of this. My personal hope is that somebody like Alex is elevated in the traditional White House bureaucracy, that the number of credentials that are issued to these mainstream media outlets is cut, and there’s a new lottery process put in place where people with large audiences are invited.
I also want to make a case here for why I think it’s really important for people like you and others who don’t have as much traditional media experience to come and practice some capital J journalism because it will sharpen you, too, giving you access in that pressure cooker environment. Having to really sit there and spar a little bit with a public official and not have as long necessarily as you’re used to, it really hones your news media skills, your news gathering skills, and it will make you a better interviewer in the long run.
Because a lot of the things that I have learned have just been through osmosis. I’ve just lived in DC. I’ve been so lucky, I’ve had a lot of cool jobs, and I’ve just been able to experience a lot of this stuff. So I’m really hoping that people who are listening to this who may have some influence or even the viewership, if you want to reach out to them and all them, this is a very easily changeable problem. It’s a cartel which has no official power. It’s all power by tradition, and it needs to be blown up. It does not serve America’s interests to have 48 seats, I think, in the White House Press Briefing Room to people who have audiences of like five. It just makes absolutely zero. Workspace, seats, access, credentials, and also credentials that are issued to other new media journalists at major events should take precedence. Because it’s not even about rewarding the creator. The American people are here. You need to meet them. That’s your job.
I’ll just end with a historical thing. Barack Obama shocked the White House Press Corps in 2009 because he took a question from the Huffington Post, a brand new blog, but they were stunned because he knew, he said, “These blog people, they went all in for me, and I got to reward them.” So there’s a longstanding precedence of this. They’ll bitch and they’ll moan. They’ll be upset. But it’s their fault that they don’t have as much credibility. It’s incumbent upon the White House, which serves the public, to actually meet them where they are. So I really hope that at least some of this is implemented inside of it.
The expectation is that the type of questions have to be substantive. Obviously, nothing is off limits. You should never, ever accept, “I’m not going to be asked about this.” Especially as a journalist, you can’t do that. Every time they’re like, “Hey, please don’t ask about this,” it’s like, actually, that’s probably one thing you should ask about. My point being that the expectation is that there’s no interference on the White House side, but that the format itself will lend exactly to what you’re saying to allow people to explain.
Again, in a media era where we need to trust the consumer, my show is routinely over two hours long on cable television. On cable television, the Tucker Carlson program, whenever it was on Fox News, without commercial breaks was about 42, 43 minutes, something like that, of runtime. So I’m speaking for almost triple what that is on a regular basis. The point is is that millions are willing to sit and to listen, but you just have to meet them where they are. So I really hope that a format like that, like a streamer briefing or something like that, I think it’s… Look, I know they would dunk on it endlessly, but I think it could work.
As you can tell, I read a lot of books. I like to take the long view. Every time I would ask a question, I go, when the future Robert Caro is writing books and he’s reading the transcript of the White House press briefing, he doesn’t even know who this kid is, he goes, “Oh, that was a pretty good question right there. That’s pretty relevant.” You got to think about all the bullshit that gets left on the cutting room floor.
But Robert came to Texas. He only intended on writing three books about Lyndon Johnson. He’s currently completed four and he is on his fifth, and it’s taken over 40 years to write those. And one of the reasons is he just kept uncovering so much stuff. And one of them is book two, Means of Ascent. He never intended to write it, but as he began to investigate Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 Senate election, he realizes in real time how rigged and stolen it was. And so I often tell people, “What if I told you that we lived in the most secure election period in modern history?” They wouldn’t believe it. But if you read through that shit, I’m talking about bags of cash, millions of dollars, literal stuffed ballot boxes.
It’s great to be back here in Texas because I always think about that place down in Zapata and Starr County. I’m talking like basically Mexico, where these dons were in power in the 1940s. They would literally stuff the ballot boxes with the rolls, and they wouldn’t even allow people to come and vote. They just check marked it all for you based upon the amount that you paid. Means of Ascent is the painstaking detail of exactly how Lyndon Johnson stole the 1948 Senate election. And nothing like that, as far as I know, is still happening.
Macro, we can talk about the 1876 election. Rutherford B. Hayes, one of the closest elections in modern history. It was one of those that got kicked with the House of Representatives. That was an insane, insane time. The corrupt bargain that was struck to basically end reconstruction and federal occupation of the South. And of course, the amount of wheeling and dealing that happened inside of that was absolutely bonkers and nuts. That was what an actual stolen election looks like, just so people know.
So on a micro and a macro, yeah, that’s what it really looks like. And so look, I understand where people are coming from. Also, let’s do, what? 1960? That was pretty wild. In 1960, there was all those allegations about Illinois going for Kennedy. If you look at the actual vote totals of Kennedy-Nixon, wow. I mean, it’s such an insanely close presidential election. And even though the electoral college victory looks a little bit differently, Nixon would openly talk about. He’s like, “Oh, old Joe Kennedy rigged Illinois for his boy.” And he’d be like, “And we didn’t even have a chance in Texas with Lyndon pulling.” Like, Lyndon stuffing the ballot boxes down there. And this is open on the…
They openly admit this stuff. They talk about it. So actually, there’s a funny story. LBJ lost, I think, his 1941 Senate primary. And it’s because that his opponent, Pappy O’Daniel, actually outstole Lyndon. So they were both corrupt, but Pappy O’Daniel stuffed the ballot box in the fifth day of the seven days to count the votes. And FDR loved LBJ. And it’s interesting, right? FDR recognized Johnson’s. His talent. And he goes, “Lyndon? You know in New York, we sit on the ballot boxes until we count them.” Because he’s admitting that he participated in a lot of this stuff.
So, this high-level chicanery of stolen elections is actually an American pastime that we luckily have moved on from. And quite a lot of people do not know the exact intricate details of how wild it was back in the day.
Okay. I have observed, and I’m going to put my analyst hat on. There are two theories of Stop the Steal. One I call Low IQ Stop the Steal, and one I call High IQ Stop the Steal. Low IQ Stop the Steal is basically what Donald Trump has advocated where Dominion voting machines, and bamboo ballots, and Venezuela and Sidney Powell, and all of the people involved basically got indicted by the state of Georgia. I’m not saying that that was correct. I’m just like, that’s what that actually looked like. Rudy Giuliani, et cetera.
High IQ Stop the Steal is basically… And actually, these are not illegitimate arguments. The school of thought is it was illegitimate for the state of Pennsylvania and other swing states to change mail-in balloting laws as a response to COVID, which enabled millions of people more to vote that wouldn’t have, and that those change in regulations became enough to swing the election. I actually think that that is true. Now, would you say that that’s rigged? That’s a very important question because we’re talking about a Republican state legislature, a Republican state supreme court. Right? The two that actually ruled on this question. So, could you say that it was rigged by the Democrats to do that?
Another problem with that theory is that while you can say that that’s unfair to change the rules last time around, you can also understand it to a certain extent. And I’m not justifying it, I’m just giving you an example. So for example, after the hurricane hit North Carolina, Republican officials were like, “Hey, we need to make sure that these people in Western North Carolina who were affected by the hurricane could still be able to have access to the ballot box.”
And people were like, “Oh, so you’re saying in an extraordinary circumstance that you should change voting access and regularity to make sure that people have access?” So, my point is you can see the logic through which this happened. And the high IQ version is basically the one that was adopted by Josh Hawley whenever he voted against certification. He said that the state of Pennsylvania, particularly election law, and that those changes were unfair and led to the, quote-unquote, rigging of the election against Donald Trump. Now, there’s an even higher IQ, Galaxy Brain Stop the Steal. Galaxy Brain Stop the Steal is one that you saw, with great love and respect, my friend JD Vance, at his debate with Tim Walsh. When Tim Walsh asked him, [inaudible 02:42:36]. He said, “Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?”
He’s like, “Tim, I focus on the future.” And then he started talking about censorship, the Hunter Biden laptop story. If you take a look at the Joe Rogan interview, Rogan actually asked JD this. He’s like, “What do you mean you’re in the election? Some version of that.”
And JD was like, “Well, what I get really frustrated by is people will bring up all of these insane conspiracy theories, but they ignore that the media censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, and that big tech had its finger on the thumb for the Democrats.” Now, that is empirically true. Okay? That is true, right? Now, would you say that that’s rigged? I’m not going to use that word because that’s a very different word. Now, would you say that that’s unfair? Yeah, I think it’s unfair.
So there’s another, a lot of MAGA folks picked up on this one. There was a Time Magazine article in 2020 that’s very famous in their crowd, called the… It was like the fight to fortify the election, and it was about all of these institutions that put their fingers on the scale for Joe Biden against Donald Trump. So I will put it this way, was Donald Trump up against the Titanic forces of billionaires, tech censorship, and elite institutions who all did absolute damnedest to defeat him in 2020? Yes, that is true. And in a sense, the Galaxy Brain case is the only one of those which I think is truly legitimate.
And I’m not going to put it off the table, but this is the problem, that’s not what Trump means. Trump, by the way, will never tell you what I just told you. JD will. If you go and you ask any of these Republican politicians when they’re challenged on it and they don’t want to say that Trump loss at 2020 election, they’ll give the hype, the Galaxy Brain case that I just gave. And again, I don’t think it’s wrong. But it’s like, guys, that’s not what he means when he says it. And that’s the important parsing of the case, right?
But that was purely, he’s the president. We’re asking him for his opinions on an immigration bill or whatever. For what you do, it’s impossible to do it for you.
Because those of us in news, we will always negotiate. We’re willing to do short form because we’re asking about policy. But for the style that you help popularize, and I think that you’re uniquely talented and good at, that’s very important not to compromise on.
Because when I was growing, I was grew up not far from here, 90 minutes from here, in College Station. I felt very uniquely closed off from the world. I found the world through books, and books saved my life so many different times. And I hope to encourage that in other people. I really… No matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter how busy you are, if you have some time, to either sit down with a book or put on an audiobook, and you can transport yourself into a different world. It’s so important. And that’s something that your show really helps me with, too. I love listening to your show whenever. Sometimes when I’m too into politics and I need to listen to something, I’ll listen to that Mayan historian guy. I love stuff like that, absolutely.
Now, and I was like, “Oh shit. This entire thing happened which actually decided the Second World War, and I don’t know anything about this.” So, shout out to Dan. God bless you, man.
God, I love that quote.
And all right, let’s put that on the table. And then the other thing I was troubled by, that maybe you can comfort me in the context of history, how easily the base ate that up. That they were able to believe the election was truly rigged based on no clear evidence that I saw. And they just love the story. And there is something compelling to the story, like this DNC type. Like with Bernie, the establishment just state they’re corrupt and they steal the will of the people. And the lack of desire from the base or from people to see any evidence of that, what’s really troubled me.
And I’m not advocating necessarily for the world he created for us, but he did it, and people should study him more. If you’re interested in media in particular, that book is one of the most important books you’ll ever read.
I’m like, “Yeah. You guys have bought a lot of crazy stupid shit, too. Okay?” And if actually, I would say liberal misinformation, quote-unquote, is worse than Republican disinformation because it pervades the entire elite media like RussiaGate or Cambridge Analytica or any of these other hoaxes that have been foisted on the American people. The people who listen to the Daily and from the New York Times are just as brainwashed, lack of informed, want to feel informed as people who watch Fox News. So, let me just say that out there. It’s an equal opportunity, cancer in the American football.
And then the other gift that my parents gave me is I got to travel the entire world. I probably visited 25, 30 countries by the time I was 18. And one of the things that that gave me was the ability to just put yourself in the brain of another person. So one of the reasons I’m really excited to go to Japan, and I picked it as a spot for my honeymoon, was because Japan is a first-world developed country where the vast majority of them don’t speak English. It’s distinguishably non-Western and they just do shit their own way. So they have a subway, but it’s not the same as ours. They have restaurants, things don’t work the same way. They have…
I could go a laundry list. Their entire philosophy of life, of the daily rhythm, even though it merges with service-based managerial capitalism and they’re fucking good at it too, they do it their own way. So, exposure to other countries in the world gave me… And also, just being an outsider myself gave me a more detached view of the world. So if you don’t have that, what I would encourage you is to flex that muscle. So, go somewhere that makes you uncomfortable. This will be a very boomer take, but I hate the fact that you have 5G everywhere you go in the world. Because some of the best experiences I’ve ever had in my life is walking around Warsaw, Poland trying to find a bus station to get my ass to Lithuania with a printed out bus ticket. I have no idea where the street is. I’m in a country where not that many people speak English. We’re pointing and gesturing, and I figured it out. And it was really useful. I got to meet a lot of cool Polish people.
Same in Thailand. I’ve been in rural, like [inaudible 02:55:32], Thailand, Columbia. Places where people speak zero English. And your ability to gesture and use Pidgin really connects you and gives you the ability to get an exposure to others. And I know this is a very wanderlust-like travel thing, but unironically, if you’re raised in a bubble, pierce it. That’s the answer, is seek something out that makes you uncomfortable. So if you’re raised rich, you need to go spend some time with poor people.
There’s that famous study where they ask people on their deathbed what they valued in life, and every single one of them was like, “I wish I’d spend more time with my children.” I think about that every time. That I am thinking about pursuing a new work endeavor or something that’s going to have me spend significant time away from my wife. And I’m almost always these days, now that I’ve achieved a certain level of success, the answer is, “I’m not doing it unless you can come with me.”
And look, it’s really hard. Once you achieve a certain level of economic success and others, what do most rich people do? They close themselves off from the world. Vast majority of the time, what do you do? Economy is annoying flying. They fly first class. Living in a small house is annoying. They buy a bigger house. Dealing with a lot of these inconveniences of life is annoying. You pay a little bit more to make sure you don’t have to do that. There’s a deep insidious thing within that, each one of those individual choices. Where the more and more removed that you get from that, the more in the bubble that you are. So, you should actually seek out those experiences or create them in a concerted way.
I do think after Trump, he did succumb a little bit, in my opinion, to the elite liberalism view, both of the impetus behind Donald Trump and why he was able to be successful. So in some ways, very denigrating to the Trump voter, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the American presidency. Because like I said, he really is the one who believes that that narcissism, that character and all of that that makes Trump tick itself will eventually override any potential benefit that he could have in office. And I just think that’s a really wrong way of looking at it.
I mean, for example, I had this debate with Crystal, and this gets to the whole Trump talking about the enemy from within. And she was like, “He wants to prosecute his political opponents. Do you disagree with that?”
And I was like, “No, I don’t.”
And she was like, “So, you’re not worried about it?”
And I go, “No, I’m not.”
And she’s like, “Well, how do you square that?”
And I was like, “Well, I actually unironically believe in the American system of institutional checks and balances.” Which kept him, quote-unquote, in check last time around. I also believe in democracy where… This is really interesting, but in 2022, a lot of the Republicans who were the most vociferous about Stop the Steal, they got their asses kicked at the ballot box. Americans also then, in 2024, decided to forgive some of that from Donald Trump. It definitely didn’t help, right? But they were able to oversee that for their own interests. As in democratically, people are able to weigh in terms of checks and balances, what they should and should not challenge a politician by. But also, we have the American legal system, and I also know the way that the institutions in Washington themselves work. That fundamentally, the way that certain processes and other things could play out will not play out to some Hitlerian fantasy.
And this gets to the whole Kamala and them calling her a fascist and a Hitler. You and I probably spent hours of our lives, maybe more, thinking and reading about Adolf Hitler, Weimar Germany. And I just find it so insulting because it becomes this moniker of fascist. You know what I’m saying? These terms have meaning beyond just the dictionary definition. The circumstances through which Hitler is able to rise to power are not the same as today. And it’s like, stop denigrating America to the point where you think… Really, you should flip it around. Why do you think America is Weimar, Germany? That’s a ridiculous thing to say. Do you unironically believe that? No, you don’t believe that.
So, that is personally what drives me a little bit crazy. And I think that Sam has found himself in a mental framework where he is not willing, he’s not able to look past the man and his, quote-unquote, danger. And at the end of the day, his worldview was rejected wholly by the American people. Because the character argument, the fascist argument, the Hitler argument, the he’s uniquely bad argument has been run twice before 2016 and in 20… Actually, all three times. I guess, it won in 2020.
But two out of the three times, Donald Trump has won the presidency. And in his latest one, where that argument has never been made before for a longer period of time and more in strength by a political candidate, was rejected completely. And I would ask him to reconcile himself to the America that he lives in.
It was crazy, okay? Was it funny? Yeah, but it was crazy, and it’s not how I would conceive and have conceived of some of my favorite presidents. I wouldn’t think that they would do that, but that’s what you get. Everyone should be clear-eyed about who this man is, and that’s another problem. The deification of politicians is sick. It’s sickening about Trump, around Obama. These people are just people. The idea that they are godlike creatures with extraordinary judgment… One of the really cool things about you and I’s job is we actually get to meet very important people. After you meet a few billionaires, you’re like, “Yeah, there’s definitely something there. But some of them get lucky.” After you meet a few politicians, you’re like, “Oh. They’re like… They’re not that smart.” That was a rude awakening for me, by the way, being here in Texas, reading about these people.
And pretty soon, I was on Capitol Hill. I was 19 years old. I was an intern. I’m actually interacting, and I see them behave in ridiculous manners and whatever. Just treat people badly or say something stupid. I was like, “Oh.” I’m like, “This is not the West Wing.” I’m like, “This is not a book. These people are just… This is just reality.” The weirdest part of my life is I’ve now been in Washington long enough. I know some of the people personally, the vice president of the United States, literally the vice president-elect, future cabinet secretaries, these people I literally have met, had dinner with, had a drink with, whatever. That’s a wild thing, and that’s even more bringing you down to Earth. You’re like, “Oh, shit. You’re actually going to have a lot of power. That’s kind of scary, but you’re just a person.”
So even though you don’t have to say, “I have my same life experience,” take it from me or anybody else who’s ever met really famous people, rich, successful, powerful people. They’re just people. There’s nothing that… There’s some things that are unique about them, but they have just as many human qualities as you or anybody else who’s listening to this right now.
I’m like, “If you actually read history, most of these things are just…” They’re not even footnotes. They’re the stuff that the historians flip past, and they’re like, “What a stupid bucking thing.” I’m talking about things that ruled American politics. What if I told you that the Panama Canal Treaty was one of the most important fights in modern American politics? Nobody thinks about that today. It ruled American politics at that time. It genuinely is a footnote, but that’s not how it felt at the time. So that’s another thing I want people to take away.
My point about the UFOs is I don’t know what is real or not. I have absolute confidence and absolute ton is being hid from the American people and that all of the official explanations are bullshit. I have had the opportunity to interface with some of the whistleblowers and other… the activists in the community, people who I trust, people who have great credentials, who have no reason to lie, who have assured us that there is a lot going on behind the scenes. There has been too much misinformation and effort by the deep state to cover up this topic.
So I would ask people to keep the faith. It’s 2024 and we still don’t have all the JFK files. Everyone involved is dead. There’s no reason to let it go. Even though we basically know what happened, we don’t know. If you read that fantastic book, the Tom O’Neill book about the Manson murders, again, it took him 20 years to write that book and he still didn’t get the full story. So sometimes, it takes an extraordinarily long agonizing period of time, and I know how deeply frustrating that is. But when you think about a secret, a program and knowledge of this magnitude, it would only make sense that it would require a titanic effort to reveal a titanic secret.
And they say, “Yes, sir. We’ll get that to you in three months.” And three months comes by. And then they’re like, “Well, there’s these hurdles.”
It’s like, well, go read about the terror that LBJ and the Kennedys and others had in confronting J. Edgar Hoover. Go and read how terrified Eisenhower and some of them were of the Dulles brothers. They were scared. They knew where the power lies. So the presidency… Look, government, deep state, et cetera, they’ve been there a long time, and they know what’s happening and presidents come and go, but they stay forever. So that’s the paradigm that you’re going to have to fight against.
But people are like, “Oh, so-and-so is only against universal healthcare getting paid.”
I’m like, “No, no, no. That’s not why. They actually believe it.”
Or it’s like, “Oh, so-and-so only wants to advocate for war with Iran because they’re on the payroll of AIPAC.”
And it’s like, “Well, yeah. The AIPAC trips and the money helps. But they think that actually the system itself…”
This is a very Chomsky-esque systemic critique, is that any journalist worth their salt would never have the ability to get hired in a mainstream. So he’s like, “It’s not that you’re bad in the mainstream media, it’s that anyone good is not allowed to be elevated to your position because they have an ideology.” So that is the most self-reinforcing, pernicious mechanism of them all, and that’s really Washington in a nutshell.
He would be able to build upon that legacy in the way that George H.W. Bush was able to get elected off the back of Reagan. But H.W. Bush was fundamentally his own man. He’s a very misunderstood figure, very different than Ronald Reagan, didn’t end up working out for him, but he did get himself elected once. So that’s one path. That’s if you have a net positive Trump presidency. The other path is the ’04 path that I just laid out. If Trump does what Bush does, misinterprets his mandate, screws things up, creates chaos, and it makes it just generally annoying to live in American society, then you will see somebody in the Republican Party… Still, it could even be JD Vance because he could say, ” JD is my natural and my chosen successor,” but then he would lose an election and then he would no longer be the so-called leader of the Republican Party.
So I could see it swing in the other direction. I could see Republicans or others… Let’s say, if it’s a total disaster and we’d get down to 20% approval ratings and the economy is bad and stuff like that. Glenn Youngkin or somebody like that who’s very diametrically opposed to Donald Trump or at least aesthetically is somebody like that who could rise from the ashes. I’m just saying in terms of his aesthetic, not him per se. So there’s a variety of different directions. It’s a big question about the Republican base. A shit ton of people voted Republican now for the first time ever. So are they going to vote in party primaries? I don’t know. The traditional party primary voter is like a white boomer who’s 58, 59. Is the Latino guy in California who turned out to vote for Trump with a MAGA hat and rolling around suburban Los Angeles with that… Is he going to vote in the Republican Party? That could change. So the type of candidate themselves could come. So it’s way too early to say. We have so many variety of paths that we could go down.
You knowhow in the way that the Supreme Court just ended the conversation around gay marriage? So Republicans were like, “Yeah, whatever. We support gay marriage,” because they’re like, “That’s the law of the land. It is what it is.” They should just hope that their unpopular issue is resolved by the president and thus, they just don’t have to talk about it anymore. Now, the battleground is actually favorable for them. They get to talk about the economy and abortion. So their least popular issue gets solved by the president by consensus from his mandate, and then they can run on a brand new platform for the new issues that are facing America.
People should go listen to that. So there you go. Another really good one, I like to think a lot about the British Empire and what eventually led to that collapse. Nobody in 1919 said the British Empire has just collapsed. Basically, nobody still thought that. They were like, “Yeah, the first World War is horrible. But actually, we came out of this okay. We still have India. We still have all these African colonies and all that, but long periods of servitude, of debt to the United States, of degradation, of social upheaval, of Bolshevism, of American industrial might.” And next thing you know, you find yourself at Potsdam and Churchill’s like, “Holy shit, I have barely any power in this room.” So revolutions happen slowly and then all at once. So could you really put a real pin in the end of the British Empire? It took almost 40 years for it to end.
So America’s empire will eventually end either from rising geopolitical competition, likely China. Could be India. Nobody knows. It will likely be because of being overstretched of an elite capture, is usually the reason why, and a misreading of what made your original society work in the first place. That is one where… Honestly, all three of those things will happen all at once, and it will happen over an extremely long period of time. It’s very difficult to predict. I would not bet against America right now. I think we have a lot of fundamental strengths. It’s such a unique and dynamic country. It really is fucking crazy. Every time I travel the world, as much as I love all these different places, I go, “Man, I love the United States so much.” You’ll love it more when you leave. I really believe that.
They have to go home and their entire cities are burned to the ground, and they’re trying to readjust and their entire economy and way of life is overthrown in five years. That’s an insane time to be alive. What do we know? They worked out. By 1890s or so, there were people shaking hands, union and there’s a cool video on YouTube actually of FDR who is addressing some of the last Gettysburg veterans. I think it was the 75th anniversary or whatever. You can literally see these old men shaking hands across the stone wall. It gives me hope. Yeah.
There’s nothing down there. Zero. Going to the South Pole is a truly useless exercise. Yet, we went. We went twice. Actually, two people went there in a span of five weeks, and they competed to do so. The spirit that propelled Amundsen and Scott’s expedition and people like Shackleton who’s like… If you were to ask me my hero of all heroes, it’s Ernest Shackleton. It’s because his spirit, I think, lives on in the United States. It unfortunately died in Great Britain. Interestingly enough, the Brits even understand that. They’re like, “It’s very interesting how popular Shackleton is in America.” Even though he was Irish and he was a British subject, to me, he’s a spiritual American. I think that his spirit lives on within us and has always been here to a certain extent. Everywhere else, I think it’s dying. But here, I love it here.
There’s so many cool things about America. People move around all the time. They buy new houses. They start families. There’s no other place that you can just reset your whole life in the same country. It’s wild. You can reinvent yourself. You can go broke. You can get rich. You can go back and forth multiple times, and there’s nowhere else where you have enough freedom and opportunity to pursue that. We definitely have a lot of problems, but I’ve traveled enough of the world now to know that it’s a special place, and that gives me a lot of hope.
“History is the study of all the world’s crime.”
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 5:06 – Why Trump won
- 10:07 – Book recommendations
- 13:44 – History of wokeism
- 21:13 – History of Scots-Irish
- 27:51 – Biden
- 31:54 – FDR
- 33:55 – George W Bush
- 36:18 – LBJ
- 41:35 – Cuban Missile Crisis
- 49:07 – Immigration
- 1:21:06 – DOGE
- 1:47:46 – MAGA ideology
- 1:50:58 – Bernie Sanders
- 1:59:20 – Obama vs Trump
- 2:16:19 – Nancy Pelosi
- 2:19:34 – Kamala Harris
- 2:35:19 – 2020 Election
- 2:59:08 – Sam Harris
- 3:10:15 – UFOs
- 3:16:06 – Future of the Republican Party
- 3:22:43 – Future of the Democratic Party
- 3:30:41 – Hope
Introduction
Saagar Enjeti
People need to go back and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel and the Senate, he gets all this stuff through. But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place, right? We’ve had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House, and he is a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has fireside chats, he’s passing legislation, but more importantly, he tries various different programs, then they get ruled unconstitutional, he tries even more.
People need to go back and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel and the Senate, he gets all this stuff through. But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place, right? We’ve had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House, and he is a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has fireside chats, he’s passing legislation, but more importantly, he tries various different programs, then they get ruled unconstitutional, he tries even more.
So what does America take away from that? Every single time, if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was, really, part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression. He’s such an inspirational figure.
I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of FDR, I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had. I think they had a really, really good judgment and I’m not sure how intrinsic their own personal character was to their exploration and thinking about the world.
Actually, JFK might be our best example because he had the best judgment out of anybody in the room as a brand new president in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that.
And I encourage people out there, this is a brutal text, we were forced to read it in graduate school, The Essence of Decision by Graham Allison, I’m so thankful we did. It’s one of the foundations of political science because it lays out theories of how government works.
People really need to understand Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don’t care about you, they don’t even really care about the president. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes a great, shocking event like World War II to change really anything beyond the marginal.
Every once in a while, you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who’s actually able to take peacetime presidency and transform the country, but it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done.
So the question around The Essence of Decision was the theory behind the Cuban Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various different schools of thought, but one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three, the organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then, kind of the great man theory as well.
You and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT-109 and about how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II and how he literally swam miles with a wounded man’s life jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back and he saved him and he ended up on the cover of Life Magazine, he was a war hero.
And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called Why England Slept, which, to this day, is considered a text, which, at the moment, was able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement. I actually have a original copy, it’s one of my most prized possessions.
And from 1939… Because this is a 23-year-old kid, who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy? Turns out he’s a brilliant man.
And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody, so in the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who will succeed him, 26-year-old John F. Kennedy as a journalist, and all three of those presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that’s the story of America right there. It’s kind of amazing.
I’m going to give you one of the most depressing quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius, shout out to The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too because it really made me understand media. “People don’t want to be informed, they want to feel informed.”
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Saagar Enjeti, his second time in the podcast. Saagar is a political commentator, journalist, co-host of Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and of The Realignment podcast with Marshall Kosloff. Saagar is one of the most well-read people I’ve ever met. His love of history and the wisdom gained from reading thousands of history books radiates through every analysis he makes of the world.
The following is a conversation with Saagar Enjeti, his second time in the podcast. Saagar is a political commentator, journalist, co-host of Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and of The Realignment podcast with Marshall Kosloff. Saagar is one of the most well-read people I’ve ever met. His love of history and the wisdom gained from reading thousands of history books radiates through every analysis he makes of the world.
In this podcast, we trace out the history of the various ideological movements that led up to the current political moment. In doing so, we mention a large number of amazing books. We’ll put a link to them in the description for those interested to learn more about each topic.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Saagar Enjeti.
Why Trump won
Lex Fridman
So let’s start with the obvious big question, why do you think Trump won? Let’s break it down. Before the election, you said that if Trump wins, it’s going to be because of immigration. So aside from immigration, what are the maybe less than obvious reasons that Trump won?
So let’s start with the obvious big question, why do you think Trump won? Let’s break it down. Before the election, you said that if Trump wins, it’s going to be because of immigration. So aside from immigration, what are the maybe less than obvious reasons that Trump won?
Saagar Enjeti
Yes, we absolutely need to return to immigration, but without that, multifaceted explanation, let’s start with the easiest one. There has been a wave of anti-incumbent energy around the world. Financial Times chart recently went viral showing, so the first time, I think since World War II, possibly since 1905, I need to look at the data set, that all anti-incumbent parties all across the world suffered major defeats. So that’s a very, very high level analysis, and we can return to that if we talk about Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 because there were similar global precursors.
Yes, we absolutely need to return to immigration, but without that, multifaceted explanation, let’s start with the easiest one. There has been a wave of anti-incumbent energy around the world. Financial Times chart recently went viral showing, so the first time, I think since World War II, possibly since 1905, I need to look at the data set, that all anti-incumbent parties all across the world suffered major defeats. So that’s a very, very high level analysis, and we can return to that if we talk about Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 because there were similar global precursors.
The individual level in the United States, there’s a very simple explanation as well, which is that Joe Biden was very old, he was very unpopular, inflation was high. Inflation is one of the highest determiners of people switching their votes and of putting their primacy on that ahead of any other issue at the ballot box. So that’s that.
But I think it’s actually much deeper, at a psychological level, for who America is and what it is. And fundamentally, I think what we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about today is the evolution of the modern left and its collapse in the Kamala Harris candidacy, and eventually, the loss to Donald Trump in the popular vote where, really, is like an apotheosis of several social forces. So we’re going to talk about The Great Awakening or so-called Awokening, which is very important to understanding all of this.
There’s also really Donald Trump himself who is really one of the most unique individual American politicians that we’ve seen in decades. At this point, Donald Trump’s victory makes him the most important and transformative figure in American politics since FDR. And a thought process for the audience is in 2028, there will be an 18-year-old who’s eligible to vote who cannot remember a time when Donald J. Trump was not the central American figure.
And there’s stories in World War II where troops were on the front line, some were 18, 19 years old, FDR died, and they literally said, “Well, who’s the president?” And they said, “Harry Truman, you dumb ass.” And they go, “Who?” They couldn’t conceive of a universe where FDR was not the president of the United States. And Donald Trump, even during the Biden administration, he was the figure. Joe Biden defined his entire candidacy and his legacy around defeating this man, and obviously, he’s failed. We should talk a lot about Joe Biden as well for his own failed theories of the presidency.
So I think at a macro level, it’s easy to understand. At a basic level, inflation, it’s easy to understand. But what I really hope that a lot of people can take away is how fundamentally unique Donald Trump is as a political figure and what he was able to do to realign American politics really forever. In the white working class realignment originally of 2016, the activation, really, of a multiracial kind of working class coalition and of really splitting American lines along a single individual question of did you attend a four-year college degree institution or not?
And this is a crazy thing to say, Donald Trump is one of the most racially depolarizing electoral figures in American history. We lived in 2016 at a time when racial groups really voted in blocks, Latinos, Blacks, whites. There was some, of course, division between the white working class and the white college educated, white collar workers. But by and large, you could pretty fairly say that Asians, Indians, everyone, 80, 90% were going to vote for the Democratic Party, Latinos as well. I’m born here in the state of Texas. George W. Bush shocked people when he won some 40% of the Latino vote. Donald Trump just beat Kamala Harris with Latino men and he ran up the table for young men.
So really, fundamentally, we have witnessed a full realignment in American politics, and that’s a really fundamental problem for the modern left. It’s erased a lot of the conversation around gerrymandering, around the Electoral College, the so-called Electoral College bias towards Republicans. Really, being able to win the popular vote for the first time since 2004 is shocking and landmark achievement by a Republican.
In 2008, I have a book on my shelf and I always look at it to remind myself of how much things can change, James Carville, and it says 40 More Years, How Democrats Will Never Lose An Election Again. 2008, they wrote that book after the Obama coalition and the landslide. And something I love so much about this country, people change their minds all the time.
I was born in 1992, I watched red states go blue. I’ve seen blue states go red. I’ve seen swing states go red or blue. I’ve seen millions of people pick up and move, the greatest internal migration in the United States since World War II. And it’s really inspiring because it’s a really dynamic, interesting place. And I love covering it and I love thinking about it, talking about it, talking to people. It’s awesome.
Book recommendations
Lex Fridman
One of the reasons I’m a big fan of yours is you’re a student of history, and so, you’ve recommended a bunch of books to me. And they and others thread the different movements throughout American history. Some movements take off and do hold power for a long time, some don’t. And some are started by a small number of people and are controlled by a small number of people, some are mass movements. And it’s just fascinating to watch how those movements evolve, and then, fit themselves, maybe, into the constraints of a two-party system. And I’d love to talk about the various perspectives of that. So would it be fair to say that this election was turned into a kind of class struggle?
One of the reasons I’m a big fan of yours is you’re a student of history, and so, you’ve recommended a bunch of books to me. And they and others thread the different movements throughout American history. Some movements take off and do hold power for a long time, some don’t. And some are started by a small number of people and are controlled by a small number of people, some are mass movements. And it’s just fascinating to watch how those movements evolve, and then, fit themselves, maybe, into the constraints of a two-party system. And I’d love to talk about the various perspectives of that. So would it be fair to say that this election was turned into a kind of class struggle?
Saagar Enjeti
Well, I won’t go that far because to say it’s a class struggle really implies that things fundamentally align on economic lines, and I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate. Although, if that’s your lens, you could get there. So there’s a very big statistic going around right now where Kamala Harris increased her vote share and won households over $100,000 or more, and Donald Trump won households under 100,000. You could view that in an economic lens.
Well, I won’t go that far because to say it’s a class struggle really implies that things fundamentally align on economic lines, and I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate. Although, if that’s your lens, you could get there. So there’s a very big statistic going around right now where Kamala Harris increased her vote share and won households over $100,000 or more, and Donald Trump won households under 100,000. You could view that in an economic lens.
The problem again that I have is that that is much more a proxy for four-year college degree and for education. And so, one of my favorite books is called Coming Apart by Charles Murray. And that book, really, really underscores how the cultural milieu that people swim in when they attend a four-year college degree and the trajectory of their life, not only on where they move to, who they marry, what type of grocery store they go to, their cultural, what television shows that they watch.
One of my favorite questions from Charles Murray’s is called a Bubble Quiz. I encourage people to go take it by the way. It asks you a question. It’s like what does the word Branson mean to you? And it has a couple of answers. One of them is Branson is Sir Richard Branson. Number two is Branson, Missouri, which is like a country music tourist style destination. Three is, it means nothing. So you are less in a bubble if you say country music. And you’re very much in the bubble if you say Richard Branson. And I remember taking that test for the first time, I go, “Obviously, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic. Like what?” And then, I was like, “Wait.” I’m like, “I’m in the bubble.”
And there are other things in there like can you name various different military ranks? I can because I’m a history nerd, but the vast majority of college educated people don’t know anybody who served in the United States military, they don’t have family members who do… The most popular shows in America are like The Big Bang Theory and NCIS, whereas people in our, probably, cultural milieu, our favorite shows are White Lotus, The Last of Us, this is prestige television with a very small audience, but high income, high education.
So the point is that culture really defines who we are as Americans, where we live. And rural, urban is one way to describe it, but honestly, with the work from home revolution and more rich people and highly educated people moving to more rural suburban or areas they traditionally weren’t able to commute in, that’s changing. And so, really, the internet is everything.
The stuff that you consume on the internet, the stuff that you spend your time doing, type of books you read, whether you read a book at all, frankly, whether you travel to Europe, whether you have a passport, all the things that you value in your life, that is the real cultural divide in America. And I actually think that’s what this revolution of Donald Trump was activating and bringing people to the polls, bringing a lot of those traditional working class voters of all races away from the Democratic Party along the lines of elitism, of sneering, and of a general cultural feeling that these people don’t understand me and my struggles in this life.
History of wokeism
Lex Fridman
And so, the trivial formulation is the woke-ism and the anti woke-ism a movement?
And so, the trivial formulation is the woke-ism and the anti woke-ism a movement?
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So it’s not necessarily that Trump winning was a statement against woke-ism, it was the broader anti-elitism?
So it’s not necessarily that Trump winning was a statement against woke-ism, it was the broader anti-elitism?
Saagar Enjeti
It’s difficult to say because I wouldn’t dismiss anti woke-ism or woke-ism as an explanation. But we need to understand the electoral impacts of woke. So there’s varying degrees of how you’re going to encounter, quote-unquote, “woke-ism,” and this is a very difficult thing to define. So let me just try and break it down, which is there are the types of things that you’re going to interact with on a cultural basis.
It’s difficult to say because I wouldn’t dismiss anti woke-ism or woke-ism as an explanation. But we need to understand the electoral impacts of woke. So there’s varying degrees of how you’re going to encounter, quote-unquote, “woke-ism,” and this is a very difficult thing to define. So let me just try and break it down, which is there are the types of things that you’re going to interact with on a cultural basis.
And what I mean by that is going to watch a TV show, and just for some reason, there’s like two trans characters. And it’s never particularly explained why, they just are there. Or watching a commercial, and it’s the same thing. Watching, I don’t know, I remember I was watching, I think it was Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It was a terrible movie, by the way. Don’t recommend it. But one of the characters, I think her name was like America and she wore a gay pride flag. Look, many left-wingers would make fun of me for saying these things, but that is obviously a social agenda to the point as in they believe it is deeply acceptable that it’s used by Hollywood and cultural elites who really value those progress in sexual orientation and others and really believe it’s important to, quote-unquote, “showcase it for representation.” So that’s one way that we may encounter, quote-unquote, woke-ism.
But the more important ways, frankly, are the ways that affirmative action, which really has its roots in American society all the way going back to the 1960s, and how those have manifested in our economy and in our understanding of, quote-unquote, “discrimination.” So two books I can recommend, one is called The Origins of Woke, that’s by Richard Hanania. There’s another one, The Age of Entitlement, by Christopher Caldwell. And they make a very strong case, Caldwell in particular, he calls it like a new founding of America, was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it created an entire new legal regime and understanding of race in the American character and how the government was going to enforce that.
And that really ties in with another one of the books that I recommended to you about the origins of Trump by Jim Webb. And Senator Jim Webb, incredible, incredible man. He’s so under appreciated. Intellectual. He was anti-war. And people may remember him from the 2016 primary and they had asked him a question, I don’t exactly remember, about one of his enemies, and he’s like, “Well, one of them was a guy I shot in Vietnam.” And he was running against Hillary.
And that guy, he wrote the book, Born Fighting, I think it’s history of the Scots-Irish people, something like that. And that book really opened my eyes to the way that affirmative action and racial preferences that were playing out through the HR, managerial elite really turned a lot of people within the white working class away from the Democratic Party and felt fundamentally discriminated against by the professional, managerial class.
So there’s a lot of roots to this, The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham. And in terms of the origin of how we got here, but the crystallization of DEI and/or affirmative action, I prefer to use the term affirmative action, in the highest echelons of business. And there became this idea that representation itself was the only thing that mattered. And I think that right around 2014, that really went on steroids, and that’s why it’s not an accident that Donald J. Trump elected in 2016.
Lex Fridman
At this point, do you think this election is the kind of statement that woke-ism as a movement is dead?
At this point, do you think this election is the kind of statement that woke-ism as a movement is dead?
Saagar Enjeti
I don’t know. It’s very difficult to say because woke-ism itself is not a movement with a party leader, it’s a amorphous belief that has worked its way through institutions now for almost 40 or 50 years. It’s effectively a religion. And part of the reason why it’s difficult to define is it means different things to different people. So for example, there are varying degrees of how we would define, quote-unquote, “woke.” Do I think that the Democrats will be speaking in so-called academic language? Yes, I do think they will.
I don’t know. It’s very difficult to say because woke-ism itself is not a movement with a party leader, it’s a amorphous belief that has worked its way through institutions now for almost 40 or 50 years. It’s effectively a religion. And part of the reason why it’s difficult to define is it means different things to different people. So for example, there are varying degrees of how we would define, quote-unquote, “woke.” Do I think that the Democrats will be speaking in so-called academic language? Yes, I do think they will.
I think that the next Democratic nominee will not do that. However, Kamala Harris actually did move as much as she could away from, quote-unquote, “woke,” but she basically was punished for a lot of the sins of both herself from 2019, but a general cultural feeling that her and the people around her do not understand me and not only do not understand me, but have racial preferences or a regime or an understanding that would lead to a, quote-unquote, “equity mindset,” equal outcomes for everybody as opposed to equality of opportunity, which is more of a colorblind philosophy. So I can’t say, I think it’s way too early.
And again, you can not use the word Latinx, but do you still believe in an effective affirmative action regime in terms of how you would run your Department of Justice, in terms of how you view the world, in terms of what you think the real dividing lines in America are? Because I would say that’s still actually kind of a woke mindset, and that’s part of the reason why the term itself doesn’t really mean a whole lot. And we have to get, actually, really specific about what it looks like in operations.
In operation, it means affirmative action, it means the NASDAQ passing some law that if you want to go public or something, that you have to have a woman and a person of color on your board. This is a blatant and extraordinary, look, racialism that they’ve enshrined in their bylaws. So you can get rid of ESG, that’s great, you can get rid of DEI, I think that’s great, but it’s really about a mindset and a view of the world, and I don’t think that’s going anywhere.
Lex Fridman
And you think the reason it doesn’t work well in practice is because there’s a big degree to which it’s anti-meritocracy.
And you think the reason it doesn’t work well in practice is because there’s a big degree to which it’s anti-meritocracy.
Saagar Enjeti
It’s anti-American, really. DEI and woke and affirmative action make perfect sense in a lot of different countries. And there are a lot of countries out there that are multi-ethnic and they’re heterogeneous and they are run by, basically, quasi-dictators. And the way it works is that you pay off the Christians and they pay off the Muslims and they get this guy and they get that guy and everybody kind of shakes… It’s very explicit where they’re like, we have 10 spots and they go to the Christians, we have 10 spots, and they go to the Hindus. India’s a country that I know pretty well, and this does kind of work like that on state politics level in some respect.
It’s anti-American, really. DEI and woke and affirmative action make perfect sense in a lot of different countries. And there are a lot of countries out there that are multi-ethnic and they’re heterogeneous and they are run by, basically, quasi-dictators. And the way it works is that you pay off the Christians and they pay off the Muslims and they get this guy and they get that guy and everybody kind of shakes… It’s very explicit where they’re like, we have 10 spots and they go to the Christians, we have 10 spots, and they go to the Hindus. India’s a country that I know pretty well, and this does kind of work like that on state politics level in some respect.
But in America, fundamentally, we really believe that, no matter where you are from, that you come here, and basically, within a generation, especially if you migrate here legally and you integrate, that you leave a lot of that stuff behind. And the story, the American dream that is ingrained in so many of us is, one, that really does not mesh well with any sort of racial preference regime or anything that’s not meritocratic.
And I will give the left-wingers some credit in the idea that meritocracy itself could have preference for people who have privileged backgrounds, I think that’s true. And so, the way I would like to see it is to increase everybody’s equality of opportunity to make sure that they all have a chance at, quote-unquote, “willing out the American dream.” But that doesn’t erase meritocracy, hard work, and many of the other things that we associate with the American character, with the American frontier.
So these are two ideologies which are really at odds. In a lot of ways, woke-ism, racialism and all this is a third world ideology. It’s one that’s very prevalent in Europe and all across Asia, but it doesn’t mix well here, and it shouldn’t. And I’m really glad that America feels the same way.
History of Scots-Irish
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I got to go back to Jim Webb in that book. What a badass, fascinating book.
Yeah, I got to go back to Jim Webb in that book. What a badass, fascinating book.
Saagar Enjeti
Oh my God, it’s amazing.
Oh my God, it’s amazing.
Lex Fridman
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. So I did not realize to the degree, first of all how badass the Scots-Irish are. And that to the degree, many of the things that kind of identify as American and part of the American spirit were defined by this relatively small group of people as he describes the motto could be summarized as fight, sing, drink and pray.
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. So I did not realize to the degree, first of all how badass the Scots-Irish are. And that to the degree, many of the things that kind of identify as American and part of the American spirit were defined by this relatively small group of people as he describes the motto could be summarized as fight, sing, drink and pray.
So there’s the principles of fierce individualism, the principles of a deep distrust of government, the elites, the authorities, bottom-up governance, over 2,000 years of a military tradition. They made up 40% of the Revolutionary War Army and produced numerous military leaders including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, and a bunch of presidents, some of the more gangster presidents, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Just the whole cultural legacy of country music.
Saagar Enjeti
We owe them so much and they really don’t get their due, unfortunately, a lot for the reasons that I just described around racialism is because post-mass immigration from Europe, the term white kind of became blanket applied to new Irish, to Italians, to Slovenians. And as you and I both know, if you travel those countries, people are pretty different. And it’s not the different here in the United States. Scots-Irish were some of the original settlers here in America, and particularly in Appalachia. And their contribution to the fighting spirit and their own culture and who we are as individualists and some of the first people to ever settle the frontier. And that frontier mindset really does come from them. We owe them just as much as we do the Puritans, but they don’t ever really get their due.
We owe them so much and they really don’t get their due, unfortunately, a lot for the reasons that I just described around racialism is because post-mass immigration from Europe, the term white kind of became blanket applied to new Irish, to Italians, to Slovenians. And as you and I both know, if you travel those countries, people are pretty different. And it’s not the different here in the United States. Scots-Irish were some of the original settlers here in America, and particularly in Appalachia. And their contribution to the fighting spirit and their own culture and who we are as individualists and some of the first people to ever settle the frontier. And that frontier mindset really does come from them. We owe them just as much as we do the Puritans, but they don’t ever really get their due.
And the reason I recommend that book is if you read that book and you understand then how exactly could this group of white working class voters go from 2012 voting for a man named Barack Hussein Obama to Donald J. Trump? It makes perfect sense if you combine it with a lot of the stuff I’m talking about here, about affirmative action, about distrust of the elites, about feeling as if institutions are not seeing through to you and specifically also not valuing your contribution to American history, and in some cases actively looking down.
I’m glad you pointed out not only their role in the Revolutionary War, but in the Civil War as well, and just how much of a contribution culturally really that we owe them for the groundwork that so many of us who came later could build upon and adopt some of their own ideas and their culture as our own. It’s one of the things that makes America great.
Lex Fridman
Mark Twain.
Mark Twain.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So much of the culture, so much of the American spirit, the whole idea, the whole shape and form and type of populism that represents our democracy. So would you trace that fierce individualism that we think of back to them?
So much of the culture, so much of the American spirit, the whole idea, the whole shape and form and type of populism that represents our democracy. So would you trace that fierce individualism that we think of back to them?
Saagar Enjeti
Definitely. It’s a huge part of them, about who they were, about the screw you attitude. That book actually kind of had a renaissance back in 2016 when Hillbilly Elegy came out. I’m sure you remember this, which it’s kind of weird to think that it’s now the Vice President-elect of the United States. It’s kind of wild, honestly, to think about. But JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, I think was really important for a lot of American elites who were like, “How do these poor people support Trump? Where does this shit come from?” Really, if you really think back to that time, it was shocking to the elite character that any person in the world could ever vote for Donald Trump. And not just vote, he won the election. How does that happen? And that’s Hillbilly Elegy guided people in an understanding of what that’s like on a lived day-to-day basis.
Definitely. It’s a huge part of them, about who they were, about the screw you attitude. That book actually kind of had a renaissance back in 2016 when Hillbilly Elegy came out. I’m sure you remember this, which it’s kind of weird to think that it’s now the Vice President-elect of the United States. It’s kind of wild, honestly, to think about. But JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, I think was really important for a lot of American elites who were like, “How do these poor people support Trump? Where does this shit come from?” Really, if you really think back to that time, it was shocking to the elite character that any person in the world could ever vote for Donald Trump. And not just vote, he won the election. How does that happen? And that’s Hillbilly Elegy guided people in an understanding of what that’s like on a lived day-to-day basis.
And JD, to his credit, talks about Scots-Irish heritage, about Appalachia and the legacy of what that culture looks like today and how a lot of these people voted for Donald Trump. But we got to give credit to Jim Webb who wrote the history of these people and taught me and you about their original fight against the oppressors in Scotland and Ireland and their militant spirit and how they were able to bring that over here. And they got their due in Andrew Jackson and some of our other populist presidents who set us up on the road to Donald Trump to where we are today.
Lex Fridman
Dude, it got me pumped and excited to be an American.
Dude, it got me pumped and excited to be an American.
Saagar Enjeti
Me too. I love that book.
Me too. I love that book.
Lex Fridman
It’s crazy that JD, the same guy, because that’s Hillbilly Elegy’s, what I kind of thought of him as.
It’s crazy that JD, the same guy, because that’s Hillbilly Elegy’s, what I kind of thought of him as.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, I’ll tell you, for me, it’s actually pretty surreal. I met JD Vance in 2017 in a bar. I didn’t ever think he would be the Vice President-elect of the United States. Just kind of wild.
Yeah, I’ll tell you, for me, it’s actually pretty surreal. I met JD Vance in 2017 in a bar. I didn’t ever think he would be the Vice President-elect of the United States. Just kind of wild.
One of my friends went back and dug up the email that we originally sent him, just like, “Hey, do you want to meet up?” And he was like, “Sure.” I was watching on television. The first time that it really hit me, I was like, whoa. It was like, name in a history book is whenever he became the vice presidential nominee. I was watching him on TV and the confetti was falling and he was waving with his wife, and I was like, “Wow, that’s it.” You’re in the history books now forever, especially now as the literal Vice President-elect of the US.
But his own evolution is actually a fascinating story for us too because I think a lot of the time I’ve spent right now is a lot of what I’m giving right now are 2016 kind of takes about why Trump won that time. But we just spent a lot of time on how Donald Trump won this election and what happened, some of the failures of the Biden administration, some of the payback for the Great Awokening. But also, if you look at the evolution of JD Vance, this is a person who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. And not a lot of people pay attention to this, but if you read Hillbilly Elegy, JD was much more of a traditional conservative at that time.
He was citing a report, I think the famous passage is about payday loans and why they’re good or something like that. I don’t know his position today, but I would assume that he’s probably changed that. But the point is that his ideological evolution from watching somebody who really was more of a traditional Republican with a deep empathy for the white working class than eventually become a champion and a disciple of Donald Trump, and to believe that he himself was the vehicle for accomplishing and bettering the United States, but specifically for working class Americans really of all stripes. And that story is really one of the rise of the modern left as it exists as a political project, as an ideology. It’s also one of the Republican Party which coalesced now with Donald Trump as a legitimate figure and as the single bulwark against cultural leftism and elitism that eventually was normalized to the point that majority of Americans decided to vote for him in 2024.
Biden
Lex Fridman
So let’s talk about 2024. What happened with the left? What happened with Biden? What’s your take on Biden?
So let’s talk about 2024. What happened with the left? What happened with Biden? What’s your take on Biden?
Saagar Enjeti
Biden is, I try to remove myself from it, and I try not to give big history takes while you’re in the moment. But it’s really hard not to say that he’s one of the worst presidents in modern history. And I think the reason why I’m going to go with it is because I want to judge him by the things that he set out to do.
Biden is, I try to remove myself from it, and I try not to give big history takes while you’re in the moment. But it’s really hard not to say that he’s one of the worst presidents in modern history. And I think the reason why I’m going to go with it is because I want to judge him by the things that he set out to do.
So Joe Biden has been the same person for his entire political career. He is a basically C student who thinks he’s an A student. The chip on his shoulder against the elites has played to his benefit in his original election to the United States Senate through his entire career as a United States Senator, where he always wanted to be the star and the center of attention and to his 1988 presidential campaign. And one of the most fascinating things about Biden and watching him age is watching him become even more of what he already was.
And so, a book recommendation, it’s called What It Takes, and it was written in 1988, and there’s actually a long chapter on Joe Biden and about the plagiarism scandal. One of the things that comes across is his sheer arrogance and belief in himself as to why he should be the center of attention.
Now, the reason I’m laying all this out is the arrogance of Joe Biden, the individual and his character is fundamentally the reason that his presidency went awry. This is a person who was elected in 2020, really because of a feeling of chaos of Donald Trump, of we need normalcy, decides to come into the office, portrays himself as a, quote-unquote, “transitional president,” slowly begins to lose a lot of his faculties and then surrounds himself with sycophants, the same ones who have been around him for so long that he had no single input into his life to tell him that he needed to stop and he needed to drop out of the race until it became truly undeniable to the vast majority of the American people.
And that’s why I’m trying to keep it as him as an individual, as a president, because we could separate him from some of his accomplishments and the things that happened on… Some of them I support, some I don’t, but generally, a lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the CHIPS Act. A lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the Build Back Better bill or whatever his Lina Khan antitrust policy. They’re going to look back on him and they’re going to remember high inflation. They’re going to remember somebody who fundamentally never was up to the job in the sense that, again, book recommendation Freedom From Fear by David Kennedy is about the Roosevelt years.
And one of the most important things people don’t understand is the New Deal didn’t really work in the way that a lot of people wanted it to. There was still high unemployment, there was still a lot of suffering, but you know what changed? They felt that they had a vigorous commander in chief who was doing everything in his power to attack the problems of the everyday American. So even though things didn’t even materially change, the vigor, that’s a term that was often associated with John F. Kennedy, he had vigor, in the Massachusetts accent. We had this young vibrant president in 1960, and he was running around and he wanted to convince us that he was working every single day tirelessly. And when you have an 80-year-old man who is simply just eating ice cream and going to the beach while people’s grocery prices and all these things go up-
Saagar Enjeti
… cream and going to the beach while people’s grocery prices and all this thing go up by 25%. And we don’t see the same vigor, we don’t see the same action, the biased action, which is so important in the modern presidency.
… cream and going to the beach while people’s grocery prices and all this thing go up by 25%. And we don’t see the same vigor, we don’t see the same action, the biased action, which is so important in the modern presidency.
That is fundamentally part of the reason why the Democrats lost the election and also why I think that he missed his moment in such a dramatic way. And he had the opportunity, he could have done it if he wanted to, but maybe 20 years ago. But the truth is that his own narcissism, his own misplaced belief in himself and his own accidental rise to the presidency ended up in his downfall.
And it’s amazing because again, if we look back to his original campaign speech 2019, why I’m running for president, it was Charlottesville, and he said, “I want to defeat Donald Trump forever and I want to make sure that he never gets back in the White House again.” By his own metric he did fail. It was the only thing he wanted to do, and he failed from.
FDR
Lex Fridman
You said a lot of interesting stuff. One, FDR that’s really interesting. It’s not about the specific policy, it’s about fighting for the people and doing that with charisma and just uniting the entire country for a… This is the same with Bernie. Maybe there’s a lot of people that disagree with Bernie that’s still supporting him because we just want somebody-
You said a lot of interesting stuff. One, FDR that’s really interesting. It’s not about the specific policy, it’s about fighting for the people and doing that with charisma and just uniting the entire country for a… This is the same with Bernie. Maybe there’s a lot of people that disagree with Bernie that’s still supporting him because we just want somebody-
Saagar Enjeti
Feels authentic.
Feels authentic.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
That’s it.
That’s it.
Lex Fridman
We just want somebody to fight authentically for us.
We just want somebody to fight authentically for us.
Saagar Enjeti
Yes, yes. FDR people really… FDR was like a king. He was like Jesus Christ in the US. And some of it was because of what he did, but it was just the fight. People need to go back and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel and the Senate. He gets all this stuff through.
Yes, yes. FDR people really… FDR was like a king. He was like Jesus Christ in the US. And some of it was because of what he did, but it was just the fight. People need to go back and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel and the Senate. He gets all this stuff through.
But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place. We’ve had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House, and he was a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has fireside chats. He’s passing legislation, but more importantly, so he tries various different programs.
Then they get ruled unconstitutional. He tries even more. What does America take away from that? Every single time if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was a really part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression. He’s such an inspirational figure. He really is.
And people think of him for World War II, of course, we can spend forever on that. But in my opinion, the early years are not studied enough. 33 to 37 is one of the most remarkable periods in American history. We were not ruled by a president. We were ruled by a king, by a monarch. And people liked it. He was a dictator and he was a good one.
George W Bush
Lex Fridman
Yeah. To push back against the implied thing that you said.
Yeah. To push back against the implied thing that you said.
Saagar Enjeti
Sure.
Sure.
Lex Fridman
When saying Biden is the worst president-
When saying Biden is the worst president-
Saagar Enjeti
No second worst in modern history, that’s what I said.
No second worst in modern history, that’s what I said.
Lex Fridman
Second in modern history. Who’s the worst?
Second in modern history. Who’s the worst?
Saagar Enjeti
W, no question.
W, no question.
Lex Fridman
I see. Because of the horrible wars probably.
I see. Because of the horrible wars probably.
Saagar Enjeti
I mean, Iraq is just so bad.
I mean, Iraq is just so bad.
Lex Fridman
It’s just a mess. Yeah.
It’s just a mess. Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
One of my favorite authors is a guy, Jean Edward Smith. He’s written a bunch of presidential biographies. And in the opening of his W Biography, he’s like, “There’s just no question. This is a single worst foreign policy mistake in all of American history. And W is one of our worst presidents ever.” He had terrible judgment and it got us into a war of his own choosing. It was a disaster, and it set us up for failure. By the way, we talked a lot about Donald Trump. Nobody is more responsible for the rise of Donald Trump than George W. Bush, but I could go off on Bush for a long time.
One of my favorite authors is a guy, Jean Edward Smith. He’s written a bunch of presidential biographies. And in the opening of his W Biography, he’s like, “There’s just no question. This is a single worst foreign policy mistake in all of American history. And W is one of our worst presidents ever.” He had terrible judgment and it got us into a war of his own choosing. It was a disaster, and it set us up for failure. By the way, we talked a lot about Donald Trump. Nobody is more responsible for the rise of Donald Trump than George W. Bush, but I could go off on Bush for a long time.
Lex Fridman
Oh, we will. We’ll return there. As part of the pushback I’d like to say, because I agree with your criticism of arrogance and narcissism against Joe Biden. The same could be said about Donald Trump.
Oh, we will. We’ll return there. As part of the pushback I’d like to say, because I agree with your criticism of arrogance and narcissism against Joe Biden. The same could be said about Donald Trump.
Saagar Enjeti
You’re absolutely right.
You’re absolutely right.
Lex Fridman
Of arrogance. And I think you’ve also articulated that a lot of presidents throughout American history have suffered from a bad case of arrogance and narcissism.
Of arrogance. And I think you’ve also articulated that a lot of presidents throughout American history have suffered from a bad case of arrogance and narcissism.
Saagar Enjeti
Absolutely. But sometimes for a benefit. You have to be a pretty crazy person to want to be president. I had put out a tweet that got some controversy, and I think it was Joe Rogan, who I love, but he was like, “I want to find out who Kamala Harris is as a human being.” And I was like, “I’m actually not interested in who politicians are as human beings at all.” I was like, “I’ve read too much about them to know, I know who you are.” If you spend your life and because I live in Washington and I spend a lot of time around would-be politicians, I know what it takes to actually become the president. It’s crazy. You have to give up everything, everything.
Absolutely. But sometimes for a benefit. You have to be a pretty crazy person to want to be president. I had put out a tweet that got some controversy, and I think it was Joe Rogan, who I love, but he was like, “I want to find out who Kamala Harris is as a human being.” And I was like, “I’m actually not interested in who politicians are as human beings at all.” I was like, “I’ve read too much about them to know, I know who you are.” If you spend your life and because I live in Washington and I spend a lot of time around would-be politicians, I know what it takes to actually become the president. It’s crazy. You have to give up everything, everything.
Every night, you’re not spending it with your wife. You’re spending it at dinner with potential donors, with friends, with people who can connect you. Even after you get elected, that’s even moreso now you got to raise money and now you’re onto the next thing. Now you want to get your political thing through. You’re going to spend all your time on your phone. You and your staff are going to be more like this.
Your entire life revolves around your career. It’s honestly, you need an insane level of narcissism to do it because you have to believe that you are better than everybody else, which is already pretty crazy. And not only that, your own personal characteristics and foibles lead you to the pursuit of this office and to the pursuit of the idolatry of the self and everything around you.
LBJ
There’s a famous story of Lady Bird Johnson after Johnson becomes the president and he’s talking to the White House Butler. She was like, “Everything in this house revolves around my husband. Whatever’s left goes to the girls,” her two children, “And I’ll take the scraps.” Everything revolved around Johnson’s political career and his daughters, when they’re honest, because they like to paper over some of the things that happened under him, but they didn’t spend any time with him.
Saturday morning was for breakfast with Richard Russell, I forget. These are all in the Robert A. Caro books. Sunday was for Rayburn. There was no time for his kids. That’s what it was. And by the way, he’s one of the greatest politicians to ever live. But he also died from a massive heart attack and he was a deeply sad and depressed individual.
Lex Fridman
I saw that tweet, to go back to that. And also I listened to your incredible debate about it with Marshall on the Realignment podcast. And I have to side with Marshall. I think you’re just wrong on this.
I saw that tweet, to go back to that. And also I listened to your incredible debate about it with Marshall on the Realignment podcast. And I have to side with Marshall. I think you’re just wrong on this.
Saagar Enjeti
All right.
All right.
Lex Fridman
Because I think revealing the character of a person is really important to understand how they will act in a room full of generals and full of-
Because I think revealing the character of a person is really important to understand how they will act in a room full of generals and full of-
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, this gets to the judgment question.
Yeah, this gets to the judgment question.
Lex Fridman
The judgment.
The judgment.
Saagar Enjeti
And that’s, I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of FDR. I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had. I think they had really, really good judgment. And I’m not sure how intrinsic their own personal character was to their exploration and thinking about the world. JFK is actually, JFK might be our best example because he had the best judgment out of anybody in a room as a brand new president in the Cuban Missile crisis.
And that’s, I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of FDR. I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had. I think they had really, really good judgment. And I’m not sure how intrinsic their own personal character was to their exploration and thinking about the world. JFK is actually, JFK might be our best example because he had the best judgment out of anybody in a room as a brand new president in the Cuban Missile crisis.
And he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that. But how did he arrive to good judgment? Some of it certainly was his character, and we can go again though into his laundry list of that. But most of it was around being with his father, seeing some of the mistakes that he would make. And he was also had a deeply inquisitive mind and he experienced World War II at the personal level after PT 109.
Look, I get it. I actually could steal, man. The response to what I’m saying is judgment is not divisible from personal character, but just because I know a lot of politicians and I’ve read enough with the really great ones, the people who I revere the most, there’s really bad personal stuff basically every single time.
Lex Fridman
But you’re saying the judgment was good?
But you’re saying the judgment was good?
Saagar Enjeti
His judgment was great. His judgment-
His judgment was great. His judgment-
Lex Fridman
On the Cuban Missile Crisis.
On the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Saagar Enjeti
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
Some of the best judgment and decision-making in the history of America.
Some of the best judgment and decision-making in the history of America.
Saagar Enjeti
Yes, and we should study a lot of it. And I encourage people out there, this is a brutal text. We were forced to read it in graduate school, the Essence of Decision by Graham Allison. I’m so thankful we did. It’s one of the foundations of political science because it lays out theories of how government works. This is also a useful transition, by the way, if we want to talk about Trump and some of his cabinet and how that is shaping up because people really need to understand Washington.
Yes, and we should study a lot of it. And I encourage people out there, this is a brutal text. We were forced to read it in graduate school, the Essence of Decision by Graham Allison. I’m so thankful we did. It’s one of the foundations of political science because it lays out theories of how government works. This is also a useful transition, by the way, if we want to talk about Trump and some of his cabinet and how that is shaping up because people really need to understand Washington.
Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don’t care about you. They don’t even really care about the president. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes a great shocking event like World War II to change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who’s actually able to take peacetime presidency and transform the country, but it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done.
The question around the essence of decision was the theory behind the Cuban Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various different schools of thought. But one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three, the organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of The Great Man Theory as well. you and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT 109 and about how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II as this, I think it was a First Lieutenant or something like that. And how he literally swam miles with a wounded man’s life jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back, and he saved him and he ended up on the cover of Life Magazine and he was a war hero. And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called Why England Slept, which to this day is considered a text, which at the moment was able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement.
I actually have a original copy is one of my most prized possessions. And from 1939, because this is a 23-year-old kid, who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy? Turns out he’s a brilliant man. And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody. In the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general, who will succeed him. 26-year-old John F. Kennedy as a journalist, some shit head journalists on the side, and all three of those presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that’s the story of America right there. It’s kind of amazing. I loved people to say that because you never know about who will end up rising to power.
Lex Fridman
Are you announcing that you’re running for president?
Are you announcing that you’re running for president?
Saagar Enjeti
No, absolutely not.
No, absolutely not.
Lex Fridman
Good.
Good.
Saagar Enjeti
I don’t have what it takes. I don’t think so. I’m self-aware.
I don’t have what it takes. I don’t think so. I’m self-aware.
Lex Fridman
Well, maybe humility is necessary for greatness. Okay. Actually, can we just linger on that book?
Well, maybe humility is necessary for greatness. Okay. Actually, can we just linger on that book?
Cuban Missile Crisis
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
The book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham Allison, it presents three different models of how government works, the Rational Act model, so seeing government as one entity. Trying to maximize the national interest. Also seeing government as through the lens of the momentum of standard operating procedures. So this giant organization that’s just doing things how it’s always been done. And the government politics model of there’s just these individual internal power struggles within government. And all of that is a different way to view, and they’re probably all true to a degree, of how decisions are made within this giant machinery of government.
The book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham Allison, it presents three different models of how government works, the Rational Act model, so seeing government as one entity. Trying to maximize the national interest. Also seeing government as through the lens of the momentum of standard operating procedures. So this giant organization that’s just doing things how it’s always been done. And the government politics model of there’s just these individual internal power struggles within government. And all of that is a different way to view, and they’re probably all true to a degree, of how decisions are made within this giant machinery of government.
Saagar Enjeti
That’s why it’s so important is because you cannot read that book and say one is true and one is not. You can say one is more true than the other, but all of them are deeply true. And this is one, or this is probably a good transition to Donald Trump because… And I guess for the people out there who think I’ve been up too obsequious, you’ll be my criticism, Trump says something very fundamental and interesting on the Joe Rogan podcast, probably the most important thing that he ever said. Which is he said, “I like to have people like John Bolton in my administration, well, because scare people and it makes me seem like the most rational individual in the room.”
That’s why it’s so important is because you cannot read that book and say one is true and one is not. You can say one is more true than the other, but all of them are deeply true. And this is one, or this is probably a good transition to Donald Trump because… And I guess for the people out there who think I’ve been up too obsequious, you’ll be my criticism, Trump says something very fundamental and interesting on the Joe Rogan podcast, probably the most important thing that he ever said. Which is he said, “I like to have people like John Bolton in my administration, well, because scare people and it makes me seem like the most rational individual in the room.”
At a very intuitive level, a lot of people can understand that, and then they can rationalize, while there are picks that Donald Trump has brought into his White House, people like Mike Waltz and others that have espoused views that are directly at odds with a “anti-neocon anti-Liz Cheney agenda”. Now, Trump’s theory of this is that he likes to have “psychopaths” like John Bolton in the room with him while he’s sitting across from Kim Jong Un because it gets scared.
What I think Trump never understood when he was president, and I honestly question if he still does now, is those two theories that you laid out, which are not about the rational interest as the government is one model, but the bureaucratic theory and the organizational theory of politics. And because what Trump I don’t think quite gets is that there are 99% of the decisions that get made in government never reached the president’s desk. One of the most important Obama quotes ever is, “By the time it gets to my desk, nobody else can solve it. All the problems here are hard. All the problems here don’t have an answer. That’s why I have to make the call.”
The theory that Trump has that you can have people in there who are, let’s say warmongers, neocons or whatever, who don’t necessarily agree with you, is that when push comes to shove at the most important decisions, that I’ll still be able to rein those people in as an influence. Here’s the issue. Let’s say for Mike Waltz, who’s going to be the National Security Advisor, a lot of people don’t really understand there’s this theory of national security advisor where you call me into your office and you’re the president and you’re like, “Hey, what do we think about Iran?” I’m like, “I think you should do X, Y, and Z.”
No, that’s not how it works. The national security advisor’s job is to coordinate the inter-agency process. His job is to actually convene meetings, him and his staff, where in the situation room, CIA, state Department, SECDEF, others before the POTUS even walks in, we have options. We’re like, “Hey, Russia just invaded Ukraine. Weed a package of options. Those packages of options are concede of three things. We’re going to have one group, we’re going to call it the dovish option. Two, we’re going to call it the middle ground. Three, the hardcore package.”
Trump walks in, this is how it’s supposed to work. Trump walks in and he goes, “Okay, Russia invaded Ukraine. What do we do?” “Mr. President, we’ve prepared three options for you. We got one, two, and three.” Now, who has the power? Is it Trump when he picks one, two, or three? Or is the man who decides what’s even in option one, two, and three? That is the part where Trump needs to really understand how these things happen.
And I watched this happen to him in his first administration. He hired a guy, Mike Flynn, who was his national security advisor. You could say a lot about Flynn, but him and Trump were at least like this on foreign policy. Flynn gets outed because what I would call an FBI coup, whatever. 33 days, he’s out as a national security advisor, H.R McMaster, he’s got a nice shiny uniform, four star, all of this. McMaster doesn’t agree with Donald Trump at all. And so Trump says, “I ran on pulling out of Afghanistan, I want to get out of Afghanistan.” They’re like, “Yeah, we’ll get out of Afghanistan, but before we get out, we got to go back in.” As in we need more troops in there. And he’s like, “Oh, okay.” It’s like all this and proves a plan and effectively gives a speech in 2017 where he ends up escalating and increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan. And it’s only until February, 2020 that he gets to sign a deal, the Taliban peace deal, which in my opinion, he should have done in 2017.
But the reason why that happened was because of that organizational theory, of that bureaucratic politics theory where H.R McMaster is able to guide the inter-agency process, bring the uniform recommendations of the joint chiefs of staff and others to give Donald Trump no option but to say, “We must put troops.” Another example of this is a book called Obama’s War by Bob Woodward. I highly encourage people to read this book because this book talks about how Obama comes into the White House in 2009 and he says, “I want to get out of Iraq and I don’t want to increase… I want to fight the Good War in Afghanistan.” Obama’s a thoughtful guy, too thoughtful actually. And so he sits there and he’s working out his opinions. And what he starts to watch is that very slowly his options began to narrow because strategic leaks start to come out from the White House situation room about what we should do in Afghanistan.
And pretty soon David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal and the entire national security apparatus has Obama pegged where he basically politically at the time decides to take the advantage position of increasing troops in Afghanistan, but then tries to have it both ways by saying, “But in two years, we’re going to withdraw.” That book really demonstrates how the deep state can completely remove any of your options to be able to move by presenting you with ones which you don’t even want, and then making it politically completely infeasible to travel down the extreme directions.
That’s why when Trump says things like, “I want to get out of Syria,” that doesn’t compute up here for the Pentagon. Because first of all, if I even asked you how many troops we have in Syria, and you could go on the DOD website, it’ll tell you a number. The number’s bullshit because the way that they do it is if you’re only there for 179 days, you don’t count as active, military contracts. The real numbers, let’s say five times.
And so Trump would be like, “Hey, I want to get out of Syria.” They’re like, “Yeah, we’ll do it. Six months, we need six months.” And after six months ago, he goes, “So, are we out of Syria yet?” And they’re like, “No. Well, we got to wrap this up. We got this base, we got that, and we have this important mission.” And next thing you know, you’re out of office and it’s over. That there’s all these things which I don’t think he quite understands. I know that some of the people around him who disagree with these picks do is the reason why these picks really matter, it’s not only are the voices in the situation room for the really, really high profile stuff, it’s where all little things to never get to that president’s desk of which can shape extraordinary policy.
And I’ll give you the best example. There was never a decision by FDR as President of the United States to oil embargo Japan. One, which he thought about as deeply as you and I would want. It was a decision made within the State Department. It was a decision that was made by some of his advisors. I think he eventually signed off on it. It was a conscious choice, but it was not one which ever was understood the implications that by doing that, we invite a potential response like Pearl Harbor. So think about what the organizational bureaucratic model can tell us about the extraordinary blowback that we can get and why we want people with great judgment all the way up and down the entire national security chain in the White House.
Immigration
Also, I just realized I did not talk about immigration, which is so insane. One of the reasons Donald Trump won in 2024, of course, was because of the massive change to the immigration status quo. The truth is is that it may actually be second to inflation in terms of the reason that Trump did win the presidency was because Joe Biden fundamentally changed the immigration status quo in this country. That was another thing about the Scots-Irish people and others that we need to understand is that when government machinery and elitism and liberalism appears to be more concerned about people who are coming here in a disorderly and illegal process and about their rights and their ability to “pursue the American dream,” while the American dream is dying for the native-born population, that is a huge reason why people are turning against mass immigration. Historically as well, my friend, Reihan Salam, wrote a book called Melting Pot or Civil War? And one of the most important parts about that book is the history of mass migration to the United States.
If we think about the transition from Scots-Irish America to the opening of America to the Irish and to mass European immigration, what a lot of people don’t realize is it caused a ton of problems. There were mass movements at the time, the no nothings and others in the 1860s who rose up against mass European migration. They were particularly concerned about Catholicism as the religion of a lot of the new immigrants.
But really what it was is about the changing of the American character by people who are not have the same traditions, values and skills as the native-born population. And their understanding of what they’re owed and their role in American society is very different from the way that people previously had. One of the most tumultuous periods of US politics was actually during the resolution of the immigration question where we had massive waves of foreign-born population come to the United States. We had them integrated, luckily actually at the time with the Industrial Revolution. So we actually did have jobs for them.
One of the problems is that today in the United States, we have one of the highest levels of foreign-born population than ever before, actually since that time in the early 1900s. But we have all of the same attendant problems. But even worse is we don’t live in an industrial economy anymore. We live in a predominantly service-based economy that has long moved past manufacturing.
Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t bring some of that back, but the truth is that manufacturing today is not what it was to work in a steel mill in 1875. I think we can all be reasonable and we can agree on that. And part of the problems with extremely high levels of foreign-born population, particularly unskilled, and the vast majority of the people who are coming here and who are claiming asylum are doing so under fraudulent purposes. They’re doing so because they are economic migrants and they’re abusing asylum law to basically gain entrance to the United States without going through a process of application or of merit. And this has all of its traces back to 1965 where the Immigration Naturalization Act of 1965 really reversed and changed the status quo of immigration from the 1920s to 1960, which really shut down levels of immigration to the United States. In my opinion, it was one of the most important things that ever happened. And one of the reasons why is it forced and caused integration. It also forced by slowing down the increase in the number of foreign-born population, it redeveloped an American character and an understanding that was more homogenous and was the ability for you and me to understand despite the difference in our background.
If you accelerate and you continue this trend of the very high foreign-born unskilled population, you unfortunately are basically creating a mass… It’s basically it’s a non-citizen population of illegal immigrants, people who are not as skilled. I think I read 27% of the people who’ve come under Joe Biden illegally don’t even have a college degree. That means that we are lucky if they’re even literate in Spanish, let alone English. So there are major problems about integrating that type of person. Even in the past, whenever we had a mass industrial economy, now imagine today the amount of strain that would put on social services if mass citizenship happened to that population would be extraordinary.
I don’t think it’s a good idea, but even if we were to do so, we would still need to pair it with a dramatic change. And part of the problem right now is I don’t think a lot of people understand that immigration system. The immigration system in the United States, effectively they call it family-based migration. I call it chain migration. Chain migration is the term which implies that let’s say you come over here and you get your green card. You can use sponsorship and others by gaming the quota system to get your cousin or whatever to be able to come. The problem with that is who is your cousin? Is he a plumber? Is he a coder? That doesn’t actually matter because he’s your cousin si he actually has preference.
The way that it should work is it should be nobody cares if he’s your cousin. What does he do? What does she do? What is she going to bring to this country? All immigration in the United States, in my opinion, should be net positive without doing fake statistics about, “Oh, they actually increased the GDP or whatever.” It’s like we need a merit-based immigration system. We are the largest country in the world and one of the only Western countries in the world that does not have a merit-based points-based immigration system like Australia and, or Canada.
And I mean, I get it because a lot of people did come to this country under non-merit-based purposes, so they’re really reluctant to let that go. But I do think that Biden, by changing the immigration status quo and by basically just allowing tens of millions, potentially tens of millions, at the very least 12 million new entrants to come to the US under these pretenses of complete disorder and of no conduct, really broke a lot of people’s understanding and even mercy in that regard. And so that was obviously a massive part of Trump’s victory.
Lex Fridman
Speaking of illegal immigration, what do you think about the border czar, Tom Homan?
Speaking of illegal immigration, what do you think about the border czar, Tom Homan?
Saagar Enjeti
Tom Homan is a very legit dude, got to know him a little bit in Trump 1.0. He is an original true believer on enforcing immigration law as it is. Now notice how I just said that. That’s a politically correct way of saying mass deportation. And I will point out for my left wing critics in that, yeah, he really believes in the ability, in the necessity of mass deportation, and he has the background to be able to carry that out. I will give some warnings, and this will apply to Doge too. czar has no statutory or constitutional authority. czar has as much authority as the President of the United States gives him. Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, even as critics or even the people who love him could say he can be capricious at times. And he can strip you or not strip you or give you the ability to compel.
Tom Homan is a very legit dude, got to know him a little bit in Trump 1.0. He is an original true believer on enforcing immigration law as it is. Now notice how I just said that. That’s a politically correct way of saying mass deportation. And I will point out for my left wing critics in that, yeah, he really believes in the ability, in the necessity of mass deportation, and he has the background to be able to carry that out. I will give some warnings, and this will apply to Doge too. czar has no statutory or constitutional authority. czar has as much authority as the President of the United States gives him. Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, even as critics or even the people who love him could say he can be capricious at times. And he can strip you or not strip you or give you the ability to compel.
Czar in and of itself is frankly a very flawed position in the White House, and it’s one that I really wish we would move away from. I understand why we do it. It’s basically to do a national security advisor inter-agency convener to accomplish certain goals. That said, there is a person, Stephen Miller, who will be in the White House, the Deputy White House chief of staff who has well-founded beliefs, experience in government and rock solid ideology on this, which I think would also give him the ability to work with Homan to pull that off.
That said, a corollary to this, and frankly this is the one I’m the most mystified yet, is Kristi Noem as the Department of Homeland Security Secretary. Let me just lay this out for people because people don’t know what this is. The Department of Homeland Security, 90% of the time the way you’re going to interact with them is TSA. You don’t think about it. But people don’t know. The Department of Homeland Security is one of the largest law enforcement if maybe the largest law enforcement agency in the world. It’s gigantic. You have extraordinary statutory power to be able to prove investigations. You have border patrol, ICE, TSA, CBP, all these other agencies that report up to you. But most importantly for this, you will be the public face of mass deportation.
I was there in the White House briefing room last time around when Kirstjen Nielsen, who was the DHS secretary under Donald Trump, and specifically the one who enforced child separation for a limited period of time. She was a smart woman. She has long experience in government. And honestly, she melted under the criticism. Kirsti Noem is the governor of South Dakota. I mean, that’s great. You have a little bit of executive experience, but to be honest, I mean you have no law enforcement background. You have no, frankly, with understanding of what it is going to be like to be the secretary of one of the most controversial programs in modern American history.
You have to go on television and defend that every single day, a literal job requirement under Donald Trump. And you will have to have extraordinary command of the facts. You have to have a very high intellect. You have to have the ability to really break through. And I mean, we all watch how she handled that situation with her dog and her interviews. And that does not give me confidence that she will be able to do all that well in the position.
Lex Fridman
What do you think is behind that?
What do you think is behind that?
Saagar Enjeti
I have no idea.
I have no idea.
Lex Fridman
Krystal Ball’s theory on Breaking Points is that there’s some kind of interpersonal…
Krystal Ball’s theory on Breaking Points is that there’s some kind of interpersonal…
Saagar Enjeti
I can explain it.
I can explain it.
Lex Fridman
I should know this, but I didn’t know any of… There was some cheating or whatever.
I should know this, but I didn’t know any of… There was some cheating or whatever.
Saagar Enjeti
There’s a rumor nobody knows if it’s true that Corey Lewandowski and Kirsti Noem had a previous relationship ongoing. Corey Lewandowski is a Trump official and that he maybe put her in front. I don’t know.
There’s a rumor nobody knows if it’s true that Corey Lewandowski and Kirsti Noem had a previous relationship ongoing. Corey Lewandowski is a Trump official and that he maybe put her in front. I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
Is this like the Real Housewives of DC?
Is this like the Real Housewives of DC?
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, but kind of, although I mean it was the most open secret in the world, allegedly. I don’t know if it’s true. Okay. All right. I don’t like to traffic too much in personal theories. But I mean in this respect, it might actually be correct in terms of how it all came down. I have no idea what he’s thinking to be… I truly don’t. I mean, maybe it’s like he was, last time he said, “I want a woman who’s softer and emotionally and the ability to be the face of my immigration program.” I mean, again, like I said, I don’t see it. In terms of her experience and her media, it’s frankly not very good.
Yeah, but kind of, although I mean it was the most open secret in the world, allegedly. I don’t know if it’s true. Okay. All right. I don’t like to traffic too much in personal theories. But I mean in this respect, it might actually be correct in terms of how it all came down. I have no idea what he’s thinking to be… I truly don’t. I mean, maybe it’s like he was, last time he said, “I want a woman who’s softer and emotionally and the ability to be the face of my immigration program.” I mean, again, like I said, I don’t see it. In terms of her experience and her media, it’s frankly not very good.
Lex Fridman
You think she needs to be, not just be the softer face of this radical policy, but also be able to articulate what’s happening with the reasoning behind all that?
You think she needs to be, not just be the softer face of this radical policy, but also be able to articulate what’s happening with the reasoning behind all that?
Saagar Enjeti
Yes. You need to give justification for everything. Here’s the thing. Under mass deportation, the media will drag up every sob story known to planet Earth about this person and that person who came here illegally and why they deserve to stay. And really what the quasi thing is. That’s why the program itself is bad and we should legalize everybody who’s here illegally. Okay.
Yes. You need to give justification for everything. Here’s the thing. Under mass deportation, the media will drag up every sob story known to planet Earth about this person and that person who came here illegally and why they deserve to stay. And really what the quasi thing is. That’s why the program itself is bad and we should legalize everybody who’s here illegally. Okay.
The thing is that you need to be able to have extraordinary oversight. You need a great team with you. You need to make sure that everything is being done by the book. The way that the media is being handled is that you throw every question back in their face and you say, “Well, you either talk about crime or you talk about the enforceability of the law, the necessity.” I mean, I just I think articulated a very coherent case for why we need much less high levels of immigration to the United States. And I am the son of people who immigrated to this country.
But one of the favorite phrases I heard from this, from a guy named Mark Corcoran, who’s a center for immigration studies, is, “We don’t make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandparents. We make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandchildren.” And that is an extraordinary and good way to put it. And in fact, I would say it’s a triumph of the American system that somebody whose family benefited from the immigration regime and was able to come here. My parents had PhDs, came here legally, applied, spent thousands of dollars through the process. Can arrive at the conclusion that actually we need to care about all of our fellow American citizens. I’m not talking about other Indians or whatever. I’m talking about all of us. I care about everybody who is here in this country. But fundamentally, that will mean that we are going to have to exclude some people from the US.
And another thing that the open borders people don’t ever really grapple with is that even within their own framework, it makes no sense. for example, a common left-wing talking point is that it’s America’s fault that El Salvador and Honduras and Central America is fucked up. And so because of that, we have a responsibility to take all those people in because our fault. Or Haiti, right? But if you think about it, America is responsible, and I’m just being honest, for destroying and ruining a lot of countries. They just don’t benefit from the geographic ability to walk to the United States.
I mean, if we’re doing grievance politics, Iraqis have way more of a claim to be able to come here than anybody from El Salvador who’s talking about something that happened in 1982. Within its own logic, it doesn’t make any sense. Even under the-
Saagar Enjeti
Within its own logic, it doesn’t make any sense. Even under the asylum process, people don’t even know this, you’re literally able to claim asylum from domestic violence. Okay? I mean, imagine that. Frankly, that is a local law enforcement and problem of people who are experiencing that in their home country. I know how cold-hearted this sounds, but maybe, honestly, it could be because I’m Indian.
Within its own logic, it doesn’t make any sense. Even under the asylum process, people don’t even know this, you’re literally able to claim asylum from domestic violence. Okay? I mean, imagine that. Frankly, that is a local law enforcement and problem of people who are experiencing that in their home country. I know how cold-hearted this sounds, but maybe, honestly, it could be because I’m Indian.
One of the things that whenever you visit India and you see a country with over a billion people, you’re like, “Holy shit. This is crazy,” and you understand both the sheer numbers of the amount of people involved, and also, there is nothing in the world you could ever do to solve all problems for everybody. It’s a very complex and dynamic problem, and it’s really nice to be bleeding heart and to say, “Oh, well, we have responsibility to this and to all mankind and all that,” but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with the nation state. It doesn’t work with the sovereign nation. We’re the luckiest people in the history of the world to live here in this country, and you need to protect it and protecting it requires really thinking about the fundamentals of immigration itself and not telling us stories.
There’s a famous moment from the Trump White House where Jim Acosta, CNN white House correspondent, got into it with Stephen Miller, who will be the current deputy chief, and he was like, “What do you say,” something along the lines, “to people who say you’re violating that quote on the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me you’re tired, you’re poor, you’re hungry,’?” all of that,” the Emma Lazarus quote. And Stephen very logically was like, “What level of immigration comports with the Emma Lazarus quote? Is it 200,000 people a year? Is it 300? Is it 1 million? Is it 1.5 million?”
And that’s such a great way of putting it because there is no limiting principle on Emma Lazarus quote. There is, when you start talking, honestly, you’re like, “Okay. We live in X, Y, and Z society with X, Y, and Z GDP. People who are coming here should be able to benefit for themselves and us not rely on welfare, not be people who we have to take care of after because we have our own problems here right now and who are the population and the types of people that we can study and look at who will be able to benefit, and based on that, yeah, immigration is great,” but there are a lot of economic, legal and societal reasons for why you definitely don’t want the current level.
But another thing is even if we turn the switch and we still let in 1,000,005 people a year under the chain family-based migration, I think it would be a colossal mistake because it’s not rooted in the idea that people who are coming to America are explicitly doing so at the benefit of America. It’s doing so based on the familial connections of people who already gamed the immigration system to be able to come here.
I have a lot of family in India and I love them, and some of them are actually very talented and qualified. If they wanted to come here, I think they should be able to apply on their own merit and that should have nothing to do with their familial status of the fact that I’m a US citizen.
Lex Fridman
You mentioned in the book Melting Pot or Civil War by Reihan Salam. He makes an argument against the open borders. The thesis there is a simulation should be a big part. I guess there’s some kind of optimal rate of immigration which allows for a simulation.
You mentioned in the book Melting Pot or Civil War by Reihan Salam. He makes an argument against the open borders. The thesis there is a simulation should be a big part. I guess there’s some kind of optimal rate of immigration which allows for a simulation.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, and there are ebbs and flows, and that’s what I was talking about historically where, I mean, the truth is you could walk the streets of New York City in the early 1900s and the late 1890s and you’re not going to hear any English, and I think that’s bad. I mean, really what you had was ethnic enclaves of people who were basically practicing their way of life just like they did previously, bringing over a lot of their ethnic problems that they had and even some of their cultural unique capabilities or whatever, bringing it to America, and then New York City police and others are figuring out like, “What the hell do we do with all of this?” And it literally took shutting down immigration for an entire generation to do away with that and there’s actually still some.
Yeah, and there are ebbs and flows, and that’s what I was talking about historically where, I mean, the truth is you could walk the streets of New York City in the early 1900s and the late 1890s and you’re not going to hear any English, and I think that’s bad. I mean, really what you had was ethnic enclaves of people who were basically practicing their way of life just like they did previously, bringing over a lot of their ethnic problems that they had and even some of their cultural unique capabilities or whatever, bringing it to America, and then New York City police and others are figuring out like, “What the hell do we do with all of this?” And it literally took shutting down immigration for an entire generation to do away with that and there’s actually still some.
The point about assimilation is twofold. One is that you should have the capacity to inherit the understanding of the American character that has nothing to do with race, and that’s so unique that I can sit here as a child of people from India and has such a deep appreciation for the Scots Irish. I consider myself American first, and one of the things that I really love about that is that I have no historical relationship to anybody who fought in the Civil War, but I feel such kinship with a lot of the people who did and reading the memoirs and the ideas of those that did because that same mindset of the victors and the values that they were able to instill in the country for 150 years later gives me the ability to connect to them. And that’s such an incredible victory on their part and that’s such a unique thing.
In almost every other country in the world, in China and India or wherever, you’re kind of like what you are. You’re a Hindu, you’re a Jew, you’re a Han Chinese, you’re a Uyghur or you’re Tibetan, something like that. You’re born into it. But really here, it was one of the only places in the world where you can really connect to that story and that spirit and the compounding effect of all of these different people who have come to America, and that is a celebration of immigration as an idea.
But immigration is also a discrete policy, and that policy was really screwed up by the Biden administration. And so we can celebrate the idea and also pursue a policy for all of the people in the US, our citizens to actually be able to benefit. And look, it’s going to be messy, and honestly, I still don’t know yet if Trump will be able to pursue actual mass deportation just because I think that I’m not sure the public is ready for it. I do support mass deportation. I don’t know if the public is ready for it. I think, I don’t know. I’ll have to see because there’s a lot of different ways that you can do it.
There’s mandatory E-Verify, which requires businesses to basically verify you’re a US citizen or you’re here legally whenever they employ you, which is not the law of the land currently, which is crazy, by the way. You can cut off or tax remittance payments, which are payments that are sent back to other countries like Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. Again, illustrating my economic migrant point. There are a lot of various different ways where you can just make it more difficult to be illegally here in the US so people will self-deport, but if he does pursue real mass deportation, that will be a flashpoint in America.
Lex Fridman
Aren’t you talking about things like what Tom Homan said, the work site raids, sort of increasing the rate of that?
Aren’t you talking about things like what Tom Homan said, the work site raids, sort of increasing the rate of that?
Saagar Enjeti
We used to do that.
We used to do that.
Lex Fridman
But there’s a rate at which you can do that where it would lead to, I mean, radical social upheaval.
But there’s a rate at which you can do that where it would lead to, I mean, radical social upheaval.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, it will. I mean, and I think some people need to be honest here, and this actually flies in the face of … I mean, one of the most common liberal critiques is this is going to raise prices, and yeah, I think it’s true. I think it’s worth it, but that’s easy for me to say. I’m making a good living. If you care about inflation, you voted for Donald Trump and your price of groceries or whatever goes up because of this immigration policy, I think that needs to be extremely well-articulated by the president and of course, he needs to think about it.
Yeah, it will. I mean, and I think some people need to be honest here, and this actually flies in the face of … I mean, one of the most common liberal critiques is this is going to raise prices, and yeah, I think it’s true. I think it’s worth it, but that’s easy for me to say. I’m making a good living. If you care about inflation, you voted for Donald Trump and your price of groceries or whatever goes up because of this immigration policy, I think that needs to be extremely well-articulated by the president and of course, he needs to think about it.
The truth is is America right now is built on cheap labor. It’s not fair to the consumer, it’s not fair to the immigrants, the illegal immigrants themselves, and it’s not fair to the natural born citizen. The natural born citizen has his wages suppressed for competition by tens of millions of people who are willing to work at lower wages. They have to compete for housing, for social services. I mean, just even basic stuff at a societal level, it’s not fair to them. It’s definitely not fair to the other person because, I mean, whenever people say who’s going to build your houses or whatever, you’re endorsing this quasi-legal system where uninsured laborers from Mexico, they have no guarantee of wages, they’re getting paid cash under the table, they are living 10 to a room, they’re sending Mexican remittance payments back just so that their children can eat. That’s not really fair to that person either.
So that’s the point. The point is is that it will lead to a lot of social upheaval, but this gets to my Kristi Noem point as well is you need to be able to articulate a lot of what I just said here because if you don’t, it’s going to go south real quick.
Lex Fridman
The way that Vivek articulates this is that our immigration system is deeply dishonest. We don’t acknowledge some of the things he just said.
The way that Vivek articulates this is that our immigration system is deeply dishonest. We don’t acknowledge some of the things he just said.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman
And he wants to make it honest. So if we don’t do mass deportation, at least you have to be really honest about the living conditions of illegal immigrants, about basically mistreatment of them.
And he wants to make it honest. So if we don’t do mass deportation, at least you have to be really honest about the living conditions of illegal immigrants, about basically mistreatment of them.
Saagar Enjeti
Yes, it’s true. I mean, if you support mass illegal migration, you’re basically supporting tens of millions who are living lives as second class citizens. That’s not fair to them. I also think it’s deeply paternalistic. So there’s this idea that America has so ruined these Central American countries that they have no agency whatsoever and they can never turn things around. What does that say about our confidence in them?
Yes, it’s true. I mean, if you support mass illegal migration, you’re basically supporting tens of millions who are living lives as second class citizens. That’s not fair to them. I also think it’s deeply paternalistic. So there’s this idea that America has so ruined these Central American countries that they have no agency whatsoever and they can never turn things around. What does that say about our confidence in them?
One of the things they always say there, “Oh, they’re law-abiding, they’re great people,” and all that. I agree. Okay? By and large, I’m not saying these are bad people, but I am saying if they’re not bad and they’re law-abiding and they’re citizens and thoughtful and all that, they can fix their own countries and they did in El Salvador. That’s the perfect example.
Look at the dramatic drop in their crime rate. Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in all of South America. That is proof positive that you can change things around despite perhaps the legacy of US intervention. So to just say this idea that because it’s America’s fault that they’re screwed up, it takes agency away from them.
Another really key part of this dishonesty, this really gets to Springfield and the whole Haitian thing because everybody, beyond the eating cats and dogs, everybody does not even acknowledge because when they’re like, “The Haitians are here legally,” they need to actually think about the program. The program is called TPS. So let me explain that. TPS is called Temporary Protected Status. Note, what’s the first word on that? Temporary. What does that mean? TPS was developed under a regime in which let’s say that there was a catastrophic … I think this is a real example. I think there was a volcano or an earthquake or something where people were granted TPS to come to the United States, and the idea was they were going to go back after it was safe. They just never went back.
There are children born in the United States today who are adults, who are the descendants of people who are still living in the US under TPS. That’s a perfect example of what Vivek says is dishonest. You can’t mass de facto legalize people by saying that they’re here temporarily because of a program or because of something that happened in their home country when the reality is that for all intents and purposes, we are acknowledging them as full legal migrants. So even the term migrant to these Haitians in Springfield makes no sense because they’re supposed to be here under TPS. Migrant implies permanency.
So the language is all dishonest and people don’t want to tell you about the things I just said about chain migration. The vast majority of Americans don’t even know how the immigration system works. They don’t understand what I just said about TPS. They don’t really understand the insanity of asylum law, where you can just literally throw up your hands and say, “I fear for my life,” and you get to live here for four or five years before your court date even happens, and by that time, you get a work permit or whatever, you can get housing, like you just said, in substandard conditions, and you can kind of just play the game and wait before a deportation order comes, and even if it does, you never have to leave because there’s no ice agent or whatever who’s going to enforce it. So the whole system is nuts right now, and we need complete systematic reform that burns it all to the ground.
Lex Fridman
That said, the image and the reality of a child being separated from their parents seems deeply un-American, right?
That said, the image and the reality of a child being separated from their parents seems deeply un-American, right?
Saagar Enjeti
Well, I mean, look, it gets … Okay. So I’m not going to defend it, but I’ll just put it this way.
Well, I mean, look, it gets … Okay. So I’m not going to defend it, but I’ll just put it this way.
Lex Fridman
Do you hate children?
Do you hate children?
Saagar Enjeti
See, this is what I mean. Do you think twice whenever you see a drug addict who’s put in prison and their child is put in protective services? Nobody in America thinks twice about that, right?
See, this is what I mean. Do you think twice whenever you see a drug addict who’s put in prison and their child is put in protective services? Nobody in America thinks twice about that, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
So I mean, well, that’s kind of screwed up. Well, what we should think about, why did we come to that conclusion? The conclusion was is that these adults willingly broke the law and pursued a path of life, which put them on a trajectory where the state had to come in and determine that you are not allowed to be a parent basically to this child while you serve your debt to society. Now, child separation was very different. Child separation was also a product of extremely strange circumstances in US immigration law, where basically at the time, the reason why it was happening was because there was no way to prosecute people for illegal entry without child separation because previous doctrine, I believe it’s called the Flores Doctrine under some asylum law. People will have to go check my work on this. But basically, the whole reason this evolved as a legal regime was because people figured out that if you bring a kid with you because of the so-called Flores Doctrine or whatever, that you couldn’t be prosecuted for illegal entry, so it was a de facto way of breaking the law.
So I mean, well, that’s kind of screwed up. Well, what we should think about, why did we come to that conclusion? The conclusion was is that these adults willingly broke the law and pursued a path of life, which put them on a trajectory where the state had to come in and determine that you are not allowed to be a parent basically to this child while you serve your debt to society. Now, child separation was very different. Child separation was also a product of extremely strange circumstances in US immigration law, where basically at the time, the reason why it was happening was because there was no way to prosecute people for illegal entry without child separation because previous doctrine, I believe it’s called the Flores Doctrine under some asylum law. People will have to go check my work on this. But basically, the whole reason this evolved as a legal regime was because people figured out that if you bring a kid with you because of the so-called Flores Doctrine or whatever, that you couldn’t be prosecuted for illegal entry, so it was a de facto way of breaking the law.
And in fact, a lot of people were bringing children here who weren’t even theirs, who they weren’t even related to or couldn’t even prove it, were bringing them to get around the prosecution for illegal entry. So I’m not defending child separation. I think it was horrible or whatever, but if I gave you the context, it does seem like a very tricky problem in terms of do we enforce the law or not, how are we able to do that, and the solution, honestly, is what Donald Trump did was remain in Mexico and then pursue a complete rewrite of the way that we have US asylum law applied and of asylum adjudication and really just about enforcing our actual laws.
So what I try to explain to people is the immigration system right now is a patchwork of this deeply dishonest, such a great word, deeply dishonest system in which you use the system and set it up in such ways that illegal immigration is actually one of the easiest things to do to accomplish immigration to the United States. That is wrong. My parents had to apply. It wasn’t easy.
Do you know in India there’s a temple called the Visa Temple where you walk 108 times around it, which is like a lucky number, and you do it when you’re applying for a visa to the United States. It costs a lot of money and it’s hard. People get rejected all the time. There’s billions of people across the world who would love to be able to come here, and many of them want to do so legally and they should have to go through a process. The current way it works is it’s easier to get here illegally than it is legally. I think that’s fundamentally right. It’s also unfair to people like us whose parents did come here legally.
Lex Fridman
Can you still man the case against mass deportation? What are the strongest arguments?
Can you still man the case against mass deportation? What are the strongest arguments?
Saagar Enjeti
The strongest argument would be that these people contribute to society, that these people, many of whom millions of here, have been here for many years who have children, natural born citizens because of birthright citizenship, it would require something that’s fundamentally inhumane and un-American as you said, the idea of separating families across different borders simply because of what is “small decision of coming here illegally”, and the best case beyond any of this moral stuff for no mass deportation is it’s good for business. Illegal immigration is great for big business. It is great for big agriculture. So if you want the lowest prices of all time, then yeah, mass deportation is a terrible idea.
The strongest argument would be that these people contribute to society, that these people, many of whom millions of here, have been here for many years who have children, natural born citizens because of birthright citizenship, it would require something that’s fundamentally inhumane and un-American as you said, the idea of separating families across different borders simply because of what is “small decision of coming here illegally”, and the best case beyond any of this moral stuff for no mass deportation is it’s good for business. Illegal immigration is great for big business. It is great for big agriculture. So if you want the lowest prices of all time, then yeah, mass deportation is a terrible idea.
Lex Fridman
First of all, very convincing, and second of all, I mean, you can’t just do mass deportation without also fixing the immigration system, right?
First of all, very convincing, and second of all, I mean, you can’t just do mass deportation without also fixing the immigration system, right?
Saagar Enjeti
Yes, exactly. And I mean, there are several pieces of legislation. H.R.2, that’s something that the Republicans have really coalesced around. It’s a border bill. I encourage people to go read it and see some of the different fixes to the US immigration system. I’m curious whether it’ll actually pass or not. Remember, there’s a very slim majority of the House of Representatives for Republicans this time around, and people vote for a lot of things when they’re not in power, but when it’s actually about to become the law, we’ll see. There’s a lot of swing state people out there who may think twice before casting that vote. So I’m definitely curious to see how that one plays out.
Yes, exactly. And I mean, there are several pieces of legislation. H.R.2, that’s something that the Republicans have really coalesced around. It’s a border bill. I encourage people to go read it and see some of the different fixes to the US immigration system. I’m curious whether it’ll actually pass or not. Remember, there’s a very slim majority of the House of Representatives for Republicans this time around, and people vote for a lot of things when they’re not in power, but when it’s actually about to become the law, we’ll see. There’s a lot of swing state people out there who may think twice before casting that vote. So I’m definitely curious to see how that one plays out.
The other thing is is that, like I just said, the biggest beneficiary of illegal immigration is big business. So if you think they’re going to take this one lying down, absolutely not. They will fight for everything that they have to keep their pool of cheap labor because it’s great for them. I think JD said a story. I think he was on Rogan about how he talked to a hotelier chain guy and he was like, “Yeah, it’s just terrible. They would take away our whole workforce.” And he was like, “Do you hear yourself in terms of what you’re talking, you’re bragging about?” but that’s real. That’s a real thing.
And that, Tyson Foods and all these other people, that’s another really sad part is … What I mean by second class citizenship is this presumption, first of all, that Americans think it’s too disgusting to process meat or to work in a field. I think anybody will do anything for the right wage, first of all, but second is the conditions in a lot of those facilities are horrible and they’re covered up for a reason, not only in terms of the way that businesses, they actually conduct themselves, but also to cover up their illegal immigrant workforce. So honestly, I think it could make things better for everything.
Lex Fridman
You have studied how government works. What are the chances mass deportation happens?
You have studied how government works. What are the chances mass deportation happens?
Saagar Enjeti
Well, it depends how you define it. So I mean, mass deportation could mean one million. I mean, nobody even knows how many people are here illegally. It could be 20 million, it could be 30 million. I’ve seen estimates of up to 30 million, which is crazy. That’s almost 1/11 of the entire US population.
Well, it depends how you define it. So I mean, mass deportation could mean one million. I mean, nobody even knows how many people are here illegally. It could be 20 million, it could be 30 million. I’ve seen estimates of up to 30 million, which is crazy. That’s almost 1/11 of the entire US population.
Lex Fridman
What number do you think will feel like mass deportation? One million people?
What number do you think will feel like mass deportation? One million people?
Saagar Enjeti
A million people is a lot.
A million people is a lot.
Lex Fridman
That’s a lot of people.
That’s a lot of people.
Saagar Enjeti
It’s a lot, but the crazy part is that’s only 1/12 of what Joe Biden led in the country. So it’s one of those. That just to give people the scale of what it will all look like. Do I think mass deportation will happen? It depends on the definition. Will one million over four years? Yeah, I feel relatively confident in that. Anything over that, it’s going to be tough to say. Like I said, probably the most efficient way to do it is to have mandatory E-Verify and to have processes in place where it becomes very difficult to live in the United States illegally, and then you’ll have mass self-deportation and they will take the victory lap on that, but actual rounding millions of people up and putting them in deportation facilities and then arranging flights to God knows all across the globe, that’s a logistical nightmare. It would also cost a lot of money.
It’s a lot, but the crazy part is that’s only 1/12 of what Joe Biden led in the country. So it’s one of those. That just to give people the scale of what it will all look like. Do I think mass deportation will happen? It depends on the definition. Will one million over four years? Yeah, I feel relatively confident in that. Anything over that, it’s going to be tough to say. Like I said, probably the most efficient way to do it is to have mandatory E-Verify and to have processes in place where it becomes very difficult to live in the United States illegally, and then you’ll have mass self-deportation and they will take the victory lap on that, but actual rounding millions of people up and putting them in deportation facilities and then arranging flights to God knows all across the globe, that’s a logistical nightmare. It would also cost a lot of money.
And don’t forget, Congress has to pay for all of this. So we can have DOGE or we can have mass deportation. So those two things are kind of irreconcilable, actually. There’s a lot of competing influences at play that people are not being real about at all.
DOGE
Lex Fridman
That was one of the tensions I had talking to Vivek is he’s big on mass deportation and big on making government more efficient, and it really feels like there’s a tension between those two in the short-term.
That was one of the tensions I had talking to Vivek is he’s big on mass deportation and big on making government more efficient, and it really feels like there’s a tension between those two in the short-term.
Saagar Enjeti
Well, yes, absolutely. Also, I mean, this is a good segue. I’ve been wanting to talk about this. I’m sympathetic to DOGE, to the whole Department of Government Efficiency.
Well, yes, absolutely. Also, I mean, this is a good segue. I’ve been wanting to talk about this. I’m sympathetic to DOGE, to the whole Department of Government Efficiency.
Lex Fridman
How unreal is it that it’s called DOGE?
How unreal is it that it’s called DOGE?
Saagar Enjeti
Actually, with Elon, it’s quite real. I guess I’ve accepted Elon as a major political figure in the US, but the DOGE committee, the Department of Government Efficiency is a non-statutory agency that has zero funding that Donald Trump says will advise OMB, the Office of Management and Budget.
Actually, with Elon, it’s quite real. I guess I’ve accepted Elon as a major political figure in the US, but the DOGE committee, the Department of Government Efficiency is a non-statutory agency that has zero funding that Donald Trump says will advise OMB, the Office of Management and Budget.
Now, two things. Number one is, as I predicted, DOGE would become a “Blue Ribbon Commission”. So this is a non-statutory Blue Ribbon Commission that has been given authority to Vivek Ramaswamy and to Elon Musk. Secondary, their recommendations to government should be complete by July of 2026 according to the press release released by Trump. First of all, what that will mean is they’re probably going to need private funding to even set all this up. That’s great, not a problem for Elon, but you’re basically going to be able to have to commission GAO reports, Government Accountability Office and other reports and fact-finding missions across the government, which is fantastic. Trump can even empower you to go through to every agency and to collect figures.
None of it matters one iota if Republican appropriators in the House of Representatives care what you have to say. Historically, they don’t give a shit what the executive office has to say. So every year, the president releases his own budget. It used to mean something, but in the last decade or so, it’s become completely meaningless. The House Ways and Means Committee and the People’s House are the ones who originate all appropriations and set up spending. So that’s one is that DOGE in and of itself has no power. It has no ability to compel or force people to do anything. Its entire case for being, really, if you think about it mechanically, is to try and convince and provide a report to Republican legislators to be able to cut spending. So that’s that. Now, we all know how Congress takes to government reports and whether they get acted on or not. So that’s number one.
Number two is the figures that Elon is throwing out there. Again, I want to give them some advice because people do not understand federal government spending. The absolute vast majority of government spending is entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are untouchable under Donald Trump and their most politically popular programs in the world, and military spending, discretionary non-military spending. I don’t have the exact figure in front of me. It’s a very, very small part of the federal budget.
Now, within that small slice, about 90% of that eight is bipartisan and is supported by everybody. NOAA, you know the hurricane guys? Like people like that, people who are flying into the eye of the hurricane, people who are government inspectors of X, Y and Z. The parts that are controversial that you’re actually able to touch, things like welfare programs like food stamps is an extraordinary small slice.
So what’s the number we put out there? Five trillion? Something like that? There is only one way to do that, and realistically under the current thing, you have to radically change the entire way that the Pentagon buys everything. And I support that, but I just want to be very, very clear, but I haven’t seen enough energy around that. There’s this real belief in the US that we spend billions on all of these programs that are doing complete bullshit, but the absolute vast majority of it is military spending and entitlements. Trump has made clear entitlements are off the table. It’s not going to happen.
So the way that you’re going to be able to cut realistically military spending over a decade long period is to really change the way that the United States procures military equipment, hands out government contracts. Elon actually does have the background to be able to accomplish this because he has had to wrangle with SpaceX and the bullshit that Boeing has been pulling for over a decade, but I really want everybody’s expectations to be very set around this. Just remember, non-statutory, Blue Ribbon.
So if he’s serious about it, I just laid out all of these hurdles that he’s going to have to overcome, and I’m not saying him and Vivek aren’t serious dudes, but you got to really know the system to be able to accomplish this.
Lex Fridman
So you just laid out the reality of how Washington works. To give the counterpoint that I think you’re probably also rooting for is that one is a statement like Peter Thiel said, “Don’t bet against Elon.”
So you just laid out the reality of how Washington works. To give the counterpoint that I think you’re probably also rooting for is that one is a statement like Peter Thiel said, “Don’t bet against Elon.”
Saagar Enjeti
Sure.
Sure.
Lex Fridman
One of the things that you don’t usually have with Blue Ribbon is the kind of megaphone that Elon has.
One of the things that you don’t usually have with Blue Ribbon is the kind of megaphone that Elon has.
Saagar Enjeti
True.
True.
Lex Fridman
And I would even set the financial aspects aside, just the influence he has with the megaphone but also just with other people who are also really influential. I think that can have real power when backed by a populist movement.
And I would even set the financial aspects aside, just the influence he has with the megaphone but also just with other people who are also really influential. I think that can have real power when backed by a populist movement.
Saagar Enjeti
I don’t disagree with you, but let me give you a case where this just failed. So Elon endorsed who for Senate Majority Leader? Rick Scott, right? Who got the least amount of votes in the US Senate for GOP leader? Rick Scott. John Thune is the person who got it. Now, the reason I’m bringing that up, one of my favorite books, Master of the Senate by Robert Caro, part of the LBJ series, the Senate has an institution, it reveres independence. It reveres. I mean, the entire theory of the Senate is to cool down the mob that is in the House of Representatives and to deliberate. That’s its entire body. They are set up to be immune from public pressure.
I don’t disagree with you, but let me give you a case where this just failed. So Elon endorsed who for Senate Majority Leader? Rick Scott, right? Who got the least amount of votes in the US Senate for GOP leader? Rick Scott. John Thune is the person who got it. Now, the reason I’m bringing that up, one of my favorite books, Master of the Senate by Robert Caro, part of the LBJ series, the Senate has an institution, it reveres independence. It reveres. I mean, the entire theory of the Senate is to cool down the mob that is in the House of Representatives and to deliberate. That’s its entire body. They are set up to be immune from public pressure.
Now, I’m not saying they can’t be pressured, but that example I just gave on Rick Scott is a very important one of he literally endorsed somebody for leader, so did Tucker Carlson, so did a lot of people online, and only 13 senators voted for Rick Scott. The truth is is that they don’t care. They’re set up where they’re marginally popular in their own home states, they’ll be able to win their primaries, and that’s all they really need to do to get elected, and they have six-year terms. They’re not even up for four years.
So will Elon still be interested in politics six years from now? That’s a legitimate question for a Republican senator. So maybe he could get the House of Representatives to sign off maybe on some of his things, but there’s no guarantee that the Senate is going to agree with any of that.
There’s a story that Caro tells in Master of the Senate book, which I love, where Thomas Jefferson was in Paris during the writing of the Constitution, and he asked Washington, he said, “Why did you put in a Senate, a bicameral legislature?” And Washington said, “Why did you pour your tea into a saucer?” and Jefferson goes, “To cool it,” and Washington says, “Just so,” to explain it. He was a man of very few words. He was a brilliant man.
Lex Fridman
Okay. So you actually outlined the most likely thing that’s going to happen with DOGE as it hits the wall of Washington. What is the most successful thing that can be pulled off?
Okay. So you actually outlined the most likely thing that’s going to happen with DOGE as it hits the wall of Washington. What is the most successful thing that can be pulled off?
Saagar Enjeti
The most successful thing they could do is right now, I think they’re really obsessed with designing cuts and identifying cuts. I would redesign systems, systems of procurement. I would redesign the way that we have processes in place to dispense taxpayer dollars because the truth is is that appropriations itself, again, are set by the United States Congress, but the way that those appropriations are spent by the government, the executive has some discretionary authority.
The most successful thing they could do is right now, I think they’re really obsessed with designing cuts and identifying cuts. I would redesign systems, systems of procurement. I would redesign the way that we have processes in place to dispense taxpayer dollars because the truth is is that appropriations itself, again, are set by the United States Congress, but the way that those appropriations are spent by the government, the executive has some discretionary authority.
So your ability as the executive to be a good steward of the taxpayer money and to redesign a system which I actually think Elon could be good at this and Vivek too in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit is the entire Pentagon procurement thing, it needs to be burned to the ground. Number one, it’s bad for the Pentagon. It gives them substandard equipment. It rewards very old weapons systems and programs and thinking that can be easily defeated by people who are studying that for vulnerabilities. The perfect example is all of this drone warfare in Ukraine and in Russia. I mean, drone warfare costs almost nothing, and yet drone swarms and hypersonic missiles pose huge dangers to US systems, which cost more than hundreds of billions of dollars.
So my point is that giving nimble procurement and systemic change in the way that we think about executing the mission that Congress does give you actually could save the most amount of money in the long run. That’s where I would really focus in on.
The other one is, counter to everything I just said, is maybe they would listen. Maybe the Republicans are like, “Yeah, okay. Let’s do it.” The problem again though is swing state people who need to get reelected, they need to do one thing. They need to deliver for their district. They need to run on stuff, and nobody has ever run on cutting money for your state. They have run on bringing money to your state. And that’s why earmarks and a lot of these other things are extraordinarily popular in Congress is because it’s such an easy way to show constituents how you’re working for them whenever it does come reelection time. So it’s a very difficult system.
And I also want to tell people who are frustrated by this, I share your frustration, but the system is designed to work this way. And for two centuries, the Senate has stood as a bulwark against literally every popular change, and because of that, it’s designed to make sure that it’s so popular for long enough that it has to become inevitable before the status quo can change. That’s really, really frustrating, but you should take comfort in that it’s always been that way, so it’s been okay.
Lex Fridman
Well, as I’ve learned from one of the recommendations of The Age of Acrimony, I feel embarrassed that I didn’t know that senators used to not be elected.
Well, as I’ve learned from one of the recommendations of The Age of Acrimony, I feel embarrassed that I didn’t know that senators used to not be elected.
Saagar Enjeti
What a crazy system, huh?
What a crazy system, huh?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean, many of the things we take for granted now as defining our democracy was kind of invented, developed after the Civil War in the 50 years after the Civil War.
Yeah. I mean, many of the things we take for granted now as defining our democracy was kind of invented, developed after the Civil War in the 50 years after the Civil War.
Saagar Enjeti
Absolutely correct. Age of Acrimony, oh, my God, I love that book. I cannot recommend it enough. It is so important. And one of the biggest mistakes that Americans make is that we study periods where greatness happened, but we don’t often study periods where nothing happened or where really bad shit happened. We don’t spend nearly enough. Americans know about FDR. They don’t really know anything about the depression or how we got there.
Absolutely correct. Age of Acrimony, oh, my God, I love that book. I cannot recommend it enough. It is so important. And one of the biggest mistakes that Americans make is that we study periods where greatness happened, but we don’t often study periods where nothing happened or where really bad shit happened. We don’t spend nearly enough. Americans know about FDR. They don’t really know anything about the depression or how we got there.
What was it like to be alive in the United States in 1840? Right? Nobody thinks about that really because it’s kind of an in-between time in history. There are people who lived their entire lives, who were born, who had to live through those times, who were just as conscientious and intelligent as you and I are and were just trying to figure shit out and things felt really big. So the Age of Acrimony is a time where it’s almost completely ignored outside of the Gilded age aspect.
But like you just said, it was a time where progressive reform of government and of the tension between civil rights, extraordinary wealth and democracy and really the reigning in of big business, so many of our foundations happened exactly in that time. And I take a lot of comfort from that book because one of the things I learned from the book is that voter participation is highest when people are pissed off, not when they’re happy, and that’s such a counterintuitive thing, but voter participation goes down when the system is working.
So 2020, right? I think we can all agree it was very tense election. That’s also why it had the highest voter participation ever. 2024, very high rates of participation. Same thing. People are pissed off, and that’s actually what drives them to the vote, but something that I take comfort in that is that people being pissed off and people going out to vote, it actually does have major impact on the system because otherwise, the status quo is basically allowed to continue and so-
Saagar Enjeti
… [inaudible 01:33:00] the status quo is basically allowed to continue. And so, yeah, like you just said, I mean, direct election of senators… I mean, there are probably people alive today who were born when there was no direct election of senators, which is an insane thing to think about. I mean, there’d be almost 100 or so. But the point is that that time, it was so deeply corrupt, and it was one where the quasi aristocracy from the early days leading into the Gilded Age, were able to enforce their will upon the people. But you can take comfort in that that was one of those areas where Americans were so fed up with it, they changed the constitution and actually force the aristocrats in power to give their own power. It’s like our version of when they flipped power and took away the legislative power of the House of Lords in the UK. I just think that’s amazing and it’s such a cool thing about our country and the UK too.
… [inaudible 01:33:00] the status quo is basically allowed to continue. And so, yeah, like you just said, I mean, direct election of senators… I mean, there are probably people alive today who were born when there was no direct election of senators, which is an insane thing to think about. I mean, there’d be almost 100 or so. But the point is that that time, it was so deeply corrupt, and it was one where the quasi aristocracy from the early days leading into the Gilded Age, were able to enforce their will upon the people. But you can take comfort in that that was one of those areas where Americans were so fed up with it, they changed the constitution and actually force the aristocrats in power to give their own power. It’s like our version of when they flipped power and took away the legislative power of the House of Lords in the UK. I just think that’s amazing and it’s such a cool thing about our country and the UK too.
Lex Fridman
It’s the continued battle between the people and the elite. Right? And we should mention not just the direct election of senators, but the election of candidates for a party.
It’s the continued battle between the people and the elite. Right? And we should mention not just the direct election of senators, but the election of candidates for a party.
Saagar Enjeti
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
That was also invented. It used to be that the, quote-unquote, party bosses, I say that with half a chuckle, chose the candidate.
That was also invented. It used to be that the, quote-unquote, party bosses, I say that with half a chuckle, chose the candidate.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. The whole system is nuts. The way that we currently experience politics is such a modern invention.
Yeah. The whole system is nuts. The way that we currently experience politics is such a modern invention.
Lex Fridman
With a little asterisk with Kamala Harris, but-
With a little asterisk with Kamala Harris, but-
Saagar Enjeti
Right. Yeah, good point. Well, that was actually more of a mean reversion, right? We’re living in an extraordinarily new era where we actually have more input than ever on who our candidates are. It used to be… This is crazy. So the conventions have always taken place two months before, right? Imagine a world where you did not know who the nominee was going to be before that convention, and the nominee literally was decided at that convention by those party bosses. Even crazier, there used to be a standard in American politics where presidents did not directly campaign. They, in fact, did not even comment about the news or mention their opponent’s names. They would give speeches from their doorstep, but it was unseemly for them to engage in direct politics.
Right. Yeah, good point. Well, that was actually more of a mean reversion, right? We’re living in an extraordinarily new era where we actually have more input than ever on who our candidates are. It used to be… This is crazy. So the conventions have always taken place two months before, right? Imagine a world where you did not know who the nominee was going to be before that convention, and the nominee literally was decided at that convention by those party bosses. Even crazier, there used to be a standard in American politics where presidents did not directly campaign. They, in fact, did not even comment about the news or mention their opponent’s names. They would give speeches from their doorstep, but it was unseemly for them to engage in direct politics.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You would not get a Bernie Sanders.
Yeah. You would not get a Bernie Sanders.
Saagar Enjeti
No.
No.
Lex Fridman
You would not get a Donald Trump.
You would not get a Donald Trump.
Saagar Enjeti
Obama, Bill Clinton… I mean, basically every president from John F. Kennedy onwards has been a product of the new system. Every president prior to that has been much more of the older system. There was an in-between period post-FDR where things were really changing, but the primary system itself had its first true big win under John F. Kennedy.
Obama, Bill Clinton… I mean, basically every president from John F. Kennedy onwards has been a product of the new system. Every president prior to that has been much more of the older system. There was an in-between period post-FDR where things were really changing, but the primary system itself had its first true big win under John F. Kennedy.
Lex Fridman
I think that the lesson from that is there’s a collective wisdom to the people. Right?
I think that the lesson from that is there’s a collective wisdom to the people. Right?
Saagar Enjeti
I think so.
I think so.
Lex Fridman
I think it works.
I think it works.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. I mean, well, okay, I’ll steel man it. We had some great presidents in the party boss era. FDR was a great president. FDR was the master of coalitional politics of his ability. In fact, what really made him a genius was his ability to get this overthrow, the support of a lot of the corruption and the elite Democrats to take control in there at the convention, and then combine his personal popularity to fuse all systems of power where he had the elites basically under his boot because he was the king, and he used his popular power and his support from the people to be able to enforce things up and down.
Yeah. I mean, well, okay, I’ll steel man it. We had some great presidents in the party boss era. FDR was a great president. FDR was the master of coalitional politics of his ability. In fact, what really made him a genius was his ability to get this overthrow, the support of a lot of the corruption and the elite Democrats to take control in there at the convention, and then combine his personal popularity to fuse all systems of power where he had the elites basically under his boot because he was the king, and he used his popular power and his support from the people to be able to enforce things up and down.
I mean, even in the party boss era, a lot of the people we revere really came out of that. People like Abraham Lincoln. I mean, I don’t think Abraham Lincoln would have won a party primary in 1860. There’s no chance. He won, luck, thank God, from an insane process in the 1860 Republican Convention. People should go read about that because that was wild. I think we were this close to not having Lincoln as president. And, yeah, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, there’s so many that I could point to who made great impacts on history. So the system does find a way to still produce good stuff.
Lex Fridman
That was a beautiful diversion from the Doge discussion. If you’re going to return briefly to Doge, so you talked about cost-cutting, but there’s also increasing the efficiency of government, which you also talked about with procurement, and maybe we can throw into the pile, the 400-plus federal agencies. So let’s take another perspective on what success might look like. So radically successful Doge, would it basically cut a lot of federal agencies?
That was a beautiful diversion from the Doge discussion. If you’re going to return briefly to Doge, so you talked about cost-cutting, but there’s also increasing the efficiency of government, which you also talked about with procurement, and maybe we can throw into the pile, the 400-plus federal agencies. So let’s take another perspective on what success might look like. So radically successful Doge, would it basically cut a lot of federal agencies?
Saagar Enjeti
Probably combine.
Probably combine.
Lex Fridman
Combine?
Combine?
Saagar Enjeti
Okay, so I can give great examples of this because I have great insight. For each agency will often use different payroll systems. They’ll have different internal processes. Right? That makes no sense, and it’s all because it’s antiquated. Now, everybody always talks about changing it, but there are a lot of party interests about why certain people get certain things. The real problem with the government, the people like us who are private, and for example, when you want to do something, you can just do it. So I was listening to a really interesting analysis about law enforcement and the military. So I think the story was that National Guard guys were assigned to help with the border, and they were trying to provide… I think it was translation services to people at border patrol. But somebody had to come down and be like, “Hey, this has got to stop. According to US Code X, Y, and Z, the United States military cannot help with law enforcement abilities here.”
Okay, so I can give great examples of this because I have great insight. For each agency will often use different payroll systems. They’ll have different internal processes. Right? That makes no sense, and it’s all because it’s antiquated. Now, everybody always talks about changing it, but there are a lot of party interests about why certain people get certain things. The real problem with the government, the people like us who are private, and for example, when you want to do something, you can just do it. So I was listening to a really interesting analysis about law enforcement and the military. So I think the story was that National Guard guys were assigned to help with the border, and they were trying to provide… I think it was translation services to people at border patrol. But somebody had to come down and be like, “Hey, this has got to stop. According to US Code X, Y, and Z, the United States military cannot help with law enforcement abilities here.”
And so even though that makes absolutely no sense, because they’re all work, there are literal legal statutes in place that prevent you from doing the most efficient thing possible. So for some reason, we have to have a ton of Spanish speakers in SouthCom, in the US Command that is responsible for South America, who literally cannot help with a crisis at the border. Now, maybe you can find some legal chicanery to make that work, but, man, you got to have an attorney general who knows what he’s doing. You need a White House counsel. You need to make sure that shit stands up in a court of law. I mean, it’s not so simple. Whereas let’s say you have a software right here and you want to get a new software, you can just do it. You can hire whoever you want. When you’re the government, there’s a whole process you got to go through about bidding, and it just takes forever and it is so inefficient.
But unfortunately, the inefficiency is really derivative of a lot of legal statutes, and that is something that, again, actually radically successful Doge, quote-unquote, would be study the law, and then change it. Instead of cost- cutting, cut this program or whatever, like I just said about why do different systems use payroll, just say that you can change the statute under which new software can be updated, let’s say, after 90 days. I’ve heard stories of people who work for the government who still have IBM mainframe in 2024 that they’re still working, because those systems have never been updated. There’s also a big problem with a lot of this clearance stuff. That’s where a lot of inefficiency happens because a lot of contractors can only work based upon previous clearance that they already got. Achieving a clearance is very expensive. It’s very lengthy process. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be, talking about security clearance, but it does naturally create a very small pool that you can draw some contracts fund.
And I even mean stuff like the janitor at the Pentagon needs a security service, right? So clearance. So there’s only five people who can even apply for that contract. Well, naturally, in an interim monopoly like that, he’s going to jack his price up because he literally has a moat around his product. Whereas if you were hiring a… Whatever, anybody for anything, that type of credentialism and legal regime, it doesn’t matter at all. So there are a million problems like this that people in government run into, and that is what I would see is the most successful.
Lex Fridman
Paperwork slows everything down, and it feels impossible to break through that in a incremental way.
Paperwork slows everything down, and it feels impossible to break through that in a incremental way.
Saagar Enjeti
It’s so hard.
It’s so hard.
Lex Fridman
It feels like the only way to do it is to literally shut down agencies in some radical way, and then build up from scratch. Of course, as you highlight, that’s going to be opposed by a lot of people within government.
It feels like the only way to do it is to literally shut down agencies in some radical way, and then build up from scratch. Of course, as you highlight, that’s going to be opposed by a lot of people within government.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. Well, historically, there’s only one way to do it, and it’s a really bad answer. War.
Yeah. Well, historically, there’s only one way to do it, and it’s a really bad answer. War.
Lex Fridman
War. Yes. I was going to say, basically you have the consensus where, “Okay, all this stupid bureaucratic bullshit we’ve been doing, we need to put that aside. Get the fuck out of here. We need to win a war. So all the paperwork, all the lawyers go leave, please,”
War. Yes. I was going to say, basically you have the consensus where, “Okay, all this stupid bureaucratic bullshit we’ve been doing, we need to put that aside. Get the fuck out of here. We need to win a war. So all the paperwork, all the lawyers go leave, please,”
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. No, but I want people to really understand that. Up until 1865 or 1860, I forget the exact year, we didn’t even have national currency. And then we were like, “Well, we need a greenback.” And prior to that, people would freak out if we were talking about having national currency, greenback backed by the US government and all of that. Not even a question, passed in two weeks in the US Congress. An income tax eventually went away, but not even in the realm of possibility, and they decided to pass it. Same thing after World War I. And you think about how World War II… I mean, World War II just fundamentally changed the entire way the United States government works. Even the DHS, which I mentioned earlier, the Department of Homeland Security, it didn’t even exist prior to 9/11. It was done as response to 9/11 to coalesce all of those agencies under one branch to make sure that nothing like that could ever happen again. And so historically, unfortunately, absolute shitshow disaster war is the only thing that moves and throws the paperwork off the table. And I wish I wasn’t such a downer, but I’ve read too much and I’ve had enough experience now in Washington to just see how these dreams get crushed instantly. And I wish it wasn’t that way. I mean, it’s a cool idea and I want people who are inspired, who are getting into politics to think that they can do something, but I want them to be realistic too, and I want them to know what they’re signing up for whenever they do something like that, and the Titanic amount of work it’s going to take for you to be able to accomplish something.
Yeah. No, but I want people to really understand that. Up until 1865 or 1860, I forget the exact year, we didn’t even have national currency. And then we were like, “Well, we need a greenback.” And prior to that, people would freak out if we were talking about having national currency, greenback backed by the US government and all of that. Not even a question, passed in two weeks in the US Congress. An income tax eventually went away, but not even in the realm of possibility, and they decided to pass it. Same thing after World War I. And you think about how World War II… I mean, World War II just fundamentally changed the entire way the United States government works. Even the DHS, which I mentioned earlier, the Department of Homeland Security, it didn’t even exist prior to 9/11. It was done as response to 9/11 to coalesce all of those agencies under one branch to make sure that nothing like that could ever happen again. And so historically, unfortunately, absolute shitshow disaster war is the only thing that moves and throws the paperwork off the table. And I wish I wasn’t such a downer, but I’ve read too much and I’ve had enough experience now in Washington to just see how these dreams get crushed instantly. And I wish it wasn’t that way. I mean, it’s a cool idea and I want people who are inspired, who are getting into politics to think that they can do something, but I want them to be realistic too, and I want them to know what they’re signing up for whenever they do something like that, and the Titanic amount of work it’s going to take for you to be able to accomplish something.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. But I’ve also heard a lot of people in Silicon Valley laughing when Elon rolled in and fired 90% of Twitter. Here’s this guy, Elon Musk-
Yeah. But I’ve also heard a lot of people in Silicon Valley laughing when Elon rolled in and fired 90% of Twitter. Here’s this guy, Elon Musk-
Saagar Enjeti
You are absolutely correct.
You are absolutely correct.
Lex Fridman
… knows nothing about running a social media company. Of course, you need all these servers. Of course, you need all these employees. And nevertheless, the service keeps running.
… knows nothing about running a social media company. Of course, you need all these servers. Of course, you need all these employees. And nevertheless, the service keeps running.
Saagar Enjeti
He figured it out, and you have to give him eternal credit for that. I guess the difference is there was no law that he could fire them. At the end of the day, he owned the company. He had total discretion of his ability to move. So I’m not even saying his ideas are bad. I’m saying that what makes him such an incredible visionary entrepreneur, it’s movement, it’s deference at times to the right people, but also the knowledge of every individual piece of the machine and his ability to come in and execute his full vision at any time and override any of the managers.
He figured it out, and you have to give him eternal credit for that. I guess the difference is there was no law that he could fire them. At the end of the day, he owned the company. He had total discretion of his ability to move. So I’m not even saying his ideas are bad. I’m saying that what makes him such an incredible visionary entrepreneur, it’s movement, it’s deference at times to the right people, but also the knowledge of every individual piece of the machine and his ability to come in and execute his full vision at any time and override any of the managers.
So I talked previously about the professional managerial class and the managerial revolution. Elon is one of the few people who’s ever built a multi-billion-dollar company who has not actually fallen victim to the managerial revolution and against entrepreneurship and innovation that happens there. There are very few people who can do it. Elon, Steve Jobs. But what do we learn is that, unfortunately, after Steve died, Apple basically did succumb to the managerial revolution and has become the product… They make all their money by printing services and making it impossible to leave this ecosystem as opposed to building the most cool product ever. As much as I love my Vision Pro, don’t get me wrong.
Lex Fridman
I think you just admitted that you’re part of a cult.
I think you just admitted that you’re part of a cult.
Saagar Enjeti
I know. I literally am. I am. I fully admit it.
I know. I literally am. I am. I fully admit it.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. I miss Steve.
Yeah. I miss Steve.
Lex Fridman
The grass is greener on the other side. Come join us. Okay. Whether it’s Elon or somebody else, what gives you hope about something like a radical transformation of government towards efficiency, towards being more slim? What gives you hope that that will be possible?
The grass is greener on the other side. Come join us. Okay. Whether it’s Elon or somebody else, what gives you hope about something like a radical transformation of government towards efficiency, towards being more slim? What gives you hope that that will be possible?
Saagar Enjeti
Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. I don’t think slimness in and of itself is a good thing. What I care about is the relationship to people and its government. So the biggest problem that we have is that we have a complete loss of faith in all of our institutions. And I really encourage people… I don’t think people can quite understand what the relationship between America and its government was like after World War II and after FDR. 90% of the people trusted the government. That’s crazy. When the president said something, they were like, “Okay, he’s not lying.”
Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. I don’t think slimness in and of itself is a good thing. What I care about is the relationship to people and its government. So the biggest problem that we have is that we have a complete loss of faith in all of our institutions. And I really encourage people… I don’t think people can quite understand what the relationship between America and its government was like after World War II and after FDR. 90% of the people trusted the government. That’s crazy. When the president said something, they were like, “Okay, he’s not lying.”
Think about our cynical attitude towards politicians today. That is largely the fault of Lyndon Johnson and of Richard Nixon and that entire fallout period of Vietnam. Vietnam, in particular, really broke the American character and its ability and its relationship with government, and we’ve never recovered faith in institutions ever since that. And it’s really unfortunate. So what makes me hopeful, at least this time, is anytime a president wins a popular vote and an election is they have the ability to reset and to actually try and build something that is new. And so what I would hope is that this is different from the first Trump administration in which the mandate for Donald Trump is actually carried out competently. Yes, he can do his antics, which got him elected. At this point, we can’t deny it. The McDonald’s thing is hilarious. It’s funny. It is. People love it. People like the podcasting. People like-
Lex Fridman
Garbage truck.
Garbage truck.
Saagar Enjeti
The garbage truck. Yeah, exactly. They like the stunts, and he will always excel and he will continue to do that. There are policy and other things that he can and should do, like the pursuit of no war, like solving the immigration question, and also really figuring out our economy the way that it currently runs and changing it so that the actual American dream is more achievable. And housing is one of the chief problems that we have right now. The real thing is Donald Trump was elected on the backs of the working man. I mean, it’s just true.
The garbage truck. Yeah, exactly. They like the stunts, and he will always excel and he will continue to do that. There are policy and other things that he can and should do, like the pursuit of no war, like solving the immigration question, and also really figuring out our economy the way that it currently runs and changing it so that the actual American dream is more achievable. And housing is one of the chief problems that we have right now. The real thing is Donald Trump was elected on the backs of the working man. I mean, it’s just true.
Households under $100,000 voted for Donald Trump. Maybe they didn’t do so for economic reasons. I think a lot of them did for economic, a lot of them did for immigration, for cultural. But you still owe them something. And I would hope that they could carry something out in that respect that is not a similar continuation and chaotic vibe of the first time where everything felt like it’d explode at any time with staffing, with even his policy or what he cared about or his ability to pursue. And a lot of that does come back to personnel. So I’m concerned in some respects, I’m not thrilled in some respects, I’m happy in some respects, but it remains to be seen how he’s going to do it.
MAGA ideology
Lex Fridman
To the degree it’s possible to see Trumpism and MAGA as a coherent ideology, what do you think are the central pillars of it?
To the degree it’s possible to see Trumpism and MAGA as a coherent ideology, what do you think are the central pillars of it?
Saagar Enjeti
MAGA is a rejection of cultural elitism. That’s what I would say. Cultural elitism though has many different categories. Immigration is one, right? Is that cultural elitism and cultural liberalism has a fundamental belief that immigration in and of itself is a natural good at any and all levels, that all immigrants are replacement level, that there is no difference between them. Cultural elitism in a foreign policy context comes back to a lot of that human rights democracy stuff that I was talking about earlier, which divorces American values from American interests and says that actually American values are American interests. Cultural elitism and liberalism leads to the worship of the post-civil rights era of bureaucracy that I talked about from those two books of DEI or, quote-unquote, woke, and of progressive social ideology. So I would put all those together as ultimately what MAGA is. It is a, “Screw you.”
MAGA is a rejection of cultural elitism. That’s what I would say. Cultural elitism though has many different categories. Immigration is one, right? Is that cultural elitism and cultural liberalism has a fundamental belief that immigration in and of itself is a natural good at any and all levels, that all immigrants are replacement level, that there is no difference between them. Cultural elitism in a foreign policy context comes back to a lot of that human rights democracy stuff that I was talking about earlier, which divorces American values from American interests and says that actually American values are American interests. Cultural elitism and liberalism leads to the worship of the post-civil rights era of bureaucracy that I talked about from those two books of DEI or, quote-unquote, woke, and of progressive social ideology. So I would put all those together as ultimately what MAGA is. It is a, “Screw you.”
I once drove past… It was in rural Nevada, and I was driving and I drove past the biggest sign I’ve ever seen, political sign, to this day. And it was in 2020. It just said, “Trump, fuck your feelings.” And I still believe that is the most coherent MAGA thing I’ve ever seen. Because everyone’s always like, “How can a neocon, and Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK and all these other people, how can they all exist under the same umbrella?” And I’m like, “It’s very simple. All of them have rejected the cultural elite, in their own way, certainly, but they’ve arrived at the same place. It’s an umbrella. And it’s an umbrella fundamentally, which has nothing to do with the status quo and with the currently established cultural elite. That doesn’t mean they’re not elite and they’re not rich in their own regards, that doesn’t mean they don’t disagree, but that’s the one thing that unites the entire party.” And so that’s the way I would put it.
Lex Fridman
Anti-cultural elite, is that synonymous with anti-establishment? So basic distrust of all institutions? Is elitism connected to institutions?
Anti-cultural elite, is that synonymous with anti-establishment? So basic distrust of all institutions? Is elitism connected to institutions?
Saagar Enjeti
Yes, absolutely, because elites are the ones who runs our institutions. That’s said, anti-establishment is really not the right word because there are a lot of left-wingers who are anti-establishment, right? They are against that, but they’re not anti-cultural leftism. And that’s the key distinction between MAGA and left populism. Left populism basically does agree. They agree with basic conceits, like racism is one of the biggest problem facing America. They’re like, “One of the ways that we would fix that is through class-oriented economic programs in order to address that. But we believe in… I don’t know, reparations as a concept. It’s just more about how we arrive there.” Whereas in MAGA, we would say, “No, we actually don’t think that at all. We think we’ve evolved past that and we think that the best way to fix it is actually similar policy prescription, but the mindset matters a lot.” So the real distinction, MAGA and left populism really is on culture.
Yes, absolutely, because elites are the ones who runs our institutions. That’s said, anti-establishment is really not the right word because there are a lot of left-wingers who are anti-establishment, right? They are against that, but they’re not anti-cultural leftism. And that’s the key distinction between MAGA and left populism. Left populism basically does agree. They agree with basic conceits, like racism is one of the biggest problem facing America. They’re like, “One of the ways that we would fix that is through class-oriented economic programs in order to address that. But we believe in… I don’t know, reparations as a concept. It’s just more about how we arrive there.” Whereas in MAGA, we would say, “No, we actually don’t think that at all. We think we’ve evolved past that and we think that the best way to fix it is actually similar policy prescription, but the mindset matters a lot.” So the real distinction, MAGA and left populism really is on culture.
Bernie Sanders
Trans, in particular, orientation about… Actually, immigration may be the biggest one. Because if you look at the history of Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders was a person who railed against open borders and against mass migration for years. There are famous interviews of him on YouTube with Lou Dobbs, who’s one of the hardcore immigration guys, and they agree with each other. And Lou is like, “Bernie’s one of the only guys out there.” Bernie, at the end of the day, he had to succumb to the cultural left, and it’s changing attitudes on mass immigration. There’s some famous clips from 2015 in a Vox interview that he gave where he started… I think he started talking about how open borders is a Koch brothers libertarian concept, right? Because Bernie is basically of a European welfare state tradition. European welfare states are very simply understood. We have high taxes, high services, low rates of immigration. Because we have high taxes and high services, we have a limited pool of people who can experience and take those services.
He used to understand that. He changed a lot of his attitude. Bernie also… I will say, look, he’s a courageous man and a courageous politician. As late as 2017, he actually endorsed a pro-life candidate because he said that that pro-life candidate was pro-worker. And he’s like, “At the end of the day, I care about pro-worker policy.” He took a ton of shit for it, and I don’t think he’s done it since. So the sad part that’s really happened is that a lot of left populist agenda and other has become subsumed in the hysteria around cultural leftism, wokeism, whatever the hell you want to call it. And ultimately, that cultural leftism was the thing that really united the two wings of that party. And that’s really why MAGA is very opposed to that. They’re really not the same, but the left populist can still be anti-establishment. That’s the key.
Lex Fridman
It’s interesting to think of the left cultural elite subsuming, consuming Bernie Sanders, the left populist. So you think that’s what happened?
It’s interesting to think of the left cultural elite subsuming, consuming Bernie Sanders, the left populist. So you think that’s what happened?
Saagar Enjeti
That’s what I would say.
That’s what I would say.
Lex Fridman
What do you think happened in 2016 with Bernie? Is there a possible future where he would’ve won? You and Krystal wrote a book on populism in 2020. So from that perspective, just looking at 2016, if he rejected wokeism at that time… By the way, that would be pretty gangster during 2016. Would he have… Because I think Hillary went towards the left more, right? Am I remembering that correctly?
What do you think happened in 2016 with Bernie? Is there a possible future where he would’ve won? You and Krystal wrote a book on populism in 2020. So from that perspective, just looking at 2016, if he rejected wokeism at that time… By the way, that would be pretty gangster during 2016. Would he have… Because I think Hillary went towards the left more, right? Am I remembering that correctly?
Saagar Enjeti
It was a very weird time. So yes and no. It wasn’t full-on BLM-mania like it was in 2020, but the signs were all there. So the Great Awokening was in 2014. I know it’s a ridiculous term. I’m-
It was a very weird time. So yes and no. It wasn’t full-on BLM-mania like it was in 2020, but the signs were all there. So the Great Awokening was in 2014. I know it’s a ridiculous term. I’m-
Lex Fridman
I love it. Please keep saying it because it has a ring to it.
I love it. Please keep saying it because it has a ring to it.
Saagar Enjeti
But just to give the origin, the Great Awakening is about the great religious revival in the United States. So because wokeism is a religion, that’s a common refrain, they were like, “The Great Awokening is a really good term,” so-
But just to give the origin, the Great Awakening is about the great religious revival in the United States. So because wokeism is a religion, that’s a common refrain, they were like, “The Great Awokening is a really good term,” so-
Lex Fridman
Thank you for explaining the joke. Yep.
Thank you for explaining the joke. Yep.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. So the Great Awokening is basically when racial attitudes amongst college-educated whites basically flipped on its head. There are a variety of reasons why this happened. I really believe that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations in the Atlantic is one of those. It radicalized an entire generation of basically white college-educated women to think completely differently on race. It was during Ferguson, and then it also happened immediately after the Trayvon Martin case. Those two things really set the stage for the eventual BLM takeover of 2020. But fundamentally, what they did is they changed racial attitudes amongst college-educated elites to really think in a race-first construct. And worse is that they were rejected in 2016 at the ballot box by the election of Donald Trump. And in response, they ramped it up because they believed that that was the framework to view the world, that people voted for Trump because he was racist and not for a variety of other reasons that they eventually did.
Yeah. So the Great Awokening is basically when racial attitudes amongst college-educated whites basically flipped on its head. There are a variety of reasons why this happened. I really believe that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations in the Atlantic is one of those. It radicalized an entire generation of basically white college-educated women to think completely differently on race. It was during Ferguson, and then it also happened immediately after the Trayvon Martin case. Those two things really set the stage for the eventual BLM takeover of 2020. But fundamentally, what they did is they changed racial attitudes amongst college-educated elites to really think in a race-first construct. And worse is that they were rejected in 2016 at the ballot box by the election of Donald Trump. And in response, they ramped it up because they believed that that was the framework to view the world, that people voted for Trump because he was racist and not for a variety of other reasons that they eventually did.
And so the point around this on question of whether Bernie could have won in 2016, I don’t know. Krystal seems to think so. I’m skeptical. I’m skeptical for a variety of reasons. I think the culture is honestly one of them. One of Trump’s core issues in 2016 was immigration. And Bernie and him did not agree on immigration. And if immigration, even if people did support Bernie Sanders and his vision for working class people, the debates and the understanding about what it would look like, like a healthcare system, which literally would pay for illegal immigrants, I think he would’ve gotten killed on that. But I could be wrong. I will never know what that looked like.
Lex Fridman
Let me reference you from earlier in the conversation with FDR. It’s not the policy. I think if he went more anti-establishment and more populist as opposed to trying to court, trying to be friendly with the DNC-
Let me reference you from earlier in the conversation with FDR. It’s not the policy. I think if he went more anti-establishment and more populist as opposed to trying to court, trying to be friendly with the DNC-
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. I mean, that’s a good counterfactual. Nobody will really know. Look, I have a lot of love for the Bernie 2016 campaign. He has a great ad from 2016 called America. You should watch it. It’s a great ad. That’s another very interesting thing. It’s unapologetically patriotic, and that is not something that you see in a lot of left-wing circles these days. So he understood politics at a base level that a lot of people did not. But Bernie himself, and then a lot of the Bernie movement was basically crushed by the elite Democratic Party for a variety of reasons. They hated them. They attacked Joe Rogan for even having him on and for giving him a platform. That was ridiculous.
Yeah. I mean, that’s a good counterfactual. Nobody will really know. Look, I have a lot of love for the Bernie 2016 campaign. He has a great ad from 2016 called America. You should watch it. It’s a great ad. That’s another very interesting thing. It’s unapologetically patriotic, and that is not something that you see in a lot of left-wing circles these days. So he understood politics at a base level that a lot of people did not. But Bernie himself, and then a lot of the Bernie movement was basically crushed by the elite Democratic Party for a variety of reasons. They hated them. They attacked Joe Rogan for even having him on and for giving him a platform. That was ridiculous.
Obviously, it backfired in their face, which is really funny. But there were a million examples like that when they attacked Bernie for endorsing a pro-life politician. He never did it again. They attacked Bernie for having Bernie Bros. People online, the bros who were [inaudible 01:56:40] Bernie, and it was his fault. His supporters would say nasty things about Elizabeth Warren, and he would defend straight himself and be like, “Yes, I’m sorry. Please, my bros,” he was like, “Stop that.”
Lex Fridman
I think that his biggest problem is he never went full Trump. He kept saying sorry.
I think that his biggest problem is he never went full Trump. He kept saying sorry.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. Actually, in 2020, I did a ton of analysis on this at the time. He would always do stuff like, “Joe Biden, my friend,” and it’s like, “No, he’s not your friend. He stands for everything that you disagree with. Everything.” He’d be like, “Yeah, he’s a nice guy, but he’s not my friend,” but he would always be like, “Joe and I are great friends, but we have a small disagreement on this.” But like you just said, in terms of going full Trump, they wanted to see Trump up there humiliating all of the GOP politicians that they didn’t trust anymore. That’s what people really wanted. But the other side of this is that the Democratic base in 2020 was very different than 2016. Because by 2020, they full-on had TDS, and they were basically like, “We need to defeat Trump at all costs. We don’t give a shit what your name is, Bernie, Biden, whatever. Whichever of you is going to be at best defeat Trump, you get the knob.”
Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. Actually, in 2020, I did a ton of analysis on this at the time. He would always do stuff like, “Joe Biden, my friend,” and it’s like, “No, he’s not your friend. He stands for everything that you disagree with. Everything.” He’d be like, “Yeah, he’s a nice guy, but he’s not my friend,” but he would always be like, “Joe and I are great friends, but we have a small disagreement on this.” But like you just said, in terms of going full Trump, they wanted to see Trump up there humiliating all of the GOP politicians that they didn’t trust anymore. That’s what people really wanted. But the other side of this is that the Democratic base in 2020 was very different than 2016. Because by 2020, they full-on had TDS, and they were basically like, “We need to defeat Trump at all costs. We don’t give a shit what your name is, Bernie, Biden, whatever. Whichever of you is going to be at best defeat Trump, you get the knob.”
2016 is different because they didn’t full-on have that love and necessity of winning. By the way, this is a strategic advantage that the Democrats have. Democrats just care about winning. The current base of the party, all they want to do is win. Republican base? They don’t give a shit about winning. They just love Trump. So it’s nice to win. But one of those where they will express their id for what they really want. Now, it’s worked out for them because it turns out, that’s a very palpable political force. But one of the reasons why you won’t see me up here doing James Carville 40 more years is there is a law of something called thermostatic public opinion, where the thermostat, it changes a lot whenever you actually… So when you have a left-wing president in power, the country goes right. When you have a right-wing president in power, the country goes left.
Amazing. Right? You can actually look at a graph of economic attitudes from the two months where Joe Biden became president after Donald Trump. So Republicans, Trump was president in the last year in office, the economy’s great. Two months later, the economy is horrible. That is a perfect example of thermostatic opinion. And I’m not counting these Democrats out. 2004, George W. Bush wins the popular vote. He has a historic mandate to continue in Iraq. By ’06, he’s toasted. We have a massive midterm election. And by ’08, we’re writing books about 40 more years, and how there’s never going to be a Republican in the office ever again. So things can change a lot in a very short period of time.
Obama vs Trump
Lex Fridman
I think also for me, personally, maybe I’m deluded, the great man view of history, I think some of it is in programming circles, the term skills issue. I think some of it just has to do how good you are, how charismatic you are, how good you are as a politician. I maybe disagree with this. I’d love to see what you think. If you were allowed to run for many terms, I think Obama would just keep winning. He would win 2016, he would win 2020, he would win this year, 2024.
I think also for me, personally, maybe I’m deluded, the great man view of history, I think some of it is in programming circles, the term skills issue. I think some of it just has to do how good you are, how charismatic you are, how good you are as a politician. I maybe disagree with this. I’d love to see what you think. If you were allowed to run for many terms, I think Obama would just keep winning. He would win 2016, he would win 2020, he would win this year, 2024.
Saagar Enjeti
It’s possible. But I would flip it on you, and I would say Obama would never be elected if there were no term limits, because Bill Clinton would’ve still been president.
It’s possible. But I would flip it on you, and I would say Obama would never be elected if there were no term limits, because Bill Clinton would’ve still been president.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. So-
Yeah. So-
Lex Fridman
Well, those two, right? That’s two examples of… Exactly. Extremely skilled politicians and somehow can appear like populists.
Well, those two, right? That’s two examples of… Exactly. Extremely skilled politicians and somehow can appear like populists.
Saagar Enjeti
Man, Bill Clinton was a force in his time, and it’s honestly sad what’s happened to him. I was actually just talking with a friend the other day. I’m like, “I don’t think that presidents should become president when they’re young because they live to see themselves become irrelevant,” and that must be really painful because I know what it takes to get there. Imagine being Clinton, I mean, your entire legacy was destroyed with Hillary Clinton in 2016. And then imagine being Obama, who, in 2016, you could argue it’s a one-off and say that Trump is just… Oh, Hillary was a bad candidate, but Michelle and Barack Obama went so hard for Kamala Harris, and they just got blown out in the popular vote. I mean, the Obama era officially ended with Donald Trump’s reelection to the presidency in 2024, and that was a 20-year period where Obama was one of the most popular central figures in American politics. But I want to return to what you’re saying because it is important, and by the way, I do not support term limits on American presidents.
Man, Bill Clinton was a force in his time, and it’s honestly sad what’s happened to him. I was actually just talking with a friend the other day. I’m like, “I don’t think that presidents should become president when they’re young because they live to see themselves become irrelevant,” and that must be really painful because I know what it takes to get there. Imagine being Clinton, I mean, your entire legacy was destroyed with Hillary Clinton in 2016. And then imagine being Obama, who, in 2016, you could argue it’s a one-off and say that Trump is just… Oh, Hillary was a bad candidate, but Michelle and Barack Obama went so hard for Kamala Harris, and they just got blown out in the popular vote. I mean, the Obama era officially ended with Donald Trump’s reelection to the presidency in 2024, and that was a 20-year period where Obama was one of the most popular central figures in American politics. But I want to return to what you’re saying because it is important, and by the way, I do not support term limits on American presidents.
Lex Fridman
Are you a fascist or-
Are you a fascist or-
Saagar Enjeti
Well, that would imply that I don’t believe in democracy. I actually do believe in democracy because I think the people, if they love their president, should be able to reelect him. I think FDR was amazing. I think that the term limit change was basically what happened is that Republicans and a lot of elite Democrats always wanted to speak against FDR, but he was a god, so they couldn’t. So they waited until he died. And then after he died, they were like, “Yeah, this whole third, fourth term, that can never happen again.” And America didn’t really think that hard about it. They were like, “Yeah, okay, whatever.” But, I mean, it had immense consequences for American history. Clinton is the perfect example. I mean, Bill Clinton left office, even despite the Lewinsky bullshit, he had a 60% approval rating. Okay? No way George W. Bush gets elected. Impossible. Clinton would’ve blown his ass out.
Well, that would imply that I don’t believe in democracy. I actually do believe in democracy because I think the people, if they love their president, should be able to reelect him. I think FDR was amazing. I think that the term limit change was basically what happened is that Republicans and a lot of elite Democrats always wanted to speak against FDR, but he was a god, so they couldn’t. So they waited until he died. And then after he died, they were like, “Yeah, this whole third, fourth term, that can never happen again.” And America didn’t really think that hard about it. They were like, “Yeah, okay, whatever.” But, I mean, it had immense consequences for American history. Clinton is the perfect example. I mean, Bill Clinton left office, even despite the Lewinsky bullshit, he had a 60% approval rating. Okay? No way George W. Bush gets elected. Impossible. Clinton would’ve blown his ass out.
And imagine the consequences of that. We would have no Iraq… I mean, I’m not saying he was a great man. We probably still would’ve had the financial crisis, and there’s still a lot of bad stuff that would’ve happened. But he was a popular dude, and I wouldn’t say he had the best judgment at times presidentially… Definitely not personally, but presidentially. But I’m pretty confident we would’ve not gone into the Iraq war. And so that’s where it really cost us. If you’re left wing and you’re talking about Obama, yeah, I think Obama probably would’ve won in 2016. Although it’s a counterfactual, because Obama was never challenged in the same way that MAGA was able to, to the liberal consensus. Romney really ran this awful campaign, honestly, about cutting spending. It was very traditional Republican. It was deeply unpopular. The autopsy of that election was we actually need to be more pro-immigration. That literally was the autopsy. But Trump understood the assignment.
There are two people who I so deeply respect for their political bets. Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. So one of the books that I recommended called The Unwinding by George Packer, he actually talks about Peter Thiel there. This is in 2013. And Thiel talks about, he was like, “Whoever runs for office next, they don’t need to run on an optimistic message. They need to run on a message that everything is fucked up and that we need to… And if you think about, that’s why Thiel’s endorsement of Trump with the American carnage message is… I mean, it was shocking at the time, but he had that fundamental insight that that’s what the American people wanted. Trump too comes out of an election in 2012 where the literal GOP autopsy, the report produced by the party, says, “We need to be pro-mass immigration.” What happens? Immediately after 2012, they start to go for mass immigrant… Basically, they go for these amnesty plans, the so-called Gang of Eight plan, Marco Rubio, and all of this in 2013, it falls apart, but Republicans get punished by their base in [inaudible 02:04:04]-
Saagar Enjeti
Republicans get punished by their base in 2014. So Eric Cantor, who was the House Majority Leader, the number two Republican, spent more on stake in his campaign than his primary opponent who successfully defeated him, a guy named Dave Brat. Dave Brat kicked his ass on the issue of immigration and said that Eric Cantor is pro-amnesty. All of the forces were there.
Republicans get punished by their base in 2014. So Eric Cantor, who was the House Majority Leader, the number two Republican, spent more on stake in his campaign than his primary opponent who successfully defeated him, a guy named Dave Brat. Dave Brat kicked his ass on the issue of immigration and said that Eric Cantor is pro-amnesty. All of the forces were there.
Then in 2015, Trump comes down the escalator, and he gives the message on immigration that the GOP base has been roaring and wanting to hear now but that nobody wanted to listen to them. That was his fundamental insight. That bet was a colossal and a Titanic political bet at a time when all political ideology and thought process would’ve said that you should come out on the other side, which is where Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and all these other guys were effectively there in varying different ways, like they were hawkish or whatever. But Trump just had such a monopoly on that as an idea.
That’s why he wins the 2016 primary. Then paired with immigration, a hard line position on immigration, is this American carnage idea that actually everything is wrong. The American dream has gone. “We will stop this American carnage.” I think American Carnage is one of the most important inaugural speeches ever given in American history. Put it up against every single other speech, there’s nothing else like it. But that was what the country wanted at the time.
That’s what great politicians are able to do, is they’re able to suss something out. That’s also why Peter Thiel is who he is because he saw that in 2000. Imagine what it takes to come out of the 2012 election and to be honestly totally contrarian to the entire national mood and this entire theory of Obama-esque star politics and say, “No, you need somebody who runs on the opposite of that to win.”
Lex Fridman
Well, we’ll never know. I love this kind of Mike Tyson versus Muhammad Ali. I still think I would’ve loved to see Obama versus Trump.
Well, we’ll never know. I love this kind of Mike Tyson versus Muhammad Ali. I still think I would’ve loved to see Obama versus Trump.
Saagar Enjeti
Me too. I agree.
Me too. I agree.
Lex Fridman
First of all, Obama versus Trump in 2008, Obama wins hands down.
First of all, Obama versus Trump in 2008, Obama wins hands down.
Saagar Enjeti
Well, yes, definitely.
Well, yes, definitely.
Lex Fridman
I love how this is a boxing talk.
I love how this is a boxing talk.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Now, 2016, Obama has Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, 2016, Obama has Iraq and Afghanistan.
Saagar Enjeti
He’s vulnerable though. I’ll tell you why: DACA. That’s what nobody ever talks about in the Obama-Trump thing. Don’t forget, Obama takes his 2012 victory, basically says, “Oh, the GOP even now agrees with me on immigration,” and then he does DACA and he legalizes X million number of illegal immigrants who are here who were brought here as children. That also fundamentally changed the immigration consensus on the Republican side because they’re like, “Wait, holy shit. You can just do that? Because we don’t agree with that at all.” That really ignited the base as well. So I’m not sure.
He’s vulnerable though. I’ll tell you why: DACA. That’s what nobody ever talks about in the Obama-Trump thing. Don’t forget, Obama takes his 2012 victory, basically says, “Oh, the GOP even now agrees with me on immigration,” and then he does DACA and he legalizes X million number of illegal immigrants who are here who were brought here as children. That also fundamentally changed the immigration consensus on the Republican side because they’re like, “Wait, holy shit. You can just do that? Because we don’t agree with that at all.” That really ignited the base as well. So I’m not sure.
A moment I think about a lot with Trump and just being able to unleash the rage of the Republican base is in the 2012 debate, Candy Crowley was the moderator with Mitt Romney, and she fact-checked him famously. This was when fact checking was shocking in a presidential debate. She said something about Benghazi, and she was like, “No, he did say that.” She corrected Romney on behalf of Obama. To this day, it’s questionable whether she was even right. Romney was just like, “Oh, he did? Okay.” Trump would’ve been like, “Excuse me. Excuse me. Look at this woman.” He would’ve gone off.
I think about that moment because that’s what the Republican base wanted to hear. But also, it turns out, America had a lot of festering feelings about the mainstream media that it needed unleashed, and Trump was just this incredible vector to just blow up this system, which, if you asked me about optimism, that’s the thing I’m most optimistic about.
Lex Fridman
But don’t you think Obama had a good sense in how to turn it on, how to be anti-establishment correctly?
But don’t you think Obama had a good sense in how to turn it on, how to be anti-establishment correctly?
Saagar Enjeti
I will not deny that he’s one of the most talented politicians literally to ever play the game. He is a just unbelievable rhetorical talent. Look, as a counterfactual, would he have been more talented than Hillary? Yeah, no question in terms of anybody would’ve been for that one. But at the same time, all the signs were there. All the signs for the Trump victory and for the backlash against Obama-ism kind of as a political project, it all existed. Like I just laid the tea leaves out there, from 2012 to 2015, in retrospect, it’s the most predictable thing in the world that Donald Trump would get elected, but it was crazy in the moment. I got to live through that, which was really fun, like professionally.
I will not deny that he’s one of the most talented politicians literally to ever play the game. He is a just unbelievable rhetorical talent. Look, as a counterfactual, would he have been more talented than Hillary? Yeah, no question in terms of anybody would’ve been for that one. But at the same time, all the signs were there. All the signs for the Trump victory and for the backlash against Obama-ism kind of as a political project, it all existed. Like I just laid the tea leaves out there, from 2012 to 2015, in retrospect, it’s the most predictable thing in the world that Donald Trump would get elected, but it was crazy in the moment. I got to live through that, which was really fun, like professionally.
Lex Fridman
I think it’s unfortunate that he kind of let Kamala Harris borrow his reputation.
I think it’s unfortunate that he kind of let Kamala Harris borrow his reputation.
Saagar Enjeti
It’s like, “You know better, dude. You know. You defeated these people, the Clinton machine. You destroyed them.” And it was awesome in ’08.
It’s like, “You know better, dude. You know. You defeated these people, the Clinton machine. You destroyed them.” And it was awesome in ’08.
Lex Fridman
What is that? He’s so much bigger and better than the machine.
What is that? He’s so much bigger and better than the machine.
Saagar Enjeti
I don’t get it.
I don’t get it.
Lex Fridman
It’s interesting, right?
It’s interesting, right?
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. It’s so weird though. I just think-
Yeah. It’s so weird though. I just think-
Lex Fridman
I think this was a wake-up call. 2024 was a wake-up call. The DNC machine doesn’t work.
I think this was a wake-up call. 2024 was a wake-up call. The DNC machine doesn’t work.
Saagar Enjeti
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
There needs to be new blood, new Obama-like candidates.
There needs to be new blood, new Obama-like candidates.
Saagar Enjeti
Well, I’m glad you brought that up because that’s important, too, in terms of the process and the way that things currently stand. The DNC actually rigged its entire primary system under Biden not to the benefit of Obama. For example, you know how they moved away from the Iowa caucuses and they actually moved some other primaries and moved the calendar to reward traditional states that vote much more in line with the democratic establishment. The story of Barack Obama is one that not many… actually, probably a lot of young people today don’t even remember how it happened.
Well, I’m glad you brought that up because that’s important, too, in terms of the process and the way that things currently stand. The DNC actually rigged its entire primary system under Biden not to the benefit of Obama. For example, you know how they moved away from the Iowa caucuses and they actually moved some other primaries and moved the calendar to reward traditional states that vote much more in line with the democratic establishment. The story of Barack Obama is one that not many… actually, probably a lot of young people today don’t even remember how it happened.
In 2008, Obama was the underdog. Actually, here’s the critical thing. Obama was losing with Black people. Why? Black Democrats simply did not believe that white people were vote for a Black guy. So Barack Obama goes to this white state, Iowa, all in on the Iowa caucuses, and shocks the world by winning the Iowa caucuses. Overnight, there is a shift in public amongst the Black population in South Carolina that says, “Oh, shit, he actually could win,” and he comes out, and he wins South Carolina. That’s basically was the death knell for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The problem is by moving South Carolina up and by making it first along with other more pro-establishment friendly places, what do we do? We make it so that Barack Obama can never happen again. We make it so that an older base of Democratic Party voters who listens to the elites can never have their assumptions challenged. That’s one of the worst things Joe Biden did. I talked about his arrogance. He was so arrogant, he changed the freaking primary system. He was so arrogant, he refused to do a debate. I mean, imagine history. How lucky are we honestly that Joe Biden agreed to do that debate with Donald Trump early? Again, that was his arrogance. I think we’re so lucky for it because if we hadn’t gotten… We got to understand as a country how cooked he was and how fake everything was behind the scenes in front of all of our eyes. They tried for three straight years to make sure that that would never happen. It’s still such a crime, honestly, against the American people.
Lex Fridman
I’ve been thinking about who I want to talk to for three hours. That’s why I bring up Obama because he’s probably the number one person on the left I would like to hear analyze what happened in this election and what’s happened to the United States of America over the past 20 plus years. I can’t imagine anybody else.
I’ve been thinking about who I want to talk to for three hours. That’s why I bring up Obama because he’s probably the number one person on the left I would like to hear analyze what happened in this election and what’s happened to the United States of America over the past 20 plus years. I can’t imagine anybody else.
Saagar Enjeti
Look, if anybody could do it, it’d be you. But there are layers upon layers with that man. I would love to actually sit and talk with him, for real.
Look, if anybody could do it, it’d be you. But there are layers upon layers with that man. I would love to actually sit and talk with him, for real.
Lex Fridman
I think it’s fair to say that we talked about the great man view of history. I think you have a psychopath view of history where all great leaders are for sure psychopaths.
I think it’s fair to say that we talked about the great man view of history. I think you have a psychopath view of history where all great leaders are for sure psychopaths.
Saagar Enjeti
Not for sure. There are many who are good people. Harry Truman was-
Not for sure. There are many who are good people. Harry Truman was-
Lex Fridman
You’re like, some of them [inaudible 02:11:52].
You’re like, some of them [inaudible 02:11:52].
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, some-
Yeah, some-
Lex Fridman
Yeah, Harry Truman, Harry Truman.
Yeah, Harry Truman, Harry Truman.
Saagar Enjeti
Some, I assume, are good people. To be fair though, most of the good ones are accidents, like Harry Truman. He never would’ve gotten himself elected. He was a great dude.
Some, I assume, are good people. To be fair though, most of the good ones are accidents, like Harry Truman. He never would’ve gotten himself elected. He was a great dude.
Lex Fridman
How do you know he was a great dude?
How do you know he was a great dude?
Saagar Enjeti
David McCullough book, I highly recommended it. Everybody should read it. Truman loved his wife. I think that’s really awesome. I love when politicians love their wife. It’s so rare. He adored his wife, he adored his daughter, spent time with them. He made family life a priority. He had really good small-town judgment that he would apply to foreign affairs. He was just a very well-considered, very stand-up man. I so appreciate that about him.
David McCullough book, I highly recommended it. Everybody should read it. Truman loved his wife. I think that’s really awesome. I love when politicians love their wife. It’s so rare. He adored his wife, he adored his daughter, spent time with them. He made family life a priority. He had really good small-town judgment that he would apply to foreign affairs. He was just a very well-considered, very stand-up man. I so appreciate that about him.
Another one is John Adams. I love and revere John Adams. He’s my favorite Founding Father. Him and John Quincy, they don’t get nearly enough of their due. They were some of the most intelligent, well-considered. They were family men. The love and the relationship between John and Abigail Adams is literally legendary. I think it’s amazing, especially in the context of the 1700s, the way that he would take her counsel into conversations and her own ability. She would sit there and go toe-to-toe as much with Thomas Jefferson. There are some who are great, who are really, really good presidents, who have good judgment and who are really good people and really think deeply about the world and have really cool personal lives. But also the vast majority of them… I would say especially in the modern era and where the price of the presidency extracts everything that you have, you have to be willing to give everything. That’s not a price that most people want to pay.
Lex Fridman
Is it possible that some of the people who you think are sociopaths in politics are in fact really good people, and some of the people you think are good, like Truman and Adams, are actually sociopaths?
Is it possible that some of the people who you think are sociopaths in politics are in fact really good people, and some of the people you think are good, like Truman and Adams, are actually sociopaths?
Saagar Enjeti
Definitely. I could just be reading the wrong books, right?
Definitely. I could just be reading the wrong books, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s right. It sounds like you just read some really compelling biographies.
Yeah, that’s right. It sounds like you just read some really compelling biographies.
Saagar Enjeti
Well, to be fair, I don’t base this on one book. I read a lot of them, and I’ll get… For example, I’ve read books about LBJ, you wouldn’t know any of his foibles. But then you find out that they’re written by his friend or it was written by… I think you read [inaudible 02:14:08].
Well, to be fair, I don’t base this on one book. I read a lot of them, and I’ll get… For example, I’ve read books about LBJ, you wouldn’t know any of his foibles. But then you find out that they’re written by his friend or it was written by… I think you read [inaudible 02:14:08].
Lex Fridman
I think you read the truth. I really worry about this general, especially now, the anti-establishment sense that every politician must be a sociopath. The reason I worry about that is it feels true.
I think you read the truth. I really worry about this general, especially now, the anti-establishment sense that every politician must be a sociopath. The reason I worry about that is it feels true.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So you can fall into this bubble of beliefs where every politician is a sociopath, and because of that-
So you can fall into this bubble of beliefs where every politician is a sociopath, and because of that-
Saagar Enjeti
It can be a self-reinforcing [inaudible 02:14:38].
It can be a self-reinforcing [inaudible 02:14:38].
Lex Fridman
… it can be a self-reinforcing mechanism.
… it can be a self-reinforcing mechanism.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I agree, by the way. We do need to dramatically change it. But the problem is that people vote with their eyeballs and with their interests, and people love to dissect people’s personal lives. One of the reasons why you were probably more likely in the pre-modern era to get, quote/unquote, good people is they were not subject to the level of scrutiny and to the insanity of the process that you are currently. Like I just said about… Theoretically, you could run for president and you would just get your nomination at the convention. It’s only two months to Election Day. That’s not so bad. But you run for president today, you got your ass on the road for two years and then two years before that. Then you have to run the damn government. So the price is so extraordinarily high.
Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I agree, by the way. We do need to dramatically change it. But the problem is that people vote with their eyeballs and with their interests, and people love to dissect people’s personal lives. One of the reasons why you were probably more likely in the pre-modern era to get, quote/unquote, good people is they were not subject to the level of scrutiny and to the insanity of the process that you are currently. Like I just said about… Theoretically, you could run for president and you would just get your nomination at the convention. It’s only two months to Election Day. That’s not so bad. But you run for president today, you got your ass on the road for two years and then two years before that. Then you have to run the damn government. So the price is so extraordinarily high.
I also think that, oh, God, just Washington as a system, it will burn you. It will extract absolutely everything that you can give it. At the end of the day, everyone always talks about this, it’s hilarious, how Trump is the only president not to age in office. I actually think it’s crazy when you look at the photos of how he actually looks better today than he did whenever he went into the office. That’s amazing, and it actually says a lot about how his mind works. I think Trump is pure id. Having observed him a little bit, both at the White House and having interviewed him, it’s calculating, but it’s also pure id, which is very interesting. The ones who are the thinkers, guys like Obama and others who are really in their heads, it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare. Apparently, Obama would only sleep four hours a night.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, add some empathy on top of that, it’s just going to destroy you.
Yeah, add some empathy on top of that, it’s just going to destroy you.
Saagar Enjeti
It will kill you, man.
It will kill you, man.
Nancy Pelosi
Lex Fridman
All right, speaking about the dirty game of politics, several people, different people told me that of everyone they have ever met in politics, Nancy Pelosi is the best at attaining and wielding political power. Is there any truth to that?
All right, speaking about the dirty game of politics, several people, different people told me that of everyone they have ever met in politics, Nancy Pelosi is the best at attaining and wielding political power. Is there any truth to that?
Saagar Enjeti
In the modern era, yeah, I think that’s fair in the last 25 years, definitely. Let’s think about it. Number one is longevity. She’s had the ability to control the caucus for a long period of time, so that’s impressive. Because as I just laid out with Clinton, Obama, these figures come and they go, but over a 25-almost-year period, you’ve been at the very top and the center of American politics.
In the modern era, yeah, I think that’s fair in the last 25 years, definitely. Let’s think about it. Number one is longevity. She’s had the ability to control the caucus for a long period of time, so that’s impressive. Because as I just laid out with Clinton, Obama, these figures come and they go, but over a 25-almost-year period, you’ve been at the very top and the center of American politics.
The other case would be is that in this modern era has been defined by access to money. She’s one of the greatest fundraisers in Democratic Party history. Again, consistently, Obama, Kamala, all those people come and go. But she’s always had a very central understanding of the ability to fundraise, to cultivate good relationships with Democratic Party elites all across the country, use that money and dole it out to her caucus.
She also was really good at making sure that legislation that came to the floor actually had the votes to do so. She ran an extremely well-ordered process in the House of Representatives, one in which you were able to reconcile problems within her office. It didn’t usually go public. Then it would make it to the floor, and it would pass so that there would be no general media frenzy and Democrats in disarray or any of that. Put that on display with the Republicans, and we’ve had multiple Speakers all resign or get fired in a 16-year period. That’s pretty remarkable. Basically, ever since John Boehner decided to leave in, what was it, 2012? I forget the exact year. My point is that if you compare her record to the longevity on the Republican side, it is astounding.
The other interesting thing is that she also has pulled off one of the real tests of political power is, can you rule even when you don’t have the title anymore? She gave up the leader position to Hakeem Jeffries, but everybody knows she pulled Joe Biden out of the race. That’s pretty interesting. She’s technically just a back-bencher, a nobody member of Congress, but we all know that’s bullshit. So that’s actually a very important case of political power is, can you rule without the title? If you can, then you truly are powerful. So I would make a good case for her, yeah. She’s done a lot of remarkable stuff for her party.
I will say they played Trump like a fiddle, man. Last time around, they were able to. They really got him. One of the craziest elements that I covered was Trump basically threatened to shut down the government and actually did shut down the government for a period of time over a dispute over border wall funding. Pelosi and Schumer, despite genuine mass hysteria in the Democratic Party with even some people who were willing to try and to strike a deal, never wavered and actually basically won and forced Trump to back down. Not a lot of MAGA people want to admit it, but that was honestly really embarrassing for the Trump administration at that time. The amount of discipline that it took for her, and Chuck to a lesser extent, but for the two of them to pull that off, it was honestly impressive that they were able to do that, even when the president has so much political power. It literally shut down the government over it.
Kamala Harris
Lex Fridman
Speaking of fundraising, Kamala raised $1 billion-
Speaking of fundraising, Kamala raised $1 billion-
Saagar Enjeti
Insane.
Insane.
Lex Fridman
… but I guess the conclusion is she spent it poorly. How would you spend it?
… but I guess the conclusion is she spent it poorly. How would you spend it?
Saagar Enjeti
I don’t think money matters that much. I think Donald Trump has proven to us twice that you can win an underdog campaign through earned media. And I don’t think that paid advertisement moves the needle that much. Now, notice, I didn’t say it doesn’t matter. But am I buying $425,000-a-day spots on the Vegas Sphere? No. We’re not doing that. As people who do this for a living, how do you even spend $100,000 to build a set for one interview?
I don’t think money matters that much. I think Donald Trump has proven to us twice that you can win an underdog campaign through earned media. And I don’t think that paid advertisement moves the needle that much. Now, notice, I didn’t say it doesn’t matter. But am I buying $425,000-a-day spots on the Vegas Sphere? No. We’re not doing that. As people who do this for a living, how do you even spend $100,000 to build a set for one interview?
Lex Fridman
Is this the Call Her Daddy?
Is this the Call Her Daddy?
Saagar Enjeti
The Call Her Daddy thing.
The Call Her Daddy thing.
Lex Fridman
Okay.
Okay.
Saagar Enjeti
How’s that possible? Think about the dollar-per-hour cost. That’s like running a jet airplane in terms of what they did, [inaudible 02:20:24] Kamala Harris thing.
How’s that possible? Think about the dollar-per-hour cost. That’s like running a jet airplane in terms of what they did, [inaudible 02:20:24] Kamala Harris thing.
Lex Fridman
You know what I want to note behind the scenes, and I’m not good with this, I get really frustrated and I shouldn’t, but dealing with PR and comms people can sometimes break my soul.
You know what I want to note behind the scenes, and I’m not good with this, I get really frustrated and I shouldn’t, but dealing with PR and comms people can sometimes break my soul.
Saagar Enjeti
It’s maddening. “Can we not talk about this? We need to pull them at 2:12 p.m.” You’re like, “But that’s only 30 minutes.” It’s like, yeah.
It’s maddening. “Can we not talk about this? We need to pull them at 2:12 p.m.” You’re like, “But that’s only 30 minutes.” It’s like, yeah.
Lex Fridman
That, but there’s stuff like where to put the camera. It’s not that I don’t-
That, but there’s stuff like where to put the camera. It’s not that I don’t-
Saagar Enjeti
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman
Hypothetically, I don’t even disagree with any of the suggestions, but it’s like-
Hypothetically, I don’t even disagree with any of the suggestions, but it’s like-
Saagar Enjeti
The micromanagement.
The micromanagement.
Lex Fridman
… just the micromanagement and the politeness, but the fake politeness. It just makes me feel like, I think, “What would Kubrick do?” Would he murder all of them right now?
… just the micromanagement and the politeness, but the fake politeness. It just makes me feel like, I think, “What would Kubrick do?” Would he murder all of them right now?
Saagar Enjeti
He would just ban them after he became Stanley Kubrick, but he dealt with it for a while. By the way, I just went on a Kubrick binge. Man, he was awesome.
He would just ban them after he became Stanley Kubrick, but he dealt with it for a while. By the way, I just went on a Kubrick binge. Man, he was awesome.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
I watched that World War I movie of his, the one from the ’50s. That is such an underrated film. I feel like people don’t… Whatever. We’ll get past it.
I watched that World War I movie of his, the one from the ’50s. That is such an underrated film. I feel like people don’t… Whatever. We’ll get past it.
Lex Fridman
I guess she paid for-
I guess she paid for-
Saagar Enjeti
A hundred grand, bro.
A hundred grand, bro.
Lex Fridman
… and the Oprah thing. She paid for the interviews?
… and the Oprah thing. She paid for the interviews?
Saagar Enjeti
That’s another one. I do this for a living. As you can tell, I’m a very cynical person. I did not even know that celebrities got paid for their endorsements. I could never have imagined a universe where Oprah Winfrey has paid $1 million to endorse Kamala Harris. I’m like, “First of all, you’re a billionaire.” Second, “I thought you’d do this because you believe.”
That’s another one. I do this for a living. As you can tell, I’m a very cynical person. I did not even know that celebrities got paid for their endorsements. I could never have imagined a universe where Oprah Winfrey has paid $1 million to endorse Kamala Harris. I’m like, “First of all, you’re a billionaire.” Second, “I thought you’d do this because you believe.”
Lex Fridman
No, to be fair, I think the million just helps do the thing you would like to do. It’s a nudge. Because I don’t think any celebrity would endorse-
No, to be fair, I think the million just helps do the thing you would like to do. It’s a nudge. Because I don’t think any celebrity would endorse-
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, yeah, they’re not doing it because of the money. You should just do it for free. I can’t even believe that you’re doing this for money. The fact, what was it, Alanis Morissette, they had to cut her because they didn’t have the funds to pay her. I’m like, “First of all, if you believe, you should just play for free.” But second, again, as a person who is deeply cynical, I still am genuinely shook that we are paying celebrities for their endorsement.
Yeah, yeah, they’re not doing it because of the money. You should just do it for free. I can’t even believe that you’re doing this for money. The fact, what was it, Alanis Morissette, they had to cut her because they didn’t have the funds to pay her. I’m like, “First of all, if you believe, you should just play for free.” But second, again, as a person who is deeply cynical, I still am genuinely shook that we are paying celebrities for their endorsement.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s really fucked up.
Yeah, it’s really fucked up.
Saagar Enjeti
That’s insane.
That’s insane.
Lex Fridman
Why do you think people on the left who are actually in the political arena are afraid of doing anything longer than an hour?
Why do you think people on the left who are actually in the political arena are afraid of doing anything longer than an hour?
Saagar Enjeti
That’s a great question.
That’s a great question.
Lex Fridman
Let me just say, probably most of the people I’ve talked to on this podcast are left wing or have been for a long time. They just don’t out and say it. Most scientists are left wing. Most vaguely political people are left wing that I’ve talked to. But the closer you get to the actual political arena, and I’ve tried really hard, they just, “Nope.” I had a bunch of people, the highest profile people say 15 minutes, 20 minutes. I say, “Nope.”
Let me just say, probably most of the people I’ve talked to on this podcast are left wing or have been for a long time. They just don’t out and say it. Most scientists are left wing. Most vaguely political people are left wing that I’ve talked to. But the closer you get to the actual political arena, and I’ve tried really hard, they just, “Nope.” I had a bunch of people, the highest profile people say 15 minutes, 20 minutes. I say, “Nope.”
Saagar Enjeti
I’m used to that, so welcome.
I’m used to that, so welcome.
Lex Fridman
I just can’t imagine a conversation with Kamala or with Joe Biden or AOC-
I just can’t imagine a conversation with Kamala or with Joe Biden or AOC-
Saagar Enjeti
Obama.
Obama.
Lex Fridman
… or Obama that’s of any quality at all that shows any kind of humanity of the person, the genius of the person, the interesting nuance of the person in 30 minutes. I don’t know. Maybe there’s people that are extremely skilled that can do that. You just can’t.
… or Obama that’s of any quality at all that shows any kind of humanity of the person, the genius of the person, the interesting nuance of the person in 30 minutes. I don’t know. Maybe there’s people that are extremely skilled that can do that. You just can’t.
Saagar Enjeti
You should be optimistic because a huge narrative out of this election is that the Democrats massively fucked up by not coming on this show or a Rogan show. Fundamentally, number one, that’s going to change dramatically-
You should be optimistic because a huge narrative out of this election is that the Democrats massively fucked up by not coming on this show or a Rogan show. Fundamentally, number one, that’s going to change dramatically-
Lex Fridman
I hope so.
I hope so.
Saagar Enjeti
… so be optimistic and keep pushing. Two, this is a good segue actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about, I know a lot of people listening to this show who are in tech and may have some influence on the admin, this is something I want people to take really seriously, is I was a White House correspondent for The Daily Caller, it’s a conservative outlet, in Washington during the Trump years. The most important thing I learned from that was that under the White House Correspondents’ Association, the way that the media cartel has everything set up for access for press to the President is fundamentally broken, anti-American, and bad for actual democracy. So let me lay this out at a very mechanical level because nobody knows this. I was a former White House Correspondents’ Association member, so anybody who says I’m full of shit, I was there.
… so be optimistic and keep pushing. Two, this is a good segue actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about, I know a lot of people listening to this show who are in tech and may have some influence on the admin, this is something I want people to take really seriously, is I was a White House correspondent for The Daily Caller, it’s a conservative outlet, in Washington during the Trump years. The most important thing I learned from that was that under the White House Correspondents’ Association, the way that the media cartel has everything set up for access for press to the President is fundamentally broken, anti-American, and bad for actual democracy. So let me lay this out at a very mechanical level because nobody knows this. I was a former White House Correspondents’ Association member, so anybody who says I’m full of shit, I was there.
For example, number one, all the seats in the Briefing Room, those seats are assigned by the White House Correspondents’ Association, not by the White House itself. The White House Correspondents’ Association requires you to apply for a seat. That adjudication process can take literally years for bylaws, elections, and all these things to do. This means that they can slow roll the entrance of new media online outlets who are allowed into the room. The reason it really matters not having a seat is if you don’t have a seat, you have to get there early and stand in the wings, like I used to, and raise your hand like this and just hope and pray that the press secretary can see. It’s extremely inconvenient. I’m talking, I have to get there hours early at a chance during a 15-minute briefing.
So one of the things is that Trump has is he owes a huge part of his election to coming on podcasts and to new media. Now, because of that, it’s really important that the White House Correspondents’ Association, which is a literal guild cartel that keeps people out of the White House and credentials itself and creates this opaque mechanism through which they control access to asking the press secretary questions, is destroyed. There are a lot of different ways you can do this. Because what nobody gets, too, is that all of these rules are unofficial. For example, they’re just traditions. The White House is like, “Yeah, it’s our building, but you guys figure it out,” because that’s a longstanding tradition.
Let me give you another insane tradition that currently exists in the White House. The Associated Press or the Associated Press correspondent gets to start the briefing, traditionally. They get the first question. They also get to end the briefing. When they think it’s been enough time, they’ll be like, “Okay, Karine Jean-Pierre, thank you,” and that calls the briefing over. What? You’re not even in the White House Correspondents’ Association. You literally just happen to work for the Associated Press. Why? Why do we allow that to happen? So number one, stop doing that. To their credit, the Trump people didn’t really do that, but it’s a longstanding tradition.
The other thing is that what nobody gets either is that the first row is all television networks for logistical reasons so that they can do their little stand-ups with their mic and say, “I’m reporting for [inaudible 02:27:00].” Well, what people don’t seem to know is that all the television networks are basically going to ask some version of the same question. The reason they do that is because they need a clip of their correspondent going after the White House press secretary all out, Robert Mueller, like whenever I was there. So you get the same goddamn version of the stupid political questions over and over again.
The Briefing Room is designed for traditional media, and they have all the access in the world. So in an election where you owe your victory, at least in part, to new media and recognizing the changing landscape, you need to change the conduit of information to the American people. And in an election, I don’t know if you saw this, but election night coverage on cable news was down 25%, just in four years, 25%. That’s astounding. Cable news had a monopoly on election night for my entire lifetime, and yet, my show had record ratings that night.
Look, I’m a small slice of the puzzle here. We’ve got Candice Owens, Patrick Bet-David, Tim Pool, David Pakman, TYT, all these other people. From what I understand, all of us blew it out that night because millions of Americans watched it on YouTube. We even partnered with some Decision Desk HQs, so we had live data. We could make state calls. We’re just a silly little YouTube show. My point, though, is that in an election where the vast majority of Americans under the age of 55 are listening to podcasts, consuming new media, and are not watching cable news, where the median age of CNN, which is the youngest viewership, is 68. 68 is the median. Statistically, what does that tell us? There’s a decent number of people who are watching CNN who are in their ’80s and in their ’90s.
Yeah, I’m glad you brought up Alex, because he deserves a tremendous shout out, Alex Bruesewitz. He was the pioneer of the podcast strategy for the Donald J. Trump campaign. He got on your show. He was able to get on Andrew Schulz’s show, Rogan. He was the internal force that pushed a lot of this. My personal hope is that somebody like Alex is elevated in the traditional White House bureaucracy, that the number of credentials that are issued to these mainstream media outlets is cut, and there’s a new lottery process put in place where people with large audiences are invited.
I also want to make a case here for why I think it’s really important for people like you and others who don’t have as much traditional media experience to come and practice some capital J journalism because it will sharpen you, too, giving you access in that pressure cooker environment. Having to really sit there and spar a little bit with a public official and not have as long necessarily as you’re used to, it really hones your news media skills, your news gathering skills, and it will make you a better interviewer in the long run.
Because a lot of the things that I have learned have just been through osmosis. I’ve just lived in DC. I’ve been so lucky, I’ve had a lot of cool jobs, and I’ve just been able to experience a lot of this stuff. So I’m really hoping that people who are listening to this who may have some influence or even the viewership, if you want to reach out to them and all them, this is a very easily changeable problem. It’s a cartel which has no official power. It’s all power by tradition, and it needs to be blown up. It does not serve America’s interests to have 48 seats, I think, in the White House Press Briefing Room to people who have audiences of like five. It just makes absolutely zero. Workspace, seats, access, credentials, and also credentials that are issued to other new media journalists at major events should take precedence. Because it’s not even about rewarding the creator. The American people are here. You need to meet them. That’s your job.
I’ll just end with a historical thing. Barack Obama shocked the White House Press Corps in 2009 because he took a question from the Huffington Post, a brand new blog, but they were stunned because he knew, he said, “These blog people, they went all in for me, and I got to reward them.” So there’s a longstanding precedence of this. They’ll bitch and they’ll moan. They’ll be upset. But it’s their fault that they don’t have as much credibility. It’s incumbent upon the White House, which serves the public, to actually meet them where they are. So I really hope that at least some of this is implemented inside of it.
Lex Fridman
If you break apart the cartel, I think you can actually enable greater journalism, frankly-
If you break apart the cartel, I think you can actually enable greater journalism, frankly-
Saagar Enjeti
Of course.
Of course.
Lex Fridman
… with a capital J. Because actually in the long form is when you can do better journalism from even just the politician perspective. You can disagree. You can get criticized because you can defend yourself.
… with a capital J. Because actually in the long form is when you can do better journalism from even just the politician perspective. You can disagree. You can get criticized because you can defend yourself.
Saagar Enjeti
I had an idea, actually. You tell me what you think. I think a really cool format would be there’s a room right near the Press Briefing Room called the Roosevelt Room. A beautiful room, by the way. It’s awesome. It has the Medal of Honor for Teddy Roosevelt, and it has a portrait of him and a portrait of FDR. It’s one of my favorite rooms in the White House.
I had an idea, actually. You tell me what you think. I think a really cool format would be there’s a room right near the Press Briefing Room called the Roosevelt Room. A beautiful room, by the way. It’s awesome. It has the Medal of Honor for Teddy Roosevelt, and it has a portrait of him and a portrait of FDR. It’s one of my favorite rooms in the White House.
Lex Fridman
Fuck, yeah.
Fuck, yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
It’s so cool. So my idea would be in the Roosevelt Room, which traditionally used for press briefings and stuff, is you as the press secretary sit there, I think there’s like 12 seats, something like that, and you set it all up. You have, let’s say, Shure microphones like this, and that secretary is going to commit to being there for two hours. New media people can sit around the room. All of this being streamed live, by the way, just like the White House Press Briefing Room.
It’s so cool. So my idea would be in the Roosevelt Room, which traditionally used for press briefings and stuff, is you as the press secretary sit there, I think there’s like 12 seats, something like that, and you set it all up. You have, let’s say, Shure microphones like this, and that secretary is going to commit to being there for two hours. New media people can sit around the room. All of this being streamed live, by the way, just like the White House Press Briefing Room.
The expectation is that the type of questions have to be substantive. Obviously, nothing is off limits. You should never, ever accept, “I’m not going to be asked about this.” Especially as a journalist, you can’t do that. Every time they’re like, “Hey, please don’t ask about this,” it’s like, actually, that’s probably one thing you should ask about. My point being that the expectation is that there’s no interference on the White House side, but that the format itself will lend exactly to what you’re saying to allow people to explain.
Again, in a media era where we need to trust the consumer, my show is routinely over two hours long on cable television. On cable television, the Tucker Carlson program, whenever it was on Fox News, without commercial breaks was about 42, 43 minutes, something like that, of runtime. So I’m speaking for almost triple what that is on a regular basis. The point is is that millions are willing to sit and to listen, but you just have to meet them where they are. So I really hope that a format like that, like a streamer briefing or something like that, I think it’s… Look, I know they would dunk on it endlessly, but I think it could work.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think the incentives are different. I think it works because you, like you saw, don’t have to signal to the other journalists that you’re part of clique.
Yeah, I think the incentives are different. I think it works because you, like you saw, don’t have to signal to the other journalists that you’re part of clique.
Saagar Enjeti
Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up because that was another lesson I learned. I go, “Oh, none of you are asking important questions for the people. You’re asking questions because you all hang out with each other, and you’re like, ‘Oh, wait.'” So this entire thing is a self-reinforcing guild to impress each other at cocktail parties and not to actually ask anything interesting. I remember people were so mad at me because, this was 2018 or maybe 2017, and I said, “Do you think that Kim Jong Un is sincere in his willingness to meet with you?” something to that effect. They were furious because I didn’t ask about some bullshit political controversy that was happening at the time. So in the historical legacy, what was more important? The Mueller question, or Donald Trump breaking 50 years or whatever of tradition with America’s relationship with North Korea and meeting him in Singapore and basically resetting that relationship for all time?
Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up because that was another lesson I learned. I go, “Oh, none of you are asking important questions for the people. You’re asking questions because you all hang out with each other, and you’re like, ‘Oh, wait.'” So this entire thing is a self-reinforcing guild to impress each other at cocktail parties and not to actually ask anything interesting. I remember people were so mad at me because, this was 2018 or maybe 2017, and I said, “Do you think that Kim Jong Un is sincere in his willingness to meet with you?” something to that effect. They were furious because I didn’t ask about some bullshit political controversy that was happening at the time. So in the historical legacy, what was more important? The Mueller question, or Donald Trump breaking 50 years or whatever of tradition with America’s relationship with North Korea and meeting him in Singapore and basically resetting that relationship for all time?
As you can tell, I read a lot of books. I like to take the long view. Every time I would ask a question, I go, when the future Robert Caro is writing books and he’s reading the transcript of the White House press briefing, he doesn’t even know who this kid is, he goes, “Oh, that was a pretty good question right there. That’s pretty relevant.” You got to think about all the bullshit that gets left on the cutting room floor.
Lex Fridman
I love that view of journalism, actually. The goal is to end up as one line in a history book.
I love that view of journalism, actually. The goal is to end up as one line in a history book.
Lex Fridman
The goal is to end up as one line in a history book 50 years from now.
The goal is to end up as one line in a history book 50 years from now.
Saagar Enjeti
Yes. I just want a quote of what the president said to something that I asked.
Yes. I just want a quote of what the president said to something that I asked.
Lex Fridman
Yes, in a book.
Yes, in a book.
Saagar Enjeti
That’s, “I would be happy. I would die happy with that.” If you told me that when I’m like a nine-year-old man, I’d be like, “Man.” Right? That means I succeeded.
That’s, “I would be happy. I would die happy with that.” If you told me that when I’m like a nine-year-old man, I’d be like, “Man.” Right? That means I succeeded.
Lex Fridman
When the AIs write the history of human civilization.
When the AIs write the history of human civilization.
2020 Election
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
One of the things I continuously learned from you, when looking back through history, is how crazy American politics has been throughout history. It makes me feel a lot better about the current day.
One of the things I continuously learned from you, when looking back through history, is how crazy American politics has been throughout history. It makes me feel a lot better about the current day.
Saagar Enjeti
It should.
It should.
Lex Fridman
Corruption.
Corruption.
Saagar Enjeti
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
Just the divisiveness, also. Just the insanity-
Just the divisiveness, also. Just the insanity-
Saagar Enjeti
It’s been way worse.
It’s been way worse.
Lex Fridman
… of stealing elections at all levels of government, and direct stealing and indirect stealing, all kinds of stuff. So, is there stuff that jumps out to mind throughout history that’s just like the craziest corruptions or stealing of elections that come to mind?
… of stealing elections at all levels of government, and direct stealing and indirect stealing, all kinds of stuff. So, is there stuff that jumps out to mind throughout history that’s just like the craziest corruptions or stealing of elections that come to mind?
Saagar Enjeti
I’ll give them the micro and the macro. So my favorite example is Robert Caro, who I’ve probably talked about him a lot. God bless you, Robert. I hope you lived to write your last book because we really need that from you.
I’ll give them the micro and the macro. So my favorite example is Robert Caro, who I’ve probably talked about him a lot. God bless you, Robert. I hope you lived to write your last book because we really need that from you.
But Robert came to Texas. He only intended on writing three books about Lyndon Johnson. He’s currently completed four and he is on his fifth, and it’s taken over 40 years to write those. And one of the reasons is he just kept uncovering so much stuff. And one of them is book two, Means of Ascent. He never intended to write it, but as he began to investigate Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 Senate election, he realizes in real time how rigged and stolen it was. And so I often tell people, “What if I told you that we lived in the most secure election period in modern history?” They wouldn’t believe it. But if you read through that shit, I’m talking about bags of cash, millions of dollars, literal stuffed ballot boxes.
It’s great to be back here in Texas because I always think about that place down in Zapata and Starr County. I’m talking like basically Mexico, where these dons were in power in the 1940s. They would literally stuff the ballot boxes with the rolls, and they wouldn’t even allow people to come and vote. They just check marked it all for you based upon the amount that you paid. Means of Ascent is the painstaking detail of exactly how Lyndon Johnson stole the 1948 Senate election. And nothing like that, as far as I know, is still happening.
Macro, we can talk about the 1876 election. Rutherford B. Hayes, one of the closest elections in modern history. It was one of those that got kicked with the House of Representatives. That was an insane, insane time. The corrupt bargain that was struck to basically end reconstruction and federal occupation of the South. And of course, the amount of wheeling and dealing that happened inside of that was absolutely bonkers and nuts. That was what an actual stolen election looks like, just so people know.
So on a micro and a macro, yeah, that’s what it really looks like. And so look, I understand where people are coming from. Also, let’s do, what? 1960? That was pretty wild. In 1960, there was all those allegations about Illinois going for Kennedy. If you look at the actual vote totals of Kennedy-Nixon, wow. I mean, it’s such an insanely close presidential election. And even though the electoral college victory looks a little bit differently, Nixon would openly talk about. He’s like, “Oh, old Joe Kennedy rigged Illinois for his boy.” And he’d be like, “And we didn’t even have a chance in Texas with Lyndon pulling.” Like, Lyndon stuffing the ballot boxes down there. And this is open on the…
They openly admit this stuff. They talk about it. So actually, there’s a funny story. LBJ lost, I think, his 1941 Senate primary. And it’s because that his opponent, Pappy O’Daniel, actually outstole Lyndon. So they were both corrupt, but Pappy O’Daniel stuffed the ballot box in the fifth day of the seven days to count the votes. And FDR loved LBJ. And it’s interesting, right? FDR recognized Johnson’s. His talent. And he goes, “Lyndon? You know in New York, we sit on the ballot boxes until we count them.” Because he’s admitting that he participated in a lot of this stuff.
So, this high-level chicanery of stolen elections is actually an American pastime that we luckily have moved on from. And quite a lot of people do not know the exact intricate details of how wild it was back in the day.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s actually one of the things. It’s harder to pull off a bunch of bullshit with all these cameras everywhere now.
Yeah, it’s actually one of the things. It’s harder to pull off a bunch of bullshit with all these cameras everywhere now.
Saagar Enjeti
Mm-hmm. Transparency too, lack of cash, banking regulations. There’s a variety of reasons, but yeah.
Mm-hmm. Transparency too, lack of cash, banking regulations. There’s a variety of reasons, but yeah.
Lex Fridman
So that said, let’s talk about the 2020 election. It seems like forever ago. Do you think it was rigged the way that Trump claimed?
So that said, let’s talk about the 2020 election. It seems like forever ago. Do you think it was rigged the way that Trump claimed?
Saagar Enjeti
No.
No.
Lex Fridman
And was it rigged in other ways?
And was it rigged in other ways?
Saagar Enjeti
Look, this is the problem with language like rigged. And by the way, when I interviewed Vivek Ramaswamy, he said the exact same thing. So for all the MAGA people who are going to get mad at me, Vivek agrees. All right? And if…
Look, this is the problem with language like rigged. And by the way, when I interviewed Vivek Ramaswamy, he said the exact same thing. So for all the MAGA people who are going to get mad at me, Vivek agrees. All right? And if…
Okay. I have observed, and I’m going to put my analyst hat on. There are two theories of Stop the Steal. One I call Low IQ Stop the Steal, and one I call High IQ Stop the Steal. Low IQ Stop the Steal is basically what Donald Trump has advocated where Dominion voting machines, and bamboo ballots, and Venezuela and Sidney Powell, and all of the people involved basically got indicted by the state of Georgia. I’m not saying that that was correct. I’m just like, that’s what that actually looked like. Rudy Giuliani, et cetera.
High IQ Stop the Steal is basically… And actually, these are not illegitimate arguments. The school of thought is it was illegitimate for the state of Pennsylvania and other swing states to change mail-in balloting laws as a response to COVID, which enabled millions of people more to vote that wouldn’t have, and that those change in regulations became enough to swing the election. I actually think that that is true. Now, would you say that that’s rigged? That’s a very important question because we’re talking about a Republican state legislature, a Republican state supreme court. Right? The two that actually ruled on this question. So, could you say that it was rigged by the Democrats to do that?
Another problem with that theory is that while you can say that that’s unfair to change the rules last time around, you can also understand it to a certain extent. And I’m not justifying it, I’m just giving you an example. So for example, after the hurricane hit North Carolina, Republican officials were like, “Hey, we need to make sure that these people in Western North Carolina who were affected by the hurricane could still be able to have access to the ballot box.”
And people were like, “Oh, so you’re saying in an extraordinary circumstance that you should change voting access and regularity to make sure that people have access?” So, my point is you can see the logic through which this happened. And the high IQ version is basically the one that was adopted by Josh Hawley whenever he voted against certification. He said that the state of Pennsylvania, particularly election law, and that those changes were unfair and led to the, quote-unquote, rigging of the election against Donald Trump. Now, there’s an even higher IQ, Galaxy Brain Stop the Steal. Galaxy Brain Stop the Steal is one that you saw, with great love and respect, my friend JD Vance, at his debate with Tim Walsh. When Tim Walsh asked him, [inaudible 02:42:36]. He said, “Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?”
He’s like, “Tim, I focus on the future.” And then he started talking about censorship, the Hunter Biden laptop story. If you take a look at the Joe Rogan interview, Rogan actually asked JD this. He’s like, “What do you mean you’re in the election? Some version of that.”
And JD was like, “Well, what I get really frustrated by is people will bring up all of these insane conspiracy theories, but they ignore that the media censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, and that big tech had its finger on the thumb for the Democrats.” Now, that is empirically true. Okay? That is true, right? Now, would you say that that’s rigged? I’m not going to use that word because that’s a very different word. Now, would you say that that’s unfair? Yeah, I think it’s unfair.
So there’s another, a lot of MAGA folks picked up on this one. There was a Time Magazine article in 2020 that’s very famous in their crowd, called the… It was like the fight to fortify the election, and it was about all of these institutions that put their fingers on the scale for Joe Biden against Donald Trump. So I will put it this way, was Donald Trump up against the Titanic forces of billionaires, tech censorship, and elite institutions who all did absolute damnedest to defeat him in 2020? Yes, that is true. And in a sense, the Galaxy Brain case is the only one of those which I think is truly legitimate.
And I’m not going to put it off the table, but this is the problem, that’s not what Trump means. Trump, by the way, will never tell you what I just told you. JD will. If you go and you ask any of these Republican politicians when they’re challenged on it and they don’t want to say that Trump loss at 2020 election, they’ll give the hype, the Galaxy Brain case that I just gave. And again, I don’t think it’s wrong. But it’s like, guys, that’s not what he means when he says it. And that’s the important parsing of the case, right?
Lex Fridman
So first at a high level, Trump or otherwise, I don’t like anyone who whines when they lose. Period.
So first at a high level, Trump or otherwise, I don’t like anyone who whines when they lose. Period.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. Although, he did tell you he lost. Did you notice that? That’s the only time he’s ever said it. Ever.
Yeah. Although, he did tell you he lost. Did you notice that? That’s the only time he’s ever said it. Ever.
Lex Fridman
I did.
I did.
Saagar Enjeti
You’re famous. You’re in history for that one.
You’re famous. You’re in history for that one.
Lex Fridman
Lost by the whisker.
Lost by the whisker.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. “I lost by a whisker.”
Yeah. “I lost by a whisker.”
Lex Fridman
I mean, there is a case to be made that he was joking, I don’t know. But there is a kind of weaving that he does with humor, where sometimes it’s sarcasm, sometimes not, much easier to showcase in a three-hour interview, I’ll say.
I mean, there is a case to be made that he was joking, I don’t know. But there is a kind of weaving that he does with humor, where sometimes it’s sarcasm, sometimes not, much easier to showcase in a three-hour interview, I’ll say.
Saagar Enjeti
Good call. Go ahead.
Good call. Go ahead.
Lex Fridman
I couldn’t even play with that when you have 40 minutes.
I couldn’t even play with that when you have 40 minutes.
Saagar Enjeti
I know, bro.
I know, bro.
Lex Fridman
You’re like… I could do just 40 minutes on weaving alone.
You’re like… I could do just 40 minutes on weaving alone.
Saagar Enjeti
For your style, it doesn’t work. And I can tell you how the way I interview politicians is I just do pure policy. So the first time I interviewed Trump, I compiled a list of 15 subjects, me and my editor Vince Coglianese. Shout out to Vince. The two of us sat in an office and then we had questions by priority in each category. And if we felt like we were running short on time, we would move around those different ones.
For your style, it doesn’t work. And I can tell you how the way I interview politicians is I just do pure policy. So the first time I interviewed Trump, I compiled a list of 15 subjects, me and my editor Vince Coglianese. Shout out to Vince. The two of us sat in an office and then we had questions by priority in each category. And if we felt like we were running short on time, we would move around those different ones.
But that was purely, he’s the president. We’re asking him for his opinions on an immigration bill or whatever. For what you do, it’s impossible to do it for you.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I just want to say that thank you for everybody involved for making my conversation with Donald Trump possible, but I’ve learned a lot from that. That if I’m told that all I have is 40 minutes, I’m very politely sparing, in that case, Donald Trump, the 40 minutes and just walking away, because I don’t think I can do a good job. [inaudible 02:46:06]
Yeah. I just want to say that thank you for everybody involved for making my conversation with Donald Trump possible, but I’ve learned a lot from that. That if I’m told that all I have is 40 minutes, I’m very politely sparing, in that case, Donald Trump, the 40 minutes and just walking away, because I don’t think I can do a good job. [inaudible 02:46:06]
Saagar Enjeti
I think that is the correct decision on your part.
I think that is the correct decision on your part.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
And I also would encourage you to have the confidence at this point, that you are in a position of something that we call, in the business, the ability to compel the interview. And to compel means to be able to bring somebody else to you and not the other way around. And I think that you and Rogan and a few others are in that very unique position, and I would really encourage you guys to stick to your guns on things that make you feel comfortable.
And I also would encourage you to have the confidence at this point, that you are in a position of something that we call, in the business, the ability to compel the interview. And to compel means to be able to bring somebody else to you and not the other way around. And I think that you and Rogan and a few others are in that very unique position, and I would really encourage you guys to stick to your guns on things that make you feel comfortable.
Because those of us in news, we will always negotiate. We’re willing to do short form because we’re asking about policy. But for the style that you help popularize, and I think that you’re uniquely talented and good at, that’s very important not to compromise on.
Lex Fridman
Thank you for saying those words. And that’s not just in the interest of journalism and the interest of conversations, it’s the interest of the guests as well.
Thank you for saying those words. And that’s not just in the interest of journalism and the interest of conversations, it’s the interest of the guests as well.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
To bring out the best in them.
To bring out the best in them.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. I mean, I would feel really adding to service. And I would feel like people would not get a unique understanding of my own thought process and my backstory if I was not able to sit here for literally hours, and to explain in deep detail how I think about the world. Not that anyone cares that much, but it’s just like all I can do is I hope it’s helpful. I want to help people think.
Yeah. I mean, I would feel really adding to service. And I would feel like people would not get a unique understanding of my own thought process and my backstory if I was not able to sit here for literally hours, and to explain in deep detail how I think about the world. Not that anyone cares that much, but it’s just like all I can do is I hope it’s helpful. I want to help people think.
Because when I was growing, I was grew up not far from here, 90 minutes from here, in College Station. I felt very uniquely closed off from the world. I found the world through books, and books saved my life so many different times. And I hope to encourage that in other people. I really… No matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter how busy you are, if you have some time, to either sit down with a book or put on an audiobook, and you can transport yourself into a different world. It’s so important. And that’s something that your show really helps me with, too. I love listening to your show whenever. Sometimes when I’m too into politics and I need to listen to something, I’ll listen to that Mayan historian guy. I love stuff like that, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
I’ve been in a deep dive on Genghis Khan, reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
I’ve been in a deep dive on Genghis Khan, reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. Jack Weatherford. Fantastic.
Yeah. Jack Weatherford. Fantastic.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, he’s coming on.
Yeah, he’s coming on.
Saagar Enjeti
Is he?
Is he?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
Amazing.
Amazing.
Lex Fridman
And again, shout out to Dan Carlin.
And again, shout out to Dan Carlin.
Saagar Enjeti
The goat, the OG. Dan, I’ve never met you before. I would love to correspond at some point. I love you so much. You changed my life, man.
The goat, the OG. Dan, I’ve never met you before. I would love to correspond at some point. I love you so much. You changed my life, man.
Lex Fridman
I met him once before, and it felt any else-
I met him once before, and it felt any else-
Saagar Enjeti
I was in your interview with him.
I was in your interview with him.
Lex Fridman
I was starstruck. Very, very starstruck. And his… I mean, there’s so much Painfotainment that I’ve listened to it many times.
I was starstruck. Very, very starstruck. And his… I mean, there’s so much Painfotainment that I’ve listened to it many times.
Saagar Enjeti
I think one of his best series that he gets no credit for, Ghosts of the Ostfront. Nobody gives him credit for that one. That’s OG. This is a 2011 series. But his Ghosts of the Ostfront on the eastern front of the Nazi war against Russia fundamentally changed my view of warfare forever. And also at that time, I was very young. And to me, World War II was saving Private Ryan. I wasn’t as well-read as I am.
I think one of his best series that he gets no credit for, Ghosts of the Ostfront. Nobody gives him credit for that one. That’s OG. This is a 2011 series. But his Ghosts of the Ostfront on the eastern front of the Nazi war against Russia fundamentally changed my view of warfare forever. And also at that time, I was very young. And to me, World War II was saving Private Ryan. I wasn’t as well-read as I am.
Now, and I was like, “Oh shit. This entire thing happened which actually decided the Second World War, and I don’t know anything about this.” So, shout out to Dan. God bless you, man.
Lex Fridman
And his, quote-unquote, short episodes I think on slavery in general, Throughout Human History-
And his, quote-unquote, short episodes I think on slavery in general, Throughout Human History-
Saagar Enjeti
That was an awesome episode. I actually bought a bunch of Hugh Thomas books because of that episode. I’d never really read about African slavery or the slave trade outside of the Civil War context. So again, shout out to him for that one. That was an amazing episode.
That was an awesome episode. I actually bought a bunch of Hugh Thomas books because of that episode. I’d never really read about African slavery or the slave trade outside of the Civil War context. So again, shout out to him for that one. That was an amazing episode.
Lex Fridman
Hugh-
Hugh-
Saagar Enjeti
His Japan series, too. I’m going to Japan in a few days, and I keep thinking of what he always talked about in his Supernova in the East, ” The Japanese are like everyone else but only more so.” And the…
His Japan series, too. I’m going to Japan in a few days, and I keep thinking of what he always talked about in his Supernova in the East, ” The Japanese are like everyone else but only more so.” And the…
God, I love that quote.
Lex Fridman
Okay, he’s great. And we ironically arrived at this tangent while talking about the 2020 election.
Okay, he’s great. And we ironically arrived at this tangent while talking about the 2020 election.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. That’s why podcasting is fun.
Yeah. That’s why podcasting is fun.
Lex Fridman
Because he said lost by a whisker. And now, were dragging us, screaming back to the topic. One of the things I was bothered by is Trump claiming that there’s widespread, as you’re saying, low IQ theory, the widespread voter fraud. And I saw no evidence of that that he provided.
Because he said lost by a whisker. And now, were dragging us, screaming back to the topic. One of the things I was bothered by is Trump claiming that there’s widespread, as you’re saying, low IQ theory, the widespread voter fraud. And I saw no evidence of that that he provided.
And all right, let’s put that on the table. And then the other thing I was troubled by, that maybe you can comfort me in the context of history, how easily the base ate that up. That they were able to believe the election was truly rigged based on no clear evidence that I saw. And they just love the story. And there is something compelling to the story, like this DNC type. Like with Bernie, the establishment just state they’re corrupt and they steal the will of the people. And the lack of desire from the base or from people to see any evidence of that, what’s really troubled me.
Saagar Enjeti
I’m going to give you one of the most depressing quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius. Shout out to The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too, because it really made me understand media. People don’t want to be informed, they want to feel informed. That is one of the most fundamental media insights of all time.
I’m going to give you one of the most depressing quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius. Shout out to The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too, because it really made me understand media. People don’t want to be informed, they want to feel informed. That is one of the most fundamental media insights of all time.
Lex Fridman
Oh, fuck. What a line.
Oh, fuck. What a line.
Saagar Enjeti
Roger Ailes, a genius. A genius in his own right who… He changed the world. He certainly did. He’s the one who gets credit for one of the greatest debate lines of all time because he was an advisor to President Reagan. Whenever he broke in, and he was like, “Mr. President, people want to know if you’re too damn old for this job or not.” And he inspired that joke that Reagan made, where he was like, “I will not use age in this campaign. I’ll not hold my opponent’s youth and inexperience against him.” That was Ailes, man. He did the Nixon townhalls. He did it all. He’s a fucking genius.
Roger Ailes, a genius. A genius in his own right who… He changed the world. He certainly did. He’s the one who gets credit for one of the greatest debate lines of all time because he was an advisor to President Reagan. Whenever he broke in, and he was like, “Mr. President, people want to know if you’re too damn old for this job or not.” And he inspired that joke that Reagan made, where he was like, “I will not use age in this campaign. I’ll not hold my opponent’s youth and inexperience against him.” That was Ailes, man. He did the Nixon townhalls. He did it all. He’s a fucking genius.
And I’m not advocating necessarily for the world he created for us, but he did it, and people should study him more. If you’re interested in media in particular, that book is one of the most important books you’ll ever read.
Lex Fridman
You know what? That quote just really connected with me because there’s all of this talk about truth. And I think what people want to… They want to feel like they’re in possession of the truth.
You know what? That quote just really connected with me because there’s all of this talk about truth. And I think what people want to… They want to feel like they’re in possession of the truth.
Saagar Enjeti
Correct.
Correct.
Lex Fridman
Not actually being the possession of the truth.
Not actually being the possession of the truth.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, I know. It hit me, too. Actually, Russell Crowe does an amazing job of delivering that line in the Showtime miniseries. So if you have the chance, you should watch it. And look, this is the problem. Liberals will be like, “Yeah. See these idiot Republicans?”
Yeah, I know. It hit me, too. Actually, Russell Crowe does an amazing job of delivering that line in the Showtime miniseries. So if you have the chance, you should watch it. And look, this is the problem. Liberals will be like, “Yeah. See these idiot Republicans?”
I’m like, “Yeah. You guys have bought a lot of crazy stupid shit, too. Okay?” And if actually, I would say liberal misinformation, quote-unquote, is worse than Republican disinformation because it pervades the entire elite media like RussiaGate or Cambridge Analytica or any of these other hoaxes that have been foisted on the American people. The people who listen to the Daily and from the New York Times are just as brainwashed, lack of informed, want to feel informed as people who watch Fox News. So, let me just say that out there. It’s an equal opportunity, cancer in the American football.
Lex Fridman
Actually, we started early on in the conversation talking about bubbles. What’s your advice about how to figure out if you’re in a bubble and how to get out of it?
Actually, we started early on in the conversation talking about bubbles. What’s your advice about how to figure out if you’re in a bubble and how to get out of it?
Saagar Enjeti
That’s such a fantastic question. Unfortunately, I think it comes really naturally to someone like me because I’m the child of immigrants and I was raised in College Station, Texas. So, I was always on the outside. And when you’re on the outside… This isn’t a sob story. It’s a deeply useful skill because when you’re on the outside, you’re forced to observe. And you’re like, “Oh.” When I was raised was the Bible belt, and people really… People were hardcore Evangelical Christians. So, I could tell. I’m like, “Oh, they really believe this stuff.” And they were always trying to proselytize and all of that.
That’s such a fantastic question. Unfortunately, I think it comes really naturally to someone like me because I’m the child of immigrants and I was raised in College Station, Texas. So, I was always on the outside. And when you’re on the outside… This isn’t a sob story. It’s a deeply useful skill because when you’re on the outside, you’re forced to observe. And you’re like, “Oh.” When I was raised was the Bible belt, and people really… People were hardcore Evangelical Christians. So, I could tell. I’m like, “Oh, they really believe this stuff.” And they were always trying to proselytize and all of that.
And then the other gift that my parents gave me is I got to travel the entire world. I probably visited 25, 30 countries by the time I was 18. And one of the things that that gave me was the ability to just put yourself in the brain of another person. So one of the reasons I’m really excited to go to Japan, and I picked it as a spot for my honeymoon, was because Japan is a first-world developed country where the vast majority of them don’t speak English. It’s distinguishably non-Western and they just do shit their own way. So they have a subway, but it’s not the same as ours. They have restaurants, things don’t work the same way. They have…
I could go a laundry list. Their entire philosophy of life, of the daily rhythm, even though it merges with service-based managerial capitalism and they’re fucking good at it too, they do it their own way. So, exposure to other countries in the world gave me… And also, just being an outsider myself gave me a more detached view of the world. So if you don’t have that, what I would encourage you is to flex that muscle. So, go somewhere that makes you uncomfortable. This will be a very boomer take, but I hate the fact that you have 5G everywhere you go in the world. Because some of the best experiences I’ve ever had in my life is walking around Warsaw, Poland trying to find a bus station to get my ass to Lithuania with a printed out bus ticket. I have no idea where the street is. I’m in a country where not that many people speak English. We’re pointing and gesturing, and I figured it out. And it was really useful. I got to meet a lot of cool Polish people.
Same in Thailand. I’ve been in rural, like [inaudible 02:55:32], Thailand, Columbia. Places where people speak zero English. And your ability to gesture and use Pidgin really connects you and gives you the ability to get an exposure to others. And I know this is a very wanderlust-like travel thing, but unironically, if you’re raised in a bubble, pierce it. That’s the answer, is seek something out that makes you uncomfortable. So if you’re raised rich, you need to go spend some time with poor people.
Lex Fridman
And consider that they might actually understand the world better than you.
And consider that they might actually understand the world better than you.
Saagar Enjeti
Well, in some respects. I think a lot of rich people have really screwed-up personal lives. So if you’re poor and you really value family, you say, “Oh, that’s interesting. There seems to be a fundamental trade-off between extraordinary wealth and something that I value. But what can I take away from that person? Oh, put my money in index funds. Make sure that I am conscientious about my budgeting.” It’s common sense shit, right? And vice versa. People who are very wealthy get so caught up in the rat race about their kids going to private school and all of this. And then, they very rarely engage with…
Well, in some respects. I think a lot of rich people have really screwed-up personal lives. So if you’re poor and you really value family, you say, “Oh, that’s interesting. There seems to be a fundamental trade-off between extraordinary wealth and something that I value. But what can I take away from that person? Oh, put my money in index funds. Make sure that I am conscientious about my budgeting.” It’s common sense shit, right? And vice versa. People who are very wealthy get so caught up in the rat race about their kids going to private school and all of this. And then, they very rarely engage with…
There’s that famous study where they ask people on their deathbed what they valued in life, and every single one of them was like, “I wish I’d spend more time with my children.” I think about that every time. That I am thinking about pursuing a new work endeavor or something that’s going to have me spend significant time away from my wife. And I’m almost always these days, now that I’ve achieved a certain level of success, the answer is, “I’m not doing it unless you can come with me.”
Lex Fridman
One of the bubbles I’m really concerned about is San Francisco bubble. I visited there recently because I have so many friends there that I respect deeply. There’s so many brilliant people in San Francisco.
One of the bubbles I’m really concerned about is San Francisco bubble. I visited there recently because I have so many friends there that I respect deeply. There’s so many brilliant people in San Francisco.
Saagar Enjeti
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
The Silicon Valley. But there’s just this… I don’t even want to criticize it, but there’s definitely a bubble of thought.
The Silicon Valley. But there’s just this… I don’t even want to criticize it, but there’s definitely a bubble of thought.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, I’m with you. I’m friends with some SV, Silicon Valley people as well. I’m similarly struck by that every time I go. And honestly, I do admire them because they… What I respect the most amongst entrepreneurs, business, and political thinkers is systems thinking. Nobody thinks systems better than people who are in tech because they deal with global shit. Not even just America. They have to think about the whole world, about the human being and his relationship with technology. And coding, in some ways, is an expression of the human mind. About how that person wants to achieve this thing and how you mechanically can type that into a keyboard or even code something to code for you to be able to achieve that. That’s a remarkable accomplishment. I do think those people… And people like that too, who think very linearly through math, their geniuses are the ones who can take their creativity and merge it with linear thinking. But I do think that that actually, those are the people who probably most need to get out of the bubble, check themselves a little bit.
Yeah, I’m with you. I’m friends with some SV, Silicon Valley people as well. I’m similarly struck by that every time I go. And honestly, I do admire them because they… What I respect the most amongst entrepreneurs, business, and political thinkers is systems thinking. Nobody thinks systems better than people who are in tech because they deal with global shit. Not even just America. They have to think about the whole world, about the human being and his relationship with technology. And coding, in some ways, is an expression of the human mind. About how that person wants to achieve this thing and how you mechanically can type that into a keyboard or even code something to code for you to be able to achieve that. That’s a remarkable accomplishment. I do think those people… And people like that too, who think very linearly through math, their geniuses are the ones who can take their creativity and merge it with linear thinking. But I do think that that actually, those are the people who probably most need to get out of the bubble, check themselves a little bit.
And look, it’s really hard. Once you achieve a certain level of economic success and others, what do most rich people do? They close themselves off from the world. Vast majority of the time, what do you do? Economy is annoying flying. They fly first class. Living in a small house is annoying. They buy a bigger house. Dealing with a lot of these inconveniences of life is annoying. You pay a little bit more to make sure you don’t have to do that. There’s a deep insidious thing within that, each one of those individual choices. Where the more and more removed that you get from that, the more in the bubble that you are. So, you should actually seek out those experiences or create them in a concerted way.
Sam Harris
Lex Fridman
Speaking of bubbles, Sam Harris.
Speaking of bubbles, Sam Harris.
Saagar Enjeti
Oh.
Oh.
Lex Fridman
He has continued to criticize me directly and indirectly, I think unfairly, but I love Sam. I deeply respect him. Everybody should listen to the Making Sense podcast. It always makes me think. It’s definitely in the rotation for me.
He has continued to criticize me directly and indirectly, I think unfairly, but I love Sam. I deeply respect him. Everybody should listen to the Making Sense podcast. It always makes me think. It’s definitely in the rotation for me.
Saagar Enjeti
That’s a very admirable view.
That’s a very admirable view.
Lex Fridman
He’s, I think, one of the sharpest minds of our generation. And for a long time, I looked up to him. It was one of the weird moments for me to meet him because you listen to somebody for such a long time.
He’s, I think, one of the sharpest minds of our generation. And for a long time, I looked up to him. It was one of the weird moments for me to meet him because you listen to somebody for such a long time.
Saagar Enjeti
I feel that way with you, yeah. I’m serious.
I feel that way with you, yeah. I’m serious.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s a beautiful moment. Same with Joe and stuff like this.
Yeah, it’s a beautiful moment. Same with Joe and stuff like this.
Saagar Enjeti
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
It’s a-
It’s a-
Saagar Enjeti
It is one of the most surreal moments of your life, to be able to meet somebody who you spend hours listening to. I actually think about that when people come up to me. Because I’m like, “Oh, they’re feeling what I felt whenever I…”
It is one of the most surreal moments of your life, to be able to meet somebody who you spend hours listening to. I actually think about that when people come up to me. Because I’m like, “Oh, they’re feeling what I felt whenever I…”
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And you see it, you feel it, and you have to celebrate that because there is an intimacy to it. I think it’s real that people really do form a real connection, a real friendship. It happens to be one-way, but I think it actually can upgrade to a two-way pretty easily. It happens with me in a matter of five minutes when I meet somebody at an airport or something like that.
Yeah. And you see it, you feel it, and you have to celebrate that because there is an intimacy to it. I think it’s real that people really do form a real connection, a real friendship. It happens to be one-way, but I think it actually can upgrade to a two-way pretty easily. It happens with me in a matter of five minutes when I meet somebody at an airport or something like that.
Saagar Enjeti
Definitely.
Definitely.
Lex Fridman
Anyway, Sam took a pretty strong position on Trump.
Anyway, Sam took a pretty strong position on Trump.
Saagar Enjeti
And has for a long time.
And has for a long time.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. He has been consistent and unwavering. He thinks that Trump is a truly dangerous person for a democracy, for… Maybe, for the world. Can you steel man his position?
Yeah. He has been consistent and unwavering. He thinks that Trump is a truly dangerous person for a democracy, for… Maybe, for the world. Can you steel man his position?
Saagar Enjeti
See, I think a lot of this podcast has been steel manning it because Sam is a big character matters guy. He focuses a lot on Trump’s personality. By the way, I’m like you. I’ve listened to Sam Harris for years. I bought his meditation app. So, nobody’s going to accuse me of being some Sam Harris hater. I listened to him for way before, long before even Donald Trump was elected. That’s how far back I go with the Sam Harris podcast. I have a lot of respect for the dude. I enjoy a lot of his older interviews.
See, I think a lot of this podcast has been steel manning it because Sam is a big character matters guy. He focuses a lot on Trump’s personality. By the way, I’m like you. I’ve listened to Sam Harris for years. I bought his meditation app. So, nobody’s going to accuse me of being some Sam Harris hater. I listened to him for way before, long before even Donald Trump was elected. That’s how far back I go with the Sam Harris podcast. I have a lot of respect for the dude. I enjoy a lot of his older interviews.
I do think after Trump, he did succumb a little bit, in my opinion, to the elite liberalism view, both of the impetus behind Donald Trump and why he was able to be successful. So in some ways, very denigrating to the Trump voter, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the American presidency. Because like I said, he really is the one who believes that that narcissism, that character and all of that that makes Trump tick itself will eventually override any potential benefit that he could have in office. And I just think that’s a really wrong way of looking at it.
I mean, for example, I had this debate with Crystal, and this gets to the whole Trump talking about the enemy from within. And she was like, “He wants to prosecute his political opponents. Do you disagree with that?”
And I was like, “No, I don’t.”
And she was like, “So, you’re not worried about it?”
And I go, “No, I’m not.”
And she’s like, “Well, how do you square that?”
And I was like, “Well, I actually unironically believe in the American system of institutional checks and balances.” Which kept him, quote-unquote, in check last time around. I also believe in democracy where… This is really interesting, but in 2022, a lot of the Republicans who were the most vociferous about Stop the Steal, they got their asses kicked at the ballot box. Americans also then, in 2024, decided to forgive some of that from Donald Trump. It definitely didn’t help, right? But they were able to oversee that for their own interests. As in democratically, people are able to weigh in terms of checks and balances, what they should and should not challenge a politician by. But also, we have the American legal system, and I also know the way that the institutions in Washington themselves work. That fundamentally, the way that certain processes and other things could play out will not play out to some Hitlerian fantasy.
And this gets to the whole Kamala and them calling her a fascist and a Hitler. You and I probably spent hours of our lives, maybe more, thinking and reading about Adolf Hitler, Weimar Germany. And I just find it so insulting because it becomes this moniker of fascist. You know what I’m saying? These terms have meaning beyond just the dictionary definition. The circumstances through which Hitler is able to rise to power are not the same as today. And it’s like, stop denigrating America to the point where you think… Really, you should flip it around. Why do you think America is Weimar, Germany? That’s a ridiculous thing to say. Do you unironically believe that? No, you don’t believe that.
So, that is personally what drives me a little bit crazy. And I think that Sam has found himself in a mental framework where he is not willing, he’s not able to look past the man and his, quote-unquote, danger. And at the end of the day, his worldview was rejected wholly by the American people. Because the character argument, the fascist argument, the Hitler argument, the he’s uniquely bad argument has been run twice before 2016 and in 20… Actually, all three times. I guess, it won in 2020.
But two out of the three times, Donald Trump has won the presidency. And in his latest one, where that argument has never been made before for a longer period of time and more in strength by a political candidate, was rejected completely. And I would ask him to reconcile himself to the America that he lives in.
Lex Fridman
I think one thing, maybe to partially steel man his case but also just to steel man the way the world works, is that there is some probability that Kamala Harris will institute a communist state and there is some probability that Donald Trump will indeed… Will fly a swastika with… And deport, I don’t know, everybody who’s not Scott Irish. I don’t know.
I think one thing, maybe to partially steel man his case but also just to steel man the way the world works, is that there is some probability that Kamala Harris will institute a communist state and there is some probability that Donald Trump will indeed… Will fly a swastika with… And deport, I don’t know, everybody who’s not Scott Irish. I don’t know.
Saagar Enjeti
You and I are screwed then.
You and I are screwed then.
Lex Fridman
Maybe, is there a spirit test?
Maybe, is there a spirit test?
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Okay. But that probability is small, and you have to… If you allow yourself to focus on a particular trajectory with a small probability, it can become all-encompassing. Because you could see it. You could see a path. There are certain character qualities to Trump where he wants to hold onto power.
Okay. But that probability is small, and you have to… If you allow yourself to focus on a particular trajectory with a small probability, it can become all-encompassing. Because you could see it. You could see a path. There are certain character qualities to Trump where he wants to hold onto power.
Saagar Enjeti
Yes, absolutely.
Yes, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
First of all, every politician wants to hold onto power. Joe Biden, maybe because he’s part of the machine, can’t even conceive of the notion of a third term. But he has the arrogance to want to hold onto power, do everything he can.
First of all, every politician wants to hold onto power. Joe Biden, maybe because he’s part of the machine, can’t even conceive of the notion of a third term. But he has the arrogance to want to hold onto power, do everything he can.
Saagar Enjeti
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
And with Trump, I could see that if it was very popular for him to have a third term, I think he would not be the kind of person who doesn’t advocate for a third term.
And with Trump, I could see that if it was very popular for him to have a third term, I think he would not be the kind of person who doesn’t advocate for a third term.
Saagar Enjeti
So, what? That would require the Senate and the House or 70… What is it? 70-
So, what? That would require the Senate and the House or 70… What is it? 70-
Saagar Enjeti
That would require the Senate and the House or 70… What is it? 75% of the states to pass and change the Constitution. Do you think that’s going to happen? No, I don’t think it’s going to happen, so I’m not that worried about it. Now, you can make a norms argument, and I actually think that’s fair, is that he’s the norms buster. But with extraordinary candidates and people like Trump, you get the good and the bad. There is a true duality. The norms he busts around foreign policy, I love. The norms he busts around the economy, I love. The norms he busts around just so much of the American political system saying how it’s et cetera, I love that. You know what I hate? This 2020 election bullshit. You know what else I hate? I don’t know. The lack of discipline that I would want to think that a great leader could have like when he was president and tweeting about Mika Brzezinski’s facelift. That was objectively ridiculous.
That would require the Senate and the House or 70… What is it? 75% of the states to pass and change the Constitution. Do you think that’s going to happen? No, I don’t think it’s going to happen, so I’m not that worried about it. Now, you can make a norms argument, and I actually think that’s fair, is that he’s the norms buster. But with extraordinary candidates and people like Trump, you get the good and the bad. There is a true duality. The norms he busts around foreign policy, I love. The norms he busts around the economy, I love. The norms he busts around just so much of the American political system saying how it’s et cetera, I love that. You know what I hate? This 2020 election bullshit. You know what else I hate? I don’t know. The lack of discipline that I would want to think that a great leader could have like when he was president and tweeting about Mika Brzezinski’s facelift. That was objectively ridiculous.
It was crazy, okay? Was it funny? Yeah, but it was crazy, and it’s not how I would conceive and have conceived of some of my favorite presidents. I wouldn’t think that they would do that, but that’s what you get. Everyone should be clear-eyed about who this man is, and that’s another problem. The deification of politicians is sick. It’s sickening about Trump, around Obama. These people are just people. The idea that they are godlike creatures with extraordinary judgment… One of the really cool things about you and I’s job is we actually get to meet very important people. After you meet a few billionaires, you’re like, “Yeah, there’s definitely something there. But some of them get lucky.” After you meet a few politicians, you’re like, “Oh. They’re like… They’re not that smart.” That was a rude awakening for me, by the way, being here in Texas, reading about these people.
And pretty soon, I was on Capitol Hill. I was 19 years old. I was an intern. I’m actually interacting, and I see them behave in ridiculous manners and whatever. Just treat people badly or say something stupid. I was like, “Oh.” I’m like, “This is not the West Wing.” I’m like, “This is not a book. These people are just… This is just reality.” The weirdest part of my life is I’ve now been in Washington long enough. I know some of the people personally, the vice president of the United States, literally the vice president-elect, future cabinet secretaries, these people I literally have met, had dinner with, had a drink with, whatever. That’s a wild thing, and that’s even more bringing you down to Earth. You’re like, “Oh, shit. You’re actually going to have a lot of power. That’s kind of scary, but you’re just a person.”
So even though you don’t have to say, “I have my same life experience,” take it from me or anybody else who’s ever met really famous people, rich, successful, powerful people. They’re just people. There’s nothing that… There’s some things that are unique about them, but they have just as many human qualities as you or anybody else who’s listening to this right now.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. For each candidate, Trump is probably the extreme version of that. There’s a distribution of the possible trajectories their administration might result in, and the range of possible trajectories is just much wider with Trump.
Yeah. For each candidate, Trump is probably the extreme version of that. There’s a distribution of the possible trajectories their administration might result in, and the range of possible trajectories is just much wider with Trump.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, you’re describing a Bayesian theory, right? I think that’s actually a really useful framework for the world, is that people are really too binary. So like you said, there’s a theoretical possibility, I guess, of a communist takeover of government and of fascist takeover of government under Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. The realistic probability, I would give it 0.05% probably in both directions. But there are a lot of things that can happen that are bad, that are not Hitlerian or fascist. There are a lot of things that happen that are really good, that are not FDR New Deal style. One of the worst things politicians do is they describe themselves in false historical ways. So in Washington, one of the most overused phrases is made history.
Yeah, you’re describing a Bayesian theory, right? I think that’s actually a really useful framework for the world, is that people are really too binary. So like you said, there’s a theoretical possibility, I guess, of a communist takeover of government and of fascist takeover of government under Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. The realistic probability, I would give it 0.05% probably in both directions. But there are a lot of things that can happen that are bad, that are not Hitlerian or fascist. There are a lot of things that happen that are really good, that are not FDR New Deal style. One of the worst things politicians do is they describe themselves in false historical ways. So in Washington, one of the most overused phrases is made history.
I’m like, “If you actually read history, most of these things are just…” They’re not even footnotes. They’re the stuff that the historians flip past, and they’re like, “What a stupid bucking thing.” I’m talking about things that ruled American politics. What if I told you that the Panama Canal Treaty was one of the most important fights in modern American politics? Nobody thinks about that today. It ruled American politics at that time. It genuinely is a footnote, but that’s not how it felt at the time. So that’s another thing I want people to take away.
UFOs
Lex Fridman
You tragically missed the UFO hearings.
You tragically missed the UFO hearings.
Saagar Enjeti
Oh, man. My brothers, I’m really sad.
Oh, man. My brothers, I’m really sad.
Lex Fridman
My brothers.
My brothers.
Saagar Enjeti
Let me tell you, I love them so much. The UFO community are some of the best people I’ve ever met in my life. Shout out to my brother Jeremy Corbell, to George Knapp, the OG, to all of the people who fly from all around the world to come to these hearings. It was so fun. I got to meet so many of them last time. Just walk the rope line as people were coming. And the excitement, the… I truly love the UFO community. Shout out to all of them.
Let me tell you, I love them so much. The UFO community are some of the best people I’ve ever met in my life. Shout out to my brother Jeremy Corbell, to George Knapp, the OG, to all of the people who fly from all around the world to come to these hearings. It was so fun. I got to meet so many of them last time. Just walk the rope line as people were coming. And the excitement, the… I truly love the UFO community. Shout out to all of them.
Lex Fridman
This is the second one, I guess.
This is the second one, I guess.
Saagar Enjeti
This is the second one.
This is the second one.
Lex Fridman
Do you hope they continue happening?
Do you hope they continue happening?
Saagar Enjeti
It’s going to be a slow burn. So one of the things I always tell the guys and everybody is, “Consider how long it took to understand the sheer insanity of the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s.” So if we think back to the church committee, I forget the exact year of the church committee. I think it was in the ’70s. The entire church committee and knowledge of how the CIA and the FBI were up to all of this insane shit throughout the ’50s and ’60s is because some people broke into a warehouse, discovered some documents, got the names of programs which were able to be FOIA’d, and we were able to break open that case. It would never have happened with real transparency, like in the official process. So we owe those people a great debt. I guess I could say, now the statute of limitations has passed.
It’s going to be a slow burn. So one of the things I always tell the guys and everybody is, “Consider how long it took to understand the sheer insanity of the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s.” So if we think back to the church committee, I forget the exact year of the church committee. I think it was in the ’70s. The entire church committee and knowledge of how the CIA and the FBI were up to all of this insane shit throughout the ’50s and ’60s is because some people broke into a warehouse, discovered some documents, got the names of programs which were able to be FOIA’d, and we were able to break open that case. It would never have happened with real transparency, like in the official process. So we owe those people a great debt. I guess I could say, now the statute of limitations has passed.
My point about the UFOs is I don’t know what is real or not. I have absolute confidence and absolute ton is being hid from the American people and that all of the official explanations are bullshit. I have had the opportunity to interface with some of the whistleblowers and other… the activists in the community, people who I trust, people who have great credentials, who have no reason to lie, who have assured us that there is a lot going on behind the scenes. There has been too much misinformation and effort by the deep state to cover up this topic.
So I would ask people to keep the faith. It’s 2024 and we still don’t have all the JFK files. Everyone involved is dead. There’s no reason to let it go. Even though we basically know what happened, we don’t know. If you read that fantastic book, the Tom O’Neill book about the Manson murders, again, it took him 20 years to write that book and he still didn’t get the full story. So sometimes, it takes an extraordinarily long agonizing period of time, and I know how deeply frustrating that is. But when you think about a secret, a program and knowledge of this magnitude, it would only make sense that it would require a titanic effort to reveal a titanic secret.
Lex Fridman
You think Trump might be able to push for… aggressively break through the secrecy, let’s say, even on the JFK files?
You think Trump might be able to push for… aggressively break through the secrecy, let’s say, even on the JFK files?
Saagar Enjeti
I hope so. I have moderate confidence. RFK Jr. has pushed him to do so. I would like to think so. At the same time, I saw him got rolled last time, so I’ll hold my breath.
I hope so. I have moderate confidence. RFK Jr. has pushed him to do so. I would like to think so. At the same time, I saw him got rolled last time, so I’ll hold my breath.
Lex Fridman
Why do you think that happens? Why do you think it gets-
Why do you think that happens? Why do you think it gets-
Saagar Enjeti
Remember that whole interagency thing I told you about? That’s how it happens. That’s another thing. You’re presuming that the president has the power to declassify this stuff. I’m saying that I’m not even sure we’re there in terms of-
Remember that whole interagency thing I told you about? That’s how it happens. That’s another thing. You’re presuming that the president has the power to declassify this stuff. I’m saying that I’m not even sure we’re there in terms of-
Lex Fridman
So it’s basic stability. He basically says, “I would like to declassify JFK files.”
So it’s basic stability. He basically says, “I would like to declassify JFK files.”
And they say, “Yes, sir. We’ll get that to you in three months.” And three months comes by. And then they’re like, “Well, there’s these hurdles.”
Saagar Enjeti
Well, the way you get around it is go, “Let’s release some.” But these in particular, there’s national security secrets is a good case for not releasing them, X, Y and Z. It’s like, you get around that. You’re like, “Oh, okay. That makes sense.” Again, he’s a busy guy. He’s the president. He got way bigger shit to worry about. So that’s the problem, is that unless you have that true urgency… Look, people of immense power have tried. Everyone forgets this. John Podesta was the White House chief of staff. He is a UFO true believer in his heart. He tried. He’s talked about it. He tried, at the top level, the number two to the White House, to get the Pentagon and others to tell him what was going on, and they stonewalled him. So people need to understand what you’re up against. People are like, “How is that even possible?”
Well, the way you get around it is go, “Let’s release some.” But these in particular, there’s national security secrets is a good case for not releasing them, X, Y and Z. It’s like, you get around that. You’re like, “Oh, okay. That makes sense.” Again, he’s a busy guy. He’s the president. He got way bigger shit to worry about. So that’s the problem, is that unless you have that true urgency… Look, people of immense power have tried. Everyone forgets this. John Podesta was the White House chief of staff. He is a UFO true believer in his heart. He tried. He’s talked about it. He tried, at the top level, the number two to the White House, to get the Pentagon and others to tell him what was going on, and they stonewalled him. So people need to understand what you’re up against. People are like, “How is that even possible?”
It’s like, well, go read about the terror that LBJ and the Kennedys and others had in confronting J. Edgar Hoover. Go and read how terrified Eisenhower and some of them were of the Dulles brothers. They were scared. They knew where the power lies. So the presidency… Look, government, deep state, et cetera, they’ve been there a long time, and they know what’s happening and presidents come and go, but they stay forever. So that’s the paradigm that you’re going to have to fight against.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s a bit of a meme, but I wonder how deep the deep state is.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a meme, but I wonder how deep the deep state is.
Saagar Enjeti
Much deeper than anyone can even imagine. The worst part is, what the deep state is, it’s not even individuals. It’s actually an ideology, and ideology is the most… People often think that if we took money out of politics that it would change everything. I’m not saying it wouldn’t change everything, but it wouldn’t change a lot.
Much deeper than anyone can even imagine. The worst part is, what the deep state is, it’s not even individuals. It’s actually an ideology, and ideology is the most… People often think that if we took money out of politics that it would change everything. I’m not saying it wouldn’t change everything, but it wouldn’t change a lot.
But people are like, “Oh, so-and-so is only against universal healthcare getting paid.”
I’m like, “No, no, no. That’s not why. They actually believe it.”
Or it’s like, “Oh, so-and-so only wants to advocate for war with Iran because they’re on the payroll of AIPAC.”
And it’s like, “Well, yeah. The AIPAC trips and the money helps. But they think that actually the system itself…”
This is a very Chomsky-esque systemic critique, is that any journalist worth their salt would never have the ability to get hired in a mainstream. So he’s like, “It’s not that you’re bad in the mainstream media, it’s that anyone good is not allowed to be elevated to your position because they have an ideology.” So that is the most self-reinforcing, pernicious mechanism of them all, and that’s really Washington in a nutshell.
Lex Fridman
It’s again, a bubble, but a bubble that has a lot of power.
It’s again, a bubble, but a bubble that has a lot of power.
Saagar Enjeti
Yes.
Yes.
Future of the Republican Party
Lex Fridman
Who do you think is the future of the Republican Party after Trump? What happens to Trumpism after Trump?
Who do you think is the future of the Republican Party after Trump? What happens to Trumpism after Trump?
Saagar Enjeti
Like you just said, Bayesian. Let’s take various theories, right? So let’s say it’s ’04, it’s Bush, Cheney. In 2004, the day after the election, I would’ve told you this. We live in a Bible belt, Jesus land America. This America wants to protect America, a war on terror against Iraq and the axis of evil, and American people who just voted for George W. Bush. So I would’ve predicted that it would’ve been somebody in that vein, and they tried that. His name was John McCain. He got blown the fuck out by Barack Obama. So I cannot sit here and confidently say.
Like you just said, Bayesian. Let’s take various theories, right? So let’s say it’s ’04, it’s Bush, Cheney. In 2004, the day after the election, I would’ve told you this. We live in a Bible belt, Jesus land America. This America wants to protect America, a war on terror against Iraq and the axis of evil, and American people who just voted for George W. Bush. So I would’ve predicted that it would’ve been somebody in that vein, and they tried that. His name was John McCain. He got blown the fuck out by Barack Obama. So I cannot sit here and confidently say.
Lex Fridman
What year would you be able to predict Obama? It was just his first time he gave the speech-
What year would you be able to predict Obama? It was just his first time he gave the speech-
Saagar Enjeti
The 2004 speech at the DNC. That was his, “We don’t live in-
The 2004 speech at the DNC. That was his, “We don’t live in-
Lex Fridman
That’s-
That’s-
Saagar Enjeti
… Black America, white America.” The John Kerry DNC speech. You honestly could not have predicted it until ’07, whenever he actually announced his campaign and activated a lot of anti-war energy. Maybe ’06. Actually, I could have said in ’06, if I was a contrarian man now, I would’ve been like, “Yeah, there’s a lot of anti-war energy. I think the next president will be somebody who’s able to vote…” The explosion of Keith Olbermann and MSNBC, it makes logical sense in hindsight. But at the same time, you’re going up against the Clinton machine who’s never lost an election. So I would’ve been afraid. I cannot confidently say. So I’ll say, if things go in different directions, if Trump is a net positive president, then I think it’ll be JD Vance, his vice president who believes in a lot of the things that I’ve talked about here today, about foreign policy restraint, about the working class, about changing Republican attitudes to the economy.
… Black America, white America.” The John Kerry DNC speech. You honestly could not have predicted it until ’07, whenever he actually announced his campaign and activated a lot of anti-war energy. Maybe ’06. Actually, I could have said in ’06, if I was a contrarian man now, I would’ve been like, “Yeah, there’s a lot of anti-war energy. I think the next president will be somebody who’s able to vote…” The explosion of Keith Olbermann and MSNBC, it makes logical sense in hindsight. But at the same time, you’re going up against the Clinton machine who’s never lost an election. So I would’ve been afraid. I cannot confidently say. So I’ll say, if things go in different directions, if Trump is a net positive president, then I think it’ll be JD Vance, his vice president who believes in a lot of the things that I’ve talked about here today, about foreign policy restraint, about the working class, about changing Republican attitudes to the economy.
He would be able to build upon that legacy in the way that George H.W. Bush was able to get elected off the back of Reagan. But H.W. Bush was fundamentally his own man. He’s a very misunderstood figure, very different than Ronald Reagan, didn’t end up working out for him, but he did get himself elected once. So that’s one path. That’s if you have a net positive Trump presidency. The other path is the ’04 path that I just laid out. If Trump does what Bush does, misinterprets his mandate, screws things up, creates chaos, and it makes it just generally annoying to live in American society, then you will see somebody in the Republican Party… Still, it could even be JD Vance because he could say, ” JD is my natural and my chosen successor,” but then he would lose an election and then he would no longer be the so-called leader of the Republican Party.
So I could see it swing in the other direction. I could see Republicans or others… Let’s say, if it’s a total disaster and we’d get down to 20% approval ratings and the economy is bad and stuff like that. Glenn Youngkin or somebody like that who’s very diametrically opposed to Donald Trump or at least aesthetically is somebody like that who could rise from the ashes. I’m just saying in terms of his aesthetic, not him per se. So there’s a variety of different directions. It’s a big question about the Republican base. A shit ton of people voted Republican now for the first time ever. So are they going to vote in party primaries? I don’t know. The traditional party primary voter is like a white boomer who’s 58, 59. Is the Latino guy in California who turned out to vote for Trump with a MAGA hat and rolling around suburban Los Angeles with that… Is he going to vote in the Republican Party? That could change. So the type of candidate themselves could come. So it’s way too early to say. We have so many variety of paths that we could go down.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think Trump is a singular figure in terms of, if you support Trump, there’s a vibe. I know Kamala has a vibe, but there’s definitely a vibe to Trump and MAGA. I think even with JD, that that’s no longer going to be there. So if JD runs and wins, that would be on principles. Because he’s a very different human being.
Yeah, I think Trump is a singular figure in terms of, if you support Trump, there’s a vibe. I know Kamala has a vibe, but there’s definitely a vibe to Trump and MAGA. I think even with JD, that that’s no longer going to be there. So if JD runs and wins, that would be on principles. Because he’s a very different human being.
Saagar Enjeti
He is so different than Trump. You can see his empathy. Remember in the VP debate when he was like, “Christ have mercy?” When Tim Walz was talking about his son? That’s not something Donald Trump’s saying, okay? It’s just not. By the way, this is my own bubble test. I have no idea how somebody listens to Trump and JD Vance is like, Trump is the guy who should be the president over him. Honestly, I don’t get it. That’s my own cards on the table. I am in too much of a bubble where my bias is to being well-spoken and being empathetic or at least being able to play empathetic and being extremely well-read about the world and thoughtful and somebody like him who’s engaged in the political process, but also has been able to retain his values and be extremely well-articulated his worldview. That’s my bias. That’s who I would want to be the president, but it’s a big country. People think differently.
He is so different than Trump. You can see his empathy. Remember in the VP debate when he was like, “Christ have mercy?” When Tim Walz was talking about his son? That’s not something Donald Trump’s saying, okay? It’s just not. By the way, this is my own bubble test. I have no idea how somebody listens to Trump and JD Vance is like, Trump is the guy who should be the president over him. Honestly, I don’t get it. That’s my own cards on the table. I am in too much of a bubble where my bias is to being well-spoken and being empathetic or at least being able to play empathetic and being extremely well-read about the world and thoughtful and somebody like him who’s engaged in the political process, but also has been able to retain his values and be extremely well-articulated his worldview. That’s my bias. That’s who I would want to be the president, but it’s a big country. People think differently.
Lex Fridman
By the way, I sure you’re bias.
By the way, I sure you’re bias.
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
I sometimes try to take myself out of that bubble. Maybe it’s not important to have read a book or multiples of books on history.
I sometimes try to take myself out of that bubble. Maybe it’s not important to have read a book or multiples of books on history.
Saagar Enjeti
I’m not saying everybody should be like me, but that’s my point. I’m checking myself by being like, because of who I am, that’s how I see the world, and that’s how I would choose a leader. But that is not how people vote, period. Nothing has taught me that more than this election.
I’m not saying everybody should be like me, but that’s my point. I’m checking myself by being like, because of who I am, that’s how I see the world, and that’s how I would choose a leader. But that is not how people vote, period. Nothing has taught me that more than this election.
Lex Fridman
I wish they did. I don’t know if that’s a lesson to take away. I think-
I wish they did. I don’t know if that’s a lesson to take away. I think-
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, but who are we to say? People are allowed to do what they want. I’m not going to tell somebody how to vote.
Yeah, but who are we to say? People are allowed to do what they want. I’m not going to tell somebody how to vote.
Lex Fridman
No, what I’m saying is you take everything Trump is doing everything, the whole… the dance, all of it, and add occasional saga-like references to history books. I think that’s just a better candidate.
No, what I’m saying is you take everything Trump is doing everything, the whole… the dance, all of it, and add occasional saga-like references to history books. I think that’s just a better candidate.
Saagar Enjeti
I agree with you. Listen, it’s my bias.
I agree with you. Listen, it’s my bias.
Lex Fridman
I don’t know. I don’t think that’s bias. I think that’s not a bubble thinking. I think it’s a-
I don’t know. I don’t think that’s bias. I think that’s not a bubble thinking. I think it’s a-
Saagar Enjeti
It’s amazing to me, right? Listen to the JD interview with Rogan. JD, he’ll drop obscure references to studies, to papers that have come out, essays, books. This is a very well-read, high IQ, well-thought-out individual who also has given his life to the political process and decided to deal with all the bullshit that this entire system is going to throw at you whenever you start to engage. That’s who I would want to be president, but I’m biased, so what can I say?
It’s amazing to me, right? Listen to the JD interview with Rogan. JD, he’ll drop obscure references to studies, to papers that have come out, essays, books. This is a very well-read, high IQ, well-thought-out individual who also has given his life to the political process and decided to deal with all the bullshit that this entire system is going to throw at you whenever you start to engage. That’s who I would want to be president, but I’m biased, so what can I say?
Future of the Democratic Party
Lex Fridman
I like how you keep saying you’re biased as if there’s some percent of the population who doesn’t like people to read at all. Okay. What about the future? You hinted at it the future of the Democratic Party. Did you see any talent out there that’s promising? Is it going to be Obama-like figure that just rolls out of nowhere?
I like how you keep saying you’re biased as if there’s some percent of the population who doesn’t like people to read at all. Okay. What about the future? You hinted at it the future of the Democratic Party. Did you see any talent out there that’s promising? Is it going to be Obama-like figure that just rolls out of nowhere?
Saagar Enjeti
Clinton is the better example because the Democratic Party was destroyed for 12 years. From the 1980 election to 1992. They’re 12 years out of power. In periods of that long of an era, it takes somebody literally brand new who is not tainted by the previous to convince the base that you can want and convince the country that you’re going in a new direction. So I would not put my money on anybody tainted by the Great Awakening, by TDS, by the insanity of the Trump era. There has to be somebody post that and/or somebody who is able to reform themselves. In my opinion, it will likely not be any establishment politician of today who will emerge for the future. Like I said, my dark horse is Dean. I think the Democratic base is going to give Dean a shit ton of credit, and they should, for him being out.
Clinton is the better example because the Democratic Party was destroyed for 12 years. From the 1980 election to 1992. They’re 12 years out of power. In periods of that long of an era, it takes somebody literally brand new who is not tainted by the previous to convince the base that you can want and convince the country that you’re going in a new direction. So I would not put my money on anybody tainted by the Great Awakening, by TDS, by the insanity of the Trump era. There has to be somebody post that and/or somebody who is able to reform themselves. In my opinion, it will likely not be any establishment politician of today who will emerge for the future. Like I said, my dark horse is Dean. I think the Democratic base is going to give Dean a shit ton of credit, and they should, for him being out.
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 03:23:46].
[inaudible 03:23:46].
Saagar Enjeti
Look, let’s be honest, he’s a no-name Congressman from Minnesota. Nobody cared who Dean Phillips was, but just like Obama, he had courage and he came out and spoke early when it mattered. By doing that, he showed good judgment, and he showed that he’s willing to take risks. So I would hope in America’s political system that we award something like that. I do think the Democrats will reward him, but I’m not saying it’ll be him per se. But it will be a figure like that who is not nationally known, who has read the tea leaves correctly, who took guesses and did things differently than everybody else. Most of all, I’m hoping that heterodox, attitudes, ideas, behaviors by definition after a blowout, those will likely be the ones that are rewarded. So I cannot give a name, but I can just describe the circumstances for what it will look like.
Look, let’s be honest, he’s a no-name Congressman from Minnesota. Nobody cared who Dean Phillips was, but just like Obama, he had courage and he came out and spoke early when it mattered. By doing that, he showed good judgment, and he showed that he’s willing to take risks. So I would hope in America’s political system that we award something like that. I do think the Democrats will reward him, but I’m not saying it’ll be him per se. But it will be a figure like that who is not nationally known, who has read the tea leaves correctly, who took guesses and did things differently than everybody else. Most of all, I’m hoping that heterodox, attitudes, ideas, behaviors by definition after a blowout, those will likely be the ones that are rewarded. So I cannot give a name, but I can just describe the circumstances for what it will look like.
Lex Fridman
Can you imagine an amorphous figure that’s a progressive populist?
Can you imagine an amorphous figure that’s a progressive populist?
Saagar Enjeti
It would be very difficult at this point, just because a huge portion of the multiracial working class has shifted to the right, but I could see it. Look, people change their minds all the time. There are people out there who voted for Barack Obama, who’ve now voted for Donald Trump three times. So a lot can change in this country. If you make a credible case, you’ve got a track record, you speak authentically and you can try to divide the country along class lines and be authentic and real about it, maybe. I think you have a shot. I still think you’re probably going to get dinged on culture just because I think this election has really showed us how important immigration and culture is. Actually, what the left populists should pray for, and they won’t admit this, is that Trump actually solves immigration in terms of changing the status quo.
It would be very difficult at this point, just because a huge portion of the multiracial working class has shifted to the right, but I could see it. Look, people change their minds all the time. There are people out there who voted for Barack Obama, who’ve now voted for Donald Trump three times. So a lot can change in this country. If you make a credible case, you’ve got a track record, you speak authentically and you can try to divide the country along class lines and be authentic and real about it, maybe. I think you have a shot. I still think you’re probably going to get dinged on culture just because I think this election has really showed us how important immigration and culture is. Actually, what the left populists should pray for, and they won’t admit this, is that Trump actually solves immigration in terms of changing the status quo.
You knowhow in the way that the Supreme Court just ended the conversation around gay marriage? So Republicans were like, “Yeah, whatever. We support gay marriage,” because they’re like, “That’s the law of the land. It is what it is.” They should just hope that their unpopular issue is resolved by the president and thus, they just don’t have to talk about it anymore. Now, the battleground is actually favorable for them. They get to talk about the economy and abortion. So their least popular issue gets solved by the president by consensus from his mandate, and then they can run on a brand new platform for the new issues that are facing America.
Lex Fridman
All right. Let’s put our historian hat back on.
All right. Let’s put our historian hat back on.
Saagar Enjeti
Okay.
Okay.
Lex Fridman
Will the American Empire collapse one day? If it does, when it does, what would be the reason?
Will the American Empire collapse one day? If it does, when it does, what would be the reason?
Saagar Enjeti
Statistically likely. Yeah. Statistically, yes. It’s the famous Fight Club quote. It’s like, “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everything drops to zero.” And-
Statistically likely. Yeah. Statistically, yes. It’s the famous Fight Club quote. It’s like, “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everything drops to zero.” And-
Lex Fridman
I like for all the books you’ve quoted, you went to Fight Club.
I like for all the books you’ve quoted, you went to Fight Club.
Saagar Enjeti
Oh, I have-
Oh, I have-
Lex Fridman
I guess the movie, right?
I guess the movie, right?
Saagar Enjeti
The book’s good though. People should read that too. In terms of why. Again, statistically the answer’s quite simple. It usually comes back to a series of unpopular wars which are pursued because of the elite’s interests. Then it usually leads to a miscalculation and not a catastrophic defeat. Normally, it comes gradually, and most of the times when these things end, the crazy part is most people who are living through end of empire have no idea that they’re living through the end of the empire. I actually think about that a lot from Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Actually, your episode on Rome was fantastic.
The book’s good though. People should read that too. In terms of why. Again, statistically the answer’s quite simple. It usually comes back to a series of unpopular wars which are pursued because of the elite’s interests. Then it usually leads to a miscalculation and not a catastrophic defeat. Normally, it comes gradually, and most of the times when these things end, the crazy part is most people who are living through end of empire have no idea that they’re living through the end of the empire. I actually think about that a lot from Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Actually, your episode on Rome was fantastic.
People should go listen to that. So there you go. Another really good one, I like to think a lot about the British Empire and what eventually led to that collapse. Nobody in 1919 said the British Empire has just collapsed. Basically, nobody still thought that. They were like, “Yeah, the first World War is horrible. But actually, we came out of this okay. We still have India. We still have all these African colonies and all that, but long periods of servitude, of debt to the United States, of degradation, of social upheaval, of Bolshevism, of American industrial might.” And next thing you know, you find yourself at Potsdam and Churchill’s like, “Holy shit, I have barely any power in this room.” So revolutions happen slowly and then all at once. So could you really put a real pin in the end of the British Empire? It took almost 40 years for it to end.
So America’s empire will eventually end either from rising geopolitical competition, likely China. Could be India. Nobody knows. It will likely be because of being overstretched of an elite capture, is usually the reason why, and a misreading of what made your original society work in the first place. That is one where… Honestly, all three of those things will happen all at once, and it will happen over an extremely long period of time. It’s very difficult to predict. I would not bet against America right now. I think we have a lot of fundamental strengths. It’s such a unique and dynamic country. It really is fucking crazy. Every time I travel the world, as much as I love all these different places, I go, “Man, I love the United States so much.” You’ll love it more when you leave. I really believe that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, and it’s nice to remember how quickly the public opinion shifts. We’re very dynamic and adaptable, which annoys me. I understand that’s part of the political discourse saying ,”If Trump wins, it’s the end of America. If Kamala wins, it’s the end of America.”
Yeah, and it’s nice to remember how quickly the public opinion shifts. We’re very dynamic and adaptable, which annoys me. I understand that’s part of the political discourse saying ,”If Trump wins, it’s the end of America. If Kamala wins, it’s the end of America.”
Saagar Enjeti
So stupid. Yeah.
So stupid. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
But I-
But I-
Saagar Enjeti
It’s so dumb.
It’s so dumb.
Lex Fridman
I understand that the radical nature of that discourse is necessary to, who mentioned [inaudible 03:29:15]-
I understand that the radical nature of that discourse is necessary to, who mentioned [inaudible 03:29:15]-
Saagar Enjeti
To drive out votes.
To drive out votes.
Lex Fridman
To drive up votes.
To drive up votes.
Saagar Enjeti
I like to think about Americans in 1866. I cannot imagine going through a war where some x percent… I think it was like two or 3% or whatever. The entire population was just killed. Our president, who was this visionary genius, who we were blessed to have, is assassinated at Ford’s Theater immediately after the surrender of Lee Andrew Johnson, who’s a bumbling fucktard, is the one who is in charge. We are having all these insane crises over internal management while we’re also trying to decide this new order in the south and how to bring these people back into the union. I would’ve despaired in that year. I would’ve been like, “It’s over. This is it. The war,” I’d be like, “was it worth anything?” If Andrew Johnson is going to be doing this or even in the South, I can’t even imagine for what they were going through too.
I like to think about Americans in 1866. I cannot imagine going through a war where some x percent… I think it was like two or 3% or whatever. The entire population was just killed. Our president, who was this visionary genius, who we were blessed to have, is assassinated at Ford’s Theater immediately after the surrender of Lee Andrew Johnson, who’s a bumbling fucktard, is the one who is in charge. We are having all these insane crises over internal management while we’re also trying to decide this new order in the south and how to bring these people back into the union. I would’ve despaired in that year. I would’ve been like, “It’s over. This is it. The war,” I’d be like, “was it worth anything?” If Andrew Johnson is going to be doing this or even in the South, I can’t even imagine for what they were going through too.
They have to go home and their entire cities are burned to the ground, and they’re trying to readjust and their entire economy and way of life is overthrown in five years. That’s an insane time to be alive. What do we know? They worked out. By 1890s or so, there were people shaking hands, union and there’s a cool video on YouTube actually of FDR who is addressing some of the last Gettysburg veterans. I think it was the 75th anniversary or whatever. You can literally see these old men shaking hands across the stone wall. It gives me hope. Yeah.
Hope
Lex Fridman
Let’s linger on that hope. What is the source of optimism you have for the 21st century, for the century beyond that, for human civilization in general? It’s easy to learn cynical lessons from history, right?
Let’s linger on that hope. What is the source of optimism you have for the 21st century, for the century beyond that, for human civilization in general? It’s easy to learn cynical lessons from history, right?
Saagar Enjeti
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman
The shit eventually goes wrong, but sometimes it doesn’t. So what gives you hope?
The shit eventually goes wrong, but sometimes it doesn’t. So what gives you hope?
Saagar Enjeti
I think that the of what makes humanity great and has for a long time are best expressed in the American character, and that despite all of our problems, that as a country with our ethos, a lot of the stuff we talked about today, individualism, the frontier mindset, the blessings of geography, the blessings of our economy, of the way that we’re able to just incorporate different cultures and the best of each and put them all together, give us the best opportunity to succeed and to accomplish awesome things. We’re the country that put a man on the moon, which is the epitome of the human spirit. I hope to see more of that. I think last time I was here, I shouted out, and I love Antarctic exploration. I’ve read basically every book that there is on the exploration of Antarctica. One of the reasons I love to do so is because there is no reason to care about Antarctica. None.
I think that the of what makes humanity great and has for a long time are best expressed in the American character, and that despite all of our problems, that as a country with our ethos, a lot of the stuff we talked about today, individualism, the frontier mindset, the blessings of geography, the blessings of our economy, of the way that we’re able to just incorporate different cultures and the best of each and put them all together, give us the best opportunity to succeed and to accomplish awesome things. We’re the country that put a man on the moon, which is the epitome of the human spirit. I hope to see more of that. I think last time I was here, I shouted out, and I love Antarctic exploration. I’ve read basically every book that there is on the exploration of Antarctica. One of the reasons I love to do so is because there is no reason to care about Antarctica. None.
There’s nothing down there. Zero. Going to the South Pole is a truly useless exercise. Yet, we went. We went twice. Actually, two people went there in a span of five weeks, and they competed to do so. The spirit that propelled Amundsen and Scott’s expedition and people like Shackleton who’s like… If you were to ask me my hero of all heroes, it’s Ernest Shackleton. It’s because his spirit, I think, lives on in the United States. It unfortunately died in Great Britain. Interestingly enough, the Brits even understand that. They’re like, “It’s very interesting how popular Shackleton is in America.” Even though he was Irish and he was a British subject, to me, he’s a spiritual American. I think that his spirit lives on within us and has always been here to a certain extent. Everywhere else, I think it’s dying. But here, I love it here.
There’s so many cool things about America. People move around all the time. They buy new houses. They start families. There’s no other place that you can just reset your whole life in the same country. It’s wild. You can reinvent yourself. You can go broke. You can get rich. You can go back and forth multiple times, and there’s nowhere else where you have enough freedom and opportunity to pursue that. We definitely have a lot of problems, but I’ve traveled enough of the world now to know that it’s a special place, and that gives me a lot of hope.
Lex Fridman
I wish I could do a Bostonian accent of, “We do these things, not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard.”
I wish I could do a Bostonian accent of, “We do these things, not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard.”
Saagar Enjeti
Because they’re hard. Thank you.
Because they’re hard. Thank you.
Lex Fridman
That’s so true. The Scott Irish got us. Well, listen, I’m a huge fan of you, Saagar. I hope to see you in the White House interviewing the president-
That’s so true. The Scott Irish got us. Well, listen, I’m a huge fan of you, Saagar. I hope to see you in the White House interviewing the president-
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. There you go. That’s right.
Yeah. There you go. That’s right.
Lex Fridman
And-
And-
Saagar Enjeti
That’s the only situation you’re going to see me in the White House. Yeah. Yeah.
That’s the only situation you’re going to see me in the White House. Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… front row and just talking free. I would love to live in a country and in the world where it’s you who gets the talk to the press secretary, to the president, because I think you’re one of the good ones, as far as journalists go, as far as human beings. So I hope to see you in there, and I hope you get to ask a question that-
… front row and just talking free. I would love to live in a country and in the world where it’s you who gets the talk to the press secretary, to the president, because I think you’re one of the good ones, as far as journalists go, as far as human beings. So I hope to see you in there, and I hope you get to ask a question that-
Saagar Enjeti
That ends up in a book.
That ends up in a book.
Lex Fridman
That ends up in a good history book.
That ends up in a good history book.
Saagar Enjeti
Absolutely. Well, likewise, I’m a huge fan of yours. For anybody out there who’s interested, I compiled a list and I will go and retroactively edit it. Just go to saagarenjeti.io. I created a newsletter with a website that has all the links to all the books I’m going to talk about here.
Absolutely. Well, likewise, I’m a huge fan of yours. For anybody out there who’s interested, I compiled a list and I will go and retroactively edit it. Just go to saagarenjeti.io. I created a newsletter with a website that has all the links to all the books I’m going to talk about here.
Lex Fridman
Beautiful. The hundreds of books that were mentioned here. All right, brother. Thank you so much for talking today.
Beautiful. The hundreds of books that were mentioned here. All right, brother. Thank you so much for talking today.
Saagar Enjeti
Thank you.
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Saagar Enjeti. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, let me leave you with some words from Voltaire.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Saagar Enjeti. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, let me leave you with some words from Voltaire.
“History is the study of all the world’s crime.”
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption | Lex Fridman Podcast #453
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #453 with Javier Milei.
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We discuss all of this in detail, both the successes and the challenges. His depth of knowledge of economic principles, metrics and data was truly impressive and refreshing to hear from a world leader. But even bigger than the economic transformation of Argentina, Javier represents the universal fight against government corruption and the fight for freedom, economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech. He has many critics, many of whom a part of the corrupt establishment he’s seeking to dismantle, but many are simply Argentinian citizens, scared of the pain his radical policies may bring, at least in the short term. But whether one disagrees with his methods or not, no one can deny that his presidency marks one of the most ambitious attempts at economic transformation in modern history, and that Javier Milei is truly a force of nature, combining the rigor of an economist with the passion of a revolutionary in the fight for freedom of a nation he loves. Argentina is one of my favorite countries, so I sincerely hope he succeeds.
This interview was conducted with the President speaking Spanish and me speaking English with an interpreter simultaneously translating. We make the episode available overdubbed and subtitled in both English and Spanish, thanks to our great friends at ElevenLabs. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can switch between English and Spanish by clicking the gear icon, selecting audio track, and then choosing the language. Same with the captions. If you’re watching on X, I’ll post both Spanish and English versions separately. If you’re watching on Spotify or listening elsewhere, I’ll probably only post the English version. This is a first time for me doing something like this in a foreign language. It was challenging, but illuminating. I hope to talking to many world leaders for two to three hours in this way, including Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, and Xi Jinping. I want to explore who they are, how they think, and how they hope to help their country and humanity flourish. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Javier Milei.
So basically, in economics, that means you get increasing returns, and the presence of increasing returns implies the existence of monopolies, concentrated structures, and according to traditional neoclassical economic theory, the presence of monopolies and concentrated structures is not a good thing. But at the same time, one could see that living standards had increased tremendously and that middle-income people ended up living far better than emperors did in the Roman era, and the population had gone from having 95% of people in extreme poverty to less than 10%. And in that context, the question was, how it could be that something that had lifted so many people out of poverty, that had improved human conditions so much, could be something bad for economic theory, meaning something was not right.
So in that context, I remember that one of the people who worked on my team suggested I read an article by Murray Newton Rothbard called Monopoly and Competition. I remember reading it like it was today, and after reading it carefully, I said, “Everything I’ve taught about market structure in the last 20 years in courses on microeconomics is wrong.” This caused a very strong internal commotion in me. So I called this person who used work with me, and they recommended a place to buy Austrian School of Economics books, and I remember I bought at least 20 or 30 books, which I went to pick up one Saturday afternoon. And when I visited the bookstore, I was fascinated by all the stuff they had there.
So I went back the next day and I started calculating how much money I needed to pay for my dog’s food. That’s my four-legged child, and how much I needed to spend on the taxi fare and food. And then with what I have left, I spent all of it on more books. And then I started to read very intensively, and I remember for example, the experience of reading Human Action by Mises, and this was a book that I didn’t know about. And I remember that on the following weekend, I started to read this book right from the first page, and I didn’t stop until I finished it, and that was a true revolution in my head. And having the chance to read Austrian authors like Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Hoppe and Jesus Huerta de Soto, or others like Juan Ramon Rallo, Philipp Bagus and Walter Block, for example.
That was very inspirational, and at one point I got the opportunity to read related to the works of Alberto Benegas Lynch [foreign language 00:07:38], and I also had the pleasure and honor to meet him. And today we are actually friends. So that paved the way for me to approach the ideas of freedom. And another book that was a very significant influence and impact on me was the Principles of Political Economics by Menger. It was truly eye-opening, or let’s say, for reading Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, these were things that really challenged all of my former thinking. I had a vague idea and poor about the Austrian School. The only thing I had read about the Austrian School until then had been Money and Time, a very good book by Garrison. But now that I understand a little bit more about Austrian economics, I know that it was rather poor. This doesn’t mean that the book isn’t good, but there were a whole lot of things to read that ended up being truly fascinating.
Now, real life poses a whole lot of restraints, and some of those you can lift, and those restrictions and others you can’t. So in real life, I am a minarchist. I advocate for minimizing state size. I try to remove as many regulations as possible. In fact, that is what I used to say during my campaign, and let’s say, that is what I’m now carrying out. We have just carried out the largest structural reform in Argentine history. It is a structural reform that is eight times larger than Menem’s, which had been the largest structural reform in history. And we did that with 15% of the representatives and 10% of the senators. Furthermore, we have a deregulation ministry where basically every day we eliminate between one and five regulations. On the other hand, we have 3,200 additional structural reforms pending, to the point that the day we finish all these reforms, we will be the freest country on the planet, with the consequences they have in terms of well-being. Think about this, when Ireland started market reforms just over 40 years ago, it was the poorest country in Europe. Today, its GDP per capita is 50% higher than that of the United States. So I have a current situation, and what I am constantly looking for, whether from my academic works and my outreach notes and books, is the world we have today, that every day we are closer, that every day we gain more freedom because there are some very interesting things here. First, I would like to quote Milton Friedman. There is a moment when they do an interview with Milton Friedman and they ask him about liberals, and then he says that there are three types of liberals. There are the classical liberals where, for example, Adam Smith or Milton Friedman himself could fit. Some say that Hayek could fit into that category. For me, Hayek is a minarchist.
Then you have the minarchists where you could clearly find in that place Mises, Hayek. One could find in philosophical terms Nozick and basically Ayn Rand. And at one point, Milton Friedman, based on his own son, he says, “But if you look closely, there are some who are anarchists.” Let’s say, probably from my point of view, the person who has been the greatest inspiration in my life is essentially Murray Newton Rothbard. So therefore, there are two dimensions. One is where I want to go, and the topic is where I stand. So the most important thing is to try each day to advance further toward that ideal of anarcho-capitalism. In that sense, sometimes we face strong and harsh criticism regarding that ideal vision. I think that’s the nirvana fallacy. If you compare yourself against paradise, everything is horrible and miserable, but you don’t live in paradise. You live on earth. Basically, what you need to understand is something called the state conditions. Let’s suppose that you don’t like rectangular tables. You prefer circular tables. Now the reality is, I have only a few hours until I go and catch my flight and the table is rectangular. You like a circular table, a round one, but there isn’t one. What you have is a rectangular table. So either we do the interview here or we just can’t do it. So what do you do? You adapt to the current conditions. This is what there is now. So then you have some restrictions that you can change and others that you cannot. The idea is to modify all the ones that can be changed in the short term, and start working on those that can be modified in the medium or long-term. For example, if you really like round tables, perhaps the next interview we may do at a round table. We’re going to try and solve it, but today it’s something that we couldn’t possibly solve. So that’s basically the idea, right?
Let’s say it’s about understanding that some restrictions you can change, others you can, and there are institutional restrictions too. There are many anarcho-capitalists who are dedicated to criticizing, and incredibly, they do so with more violence towards liberals, and many of them actually criticize me, which truly make no sense because it is precisely the nirvana fallacy but the reality is that… Look, in Argentina, for example, the most popular sport is soccer. When you go to watch an Argentina match, it is beautiful. The stands are full, and they’re all painted with sky blue and white colors. There is a lot of joy. People sing songs that are very fun, that are very distinctive. It’s very much part of Argentine folklore, so to speak. But you see that beautiful show is external. That is to say it does not determine the outcome. You place the ball in the middle of the field, and no matter how much people shout, the ball doesn’t move. The one who moves the ball and scores the goals is Messi.
So what do I mean? If you don’t get involved and don’t get into it, no, you don’t do anything. So what do I know is that there are many liberals, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who are really useless because all they do is criticize, let’s say, those of us who want to lead the world toward the ideas of freedom. And what they don’t realize is that power is a zero-sum game, and if we don’t have it, then the left will have it. Therefore, if you level your harshest criticism at those in your own ranks, you end up being subservient to socialism probably. And also, for instance, you have cases of strong hypocrisy, let’s say. I have seen cases of agorists. It’s the anarcho- capitalists who criticize Rothbard because he said that you have to get into politics, otherwise the socialists will advance. And it’s interesting because some of them, I have seen them criticizing, proposing agorism, and I remember one of them, one day the police showed up and honestly, he was peeing himself.
So it’s very easy to criticize, propose, and suggest, but if he was truly such an agonist, he should have been willing to endure going to jail. However, when it was time to face the consequences of the idea he was promoting, he froze, wet his pants and ended up, let’s say, accepting all the restrictions because clearly it was better to be out of jail than in jail. But in doing so, he sold out his ideas. So it seems to me that no, not taking into account the restrictions of the situation, only serves to be functional to socialism because all it does is strike against one’s own.
Now, later I will get deeper into that discussion, and the reality is that we had a fiscal deficit, which amounted to 15% of GDP. Five points were in the Treasury, 10 points were in the Central Bank, which was endogenous monetary issuance. And the reality is that we also had interest-bearing liabilities at the Central Bank, equivalent to four monetary bases maturing in one day, meaning we could have quintupled the amount of money in one day. We had peso-denominated maturities, amounting to the equivalent of $90 billion. The Central Bank had negative net currency foreign reserves, minus $12 billion. We had commercial debts in the Central Bank equivalent to $50 billion. There were company dividends held back amounting to $10 billion. Therefore, if we had instantly opened up… You see, I say we are liberal libertarians. We are not liberal fools. That’s what some anarchist liberals suggested, meaning that we basically open everything on the first day.
So in that context, of course, if we had done that, we would’ve encountered hyperinflation. Therefore, that would have led to the number of poor people being around 95% and probably, and by December, the Peronist party would have organized supermarket’s lootings, and would’ve done all sorts of things, and would’ve probably been ousted. And by the first part of the year, the Peronists would’ve gone back to office. So to us, it was crucial to end fiscal deficit.
One of the things we promised during the campaign had been to reduce the number of ministries, and indeed we reduced to less than half the number of ministries because we went to nine ministries, today we have eight. We have also laid off a large number of civil employees. Today, I can say that we’ve already dismissed about 50,000 of them, and we practically don’t renew any contracts unless the positions are absolutely necessary. At the same time, we have stopped public works and we have eliminated discretionary transfers to the provinces. We have also diluted public sector wages. Also, we have eliminated economic subsidies by restoring utility rates to the right levels. And in that, let’s say, in this context, we achieved fiscal balance as far as the Treasury is concerned. This is very important because in the last 123 years, Argentina had a deficit for 113 of them, and in the 10 years it did not have a deficit because it was not paying the debt. So that was absolutely false, and they told us it would be impossible to do that.
We had planned to do so within a year, and they said it wasn’t possible to adjust by more than one percentage point, and we achieved fiscal balance in the month of January. That is the first month of administration. At the same time, we also cut social plans linked to intermediation. This is very important because we knew we were going to make a very tough adjustment, and we knew that this was going to have a court in social terms, and we knew that we had to offer support during the first month, I mean, the first quarter and second quarter in office. One of the things we did was to eliminate what are known as poverty managers. That is intermediaries. Basically, people have a guard through which they receive assistance, but it happens that they had to provide a counter service, and that counter service was verified by a group called the piqueteros.
So in that context, when they were going to sign, the counter service took away half of the money. So by removing that payoff, they stopped extorting them, stopped stealing their money, and with the same amount of money, they received double the resources. And of course, we also provided an additional boost. So let’s say that this is related to the five adjustment points in the Treasury. Now, what happens, as we began to achieve fiscal balance and no longer needed to issue money to finance ourselves, and as we also met interest payments and some capital repayments, one of the things that happened is that the debt market began to be recreated. So we were able to take debt out of the Central Bank and transfer it to the Treasury where it should have always been, and that meant an adjustment of approximately 10% of GDP. Everyone said this would be impossible and couldn’t be fixed.
Essentially, what we did was implement a fiscal adjustment at the Central Bank, amounting to 10% of GDP. So if you ask me, it’s clear that we have not only made the biggest fiscal adjustment in the history of humanity, because we made a fiscal adjustment of 15 points of the GDP, but also most of that went back to the people as less seigniorage, as a lower inflation rate. It’s true that we temporarily raised the country tax, but we lowered it in September, and now in December, we’re going to eliminate it. Today, for example, we also announced that in December we are eliminating import taxes. In fact, in that regard, what you have is that we return to the people 13 and a half points of GDP because the real tax burden is the size of the state. So while back in December we were discussing hyperinflation, today we are discussing 30-year loans.
In other words, all those resources that the national government used to take are now back in the private sector. And that’s what has allowed it to be very dynamic. And this has two very strong impacts. The first one is that if you look at wholesale inflation, it went down from 54% to 2%. So it went down by 27 times. It was divided into 27. So we had inflation at the rate of 17,000% annually, and it’s now close to about 28% a year, but it’s not only that. You could consider consumer inflation, the latest consumer inflation rate was 2.7%. Now, it happens that we essentially, due to a matter that is related to the Central Bank’s balance sheets and also due to the debt stocks, we still have controls in place and we are eliminating restrictions, day by day. Now, the interesting thing is that we have a 2% monthly devaluation standard, and there’s international inflation of course, which means that you then have to subtract two and a half points from the inflation observed by the consumer.
This indicates that inflation in Argentina, the true inflation, not the induced one, but the actual monetary inflation is 0.2% per month. At 0.2% per month, this equates to 2.4% annually. What I’m saying is, the original discussion was about whether inflation could reach 17,000%. Now we are bringing inflation down to levels of 2.5% annually, and that is amazing. And we achieved this by considering a number of factors. The first one is that we did not experience a previous hyperinflation, which would’ve simplified the process of implementing a stabilization program. Typically, when hyperinflation occurs, monetary assets are diluted, leading to a natural restoration of demand. And besides, we did not resort to any expropriation. For example, before the Convertibility plan, which was the most successful program in Argentina’s history, Argentina experienced two instances of hyperinflation. During Alfonsin’s administration, inflation reached 5,000%, and under Menem was 1,200%.
Additionally, there was the BONEX plan, under which debt was exchanged on a compulsory basis. In other words, what we did instead was clean up the Central Bank balance sheet. So with that, we cleaned up the Central Bank’s balance sheet. We cleared a loss of $45 billion, all voluntarily. And the most amazing thing is that we did it in just six months, and at the same time, we have not controlled prices.
And in fact, there is an article called Passing the Buck, which is by Gerardo della Paolera, Bózzoli, and Irigoin that demonstrates that Menem’s first government was the best government in history. And basically, it argues two things in the success of the stabilization of the convertibility program. So if you take a closer look, when you examine it carefully, when you account for all these factors, our disinflation process is actually much more genuine. And not only that, it’s also much deeper. We are restored freedoms to Argentinians while simultaneously implementing a structural reform eight times larger. And we accomplished this with only with 15% of the representatives, 10% of the senators, and within the first six months of government. In other words, our deregulation agenda continues daily and we still have 3,200 structural reforms pending. This will ultimately make Argentina the freest country in the world.
Moreover, to have a sense of magnitude, the reforms that we already have made with the executive order 7023, and with the basis law, we have actually jumped 90 places in terms of economic freedom. What this means is that today, Argentina has institutions similar to those of Germany, France, Italy, and we obviously want this to continue. And let’s say we are going to surpass no doubt the levels of economic freedom that Ireland reached in its best moment. And not only that, we’re going to exceed the levels of economic freedom of Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland. We are undoubtedly going to be the freest country in the world.
And this means that thanks to what we’ve done today, we are on a path that allows us to multiply our per capita GDP by 2.5 times when you apply the relevant correction. And this of course is something very interesting because it implies a huge increase in well-being. And furthermore, today the Argentinian economy is already strongly and amazingly recovering. And we can say analysts’ hypotheses were suggesting that next year we will be growing between five and 6%. Today, JP Morgan has now corrected or let’s say revised the projections upwards. And besides, when we normalized the price situation, the true poverty rate came up and it was 57% in January. Today it is at 46%, meaning we lowered poverty by 11 percentage points. Let’s say, I mean, it seems truly like a miracle. And not only that, but actually not a single job was lost in the process.
When it comes to all of this inflation reduction process, people said that our economy and economic activity would collapse. And actually when you look at the de-seasonalized data, you see that in August there was a recovery that took us back to December levels, to December levels. That means that in the year, we made the largest fiscal adjustment in the history of humanity. We will end up with less inflation, fewer poor people, better real wages, and additionally, a GDP higher than what we started with.
And if you look at it in dollars, I can assure you that the numbers are phenomenal because basically today the dollar is below the levels we had when we took office. So the reality is that in all of this, when you take my popularity levels and the government’s acceptance levels, today they are above the moment. We assumed office if you know that the moment of maximum popularity is when you take office. Therefore this means that far from resting on our laurels with this, we’re going for more reforms. We’re going to deepen the reforms. And I tell you, we won’t stop until Argentina is the freest country in the world.
Furthermore, a recent work by an Argentinian economist named Juan Pablo Nicolini was presented at the central bank’s monetary meetings and he works at the Federal Reserve. And it’s interesting because he shows that only on the basis of what we have done in fiscal matters it ensures that in the span of 10 years we can double the GDP per capita, meaning that Argentina could grow at rates of 7% annually, which is very much, very much, and that has strong consequences in terms of improving quality of life, reducing poverty, reducing indigence. Therefore, if during the worst moment our image didn’t suffer and we stayed strong in our ideas, now that everything is working much better, why should we change?
On the contrary, we are ready to redouble the bet, to redouble our efforts because we’ve done things that no one else has done. I will give you an example. There’s something that seems trivial, but there’s what’s called the single paper ballot. Argentina used to vote with huge ballots, which were above all very costly. And that reform, it never… Let’s say it wasn’t done because it always harmed the ruling party. So everyone talked about going to the single paper ballot, but no one did it when they were in power. They didn’t want to implement it because they preferred to commit fraud or use some kind of trickery to avoid applying that rule that makes the election more competitive. Well, what’s interesting, we sent that law and it was approved.
What’s more? Now we are finishing with the open, simultaneous and mandatory primaries because it was a mechanism by which politics was also stealing. We are eliminating the financing of political parties. If you look, we have reduced the fiscal pressure by 15 points to the Argentinians. We are restoring freedoms with a deep set of structural and regulatory reforms that is I think that any sensible liberal could perceive. We are already delivering a wonderful government. In fact, it’s the best government in the history of Argentina. If the best had been that of Menem, we’ve already outpaced him.
I’ll try to explain it with an example that I think clarifies what’s happening in Argentina. Argentina was an economy that had a total price controls. It had a fiscal deficit which was financed through money printing. Just for you to give you an idea, in the last year, Argentina financed 13 points of the gross domestic product with money printing. In other words, a real disaster. So that situation provoked this artificially demand and puts pressure on prices. The issue is that price controls are applied additionally over the prices that they enter the price index with which inflation was… I’m not saying they were lying about it. It was distorted.
And since Argentina measures poverty and indigence by income line, then what happens? That distorted the true levels of poverty, of course. But that’s not the only effect. I mean, let’s say the real poverty levels were higher, quite a bit higher than those shown by the previous government, which showed them at 41% and also did so on a six-monthly basis. So if you, let’s say, have a growing trend, they are actually leaving you a bomb and you don’t see it because let’s say basically the indicator was measured with a delayed form. But not only that, imagine that you are also given… You are in the middle of an island alone and they give you $1 million. What can you do with that? You cannot do anything because you cannot buy anything. It is the same as if someone tells you that the price of glasses is $10, but when you want to buy it, it’s not available.
Actually, there’s a joke told by an Argentinian professor named Juan Carlos de Pablo, who says that a man goes to a bazaar and asks for a vase. Then he says to him, “Well, I want that vase. How much would you charge me?” Then he says, “$5,000.”
“Oh, okay, $5,000. But why $5,000 if across the street it’s 1,000?” He says, “Well, go buy it across the street for 1,000.”
“Ah, there’s none for 1,000.”
“Well then, here when there’s more, it’ll also cost 1,000.” In other words, prices at which they are available. So what happens? When you are faced with that situation, the supermarket shelves were empty. So what was the point of having a price at which you couldn’t buy anything? You left those prices. The shelves were empty. So the statistics showed that you were much better, but the reality is you couldn’t buy anything. You couldn’t make it happen.
So if you left the situation as it was, people were going to starve because they couldn’t buy anything. Yes, they had a certain amount of money that could supposedly buy certain goods, but those goods were not available. What is the only thing you can do to save people? Make the prices transparent and allow products to reappear. Well, when you make the prices transparent, you also make transparent the cost of the basic food basket and the total basic basket, meaning the poverty line… Sorry, the indigence line and the poverty line respectively. And when you do that, clearly you will see a jump in poverty. That brought poverty up to 57%.
Now, Argentina found its activity floor in the month of April. From that moment, Argentina began to invent a cyclical recovery. Real wages have been growing every month above inflation. Therefore, nominal wages are beating inflation. In fact, we are already at level similar to those we had in November. The same goes for pensions.
Moreover, also, let’s say there is a rebound in activity due to the recovery of the stock cycle. Therefore, this is also contributing to more and better-paid jobs. In fact, this is so strong and evident that the wages growing the most are in the informal sector. This means that poverty and extreme poverty are decreasing much faster than we imagined. But not only that, by eliminating inflation, you remove the inflationary tax, but the real burden is the fiscal deficit, which was 15 points of the GDP.
Okay, we temporarily raised the country tax, now we lower it, but we return that to the Argentinians. We gave back 15 points of the GDP. Not only that, but also when you eliminate inflation, you remove the distortion of relative prices. Therefore, the allocation of resources is much better. Not only that, but also with the strong fiscal adjustment we made, we have reduced the country risk from 3000 basis points to 770. Today, Fitch raised Argentina’s rating to CCC. So what do I mean? That translates into a lower country risk and interest rates. And that generates an increase in investment, also generates an increase in consumption.
In other words, the Argentinian economy is currently in an absolutely flourishing moment. And how is that sustained in the long term? With structural reforms which we implement daily, deregulating the economy and introducing new laws that free Argentinians from the many oppressive measures that have burdened it over the past 100 years.
In fact, when we did that, two days later, one of the most renowned and influential Piqueteros called for a demonstration. He claimed that 50,000 people would attend because he was actually expecting 100,000. So he wanted to showcase it as a success. And so then let’s say with the decision made in human capital to cut their funding, the anti-blockade protocol was also enacted, where those who blocked the streets wouldn’t receive welfare benefits.
And those who broke the law would go to jail. All of that. And also we were informing this through transportation channels. Well, in that march, they expected to have 100,000 people there. And actually it turned out to be 3,000 people. And from that point on, they didn’t block the streets anymore.
We also evidently put an end to that corruption. One of the things that also generated a lot of corruption was public works. Another thing that led to significant acts of corruption were the discretionary transfers to provinces. In general, these transfers were made to the provinces with accounting as obscure as possible. So the national government, in collusion with the governors let’s say, the money ended up being used for other things. Not only that, with which we have already done many things.
Furthermore, the ministry of human capital is always filing complaints in court. Not in the media, in court. Acts of corruption like never before in Argentine history. Not only that, but also in terms of condemning corruption. That is, we have done, for example, two days ago, it was condemned, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner got a sentence for corruption, I mean, due to corruption. And the next day, that is yesterday, we took away their privileged pensions.
At the same time, we are, for example, we have discovered that Kirchnerism used disability pensions for acts of corruption. For example, there is a city that has more disability pensions than people. In other words, to give you an idea of the things being done in Argentina.
And also in Argentina, we have restored freedom to the judiciary. We do not pressure the judiciary. And this is so true that during my government, not only was Cristina Fernández de Kirchner convicted, but also the two terrorist attacks carried out by Iran were condemned. So if there is a government that is truly fighting against corruption, it is us. Not only that, but also with each deregulation, it is a privilege that we take away either from a politician, a prebendary company, or a power group. That is also very powerful. No one in Argentina has ever fought against corruption the way we have. In fact, I will move on to something that is deeply corrupt and one of my great battles, the corruption of the media and social media. That is to say, I removed the official advertising. That’s why you will see that even though we generate wonderful news, every week in large quantity, the media speak terribly. In other words, they demand to have a monopoly on the microphone. That is they are entitled to insult, hurt, offend, and they don’t want anyone to bother them, and they expect me not to even respond. That’s why a large part of journalism in Argentina hates the X Network. And that’s why the liberal libertarians love the X network, because we can all say what we want.
However, let’s say these supposed journalists who defend freedom of expression, actually what they want is to censor the ideas they don’t like. And of course, because they are leftists, because they are wokes, because they can’t stand the competition, because if they had to fight face-to-face, hand to hand, on a level playing field, when it comes to ideas, they would lose because they were a failure in the economic, social, and cultural aspects. And also, we must not forget that those murderers called socialists killed 150 million people. So they clearly cannot fight on equal terms. Therefore, they demand that social networks have censorship and that the truth cannot be told to them. Because when you tell a socialist the truth, they cry, claiming it’s hate speech. No, it’s not hate speech. It’s that you are useless people who have ruined the planet. They have made the planet much worse.
And fortunately today, thanks to social media, especially due to the enormous and brave work of Elon Musk and the role of Twitter, today X, allows information to flow, which makes it possible, let’s say, to expose politicians and also expose the media. And that’s why journalists in Argentina are so violent. Why? Because before they could, for instance, a journalist went and for example, he would go to a person and he would throw a folder at them and say, “If you don’t give me X amount of money, I am going to publish all of this and tarnish your reputation.” And I know for a fact a case of a journalist who carried out this extortion twice to a businessman, that businessman told him that he wasn’t going to pay. And evidently the journalist did it. Obviously they went to court, there was a trial, and that journalist lost both times. But that process is very slow. And in the meantime, they smeared.
So since the justice system takes a long time, so what is the problem? The problem is that in the meantime, your life got dirtied. So why can’t journalists do all this? Well, that’s why they dislike X. They dislike social media. They dislike the new form of communication because it took away their monopoly over the microphone. And by taking away the monopoly over the microphone, it removed the economic benefits of extortion.
So clearly, that’s another battle I’m fighting. You read a newspaper in Argentina, and 85% of what you read is a lie. That is to say the fundamental characteristic of most journalists, not all, but the vast majority of journalists in Argentina with some honorable exceptions, is that they are liars, slanderers, and defamers. And if the monopoly they demand were still in place that they want to reign again, I have no doubt that they will demand money in exchange for silence, because that’s what they are. They are extortionists, they are thieves, they are corrupt. And then of course, obviously when you take away a privilege from a sector, they get upset. Well, welcome to freedom.
Well, it’s no coincidence that they killed 150 million human beings. So what happened then? The official fall of the wall in the year 1989 made it clear that socialism had failed. In that context, the socialists, they moved the discussion of class struggle in economics and took it to other areas. So for example, socialism or what is of the 21st century or cultural Marxism or post-Marxism, whatever definition you want, is to take class struggle to different aspects of life.
For example, one of the aspects of life where you, let’s say, have this is in gender ideology. I mean, it’s incredible because the first ones to defend equality before the law were the liberals. The first to defend women’s rights were the liberals. Jeremy Bentham in the year 1750 was the first to demand equality before the law for women. I mean the cause of equality, equality before the law for women and equality of rights. The first ones who advocated for this were the liberals, did you know? However, what does the left do? They just go on to radicalize it. And then it moves to what is called female chauvinism.
Female chauvinism is, let’s say, the fight against males. And then, I mean, how do they do it? They do it by assigning rights. But when you assign a right, someone has to pay for it. And that has consequences. And in general, let’s say this always happens, the consequences are that the results are worse than what you had before. I mean, in any state intervention, the subsequent result is often worse than what you originally had. So that’s one thing. And not only that, but the other side of this is the environmental agenda, which sets man against nature involving all aspects of environmentalism and everything related to climate change.
In other words, they can’t stand any serious discussion. Therefore, all environmental policies are nothing more than an excuse to collect taxes so that a group of parasitic bureaucrats can live at the expense of others and finance sinister ideas, where the most sinister idea of all is that there is no room for everyone on planet earth. That is an idea that failed with Malthus at the beginning of the 19th century, a murderous idea that was also applied by the Egyptians against the Jews. And this is famously recorded in the Book of Shemot or Exodus.
Or for example, another thing is Black Lives matter, that is Black people against white people or indigenous people against the established communities, or I mean everything related to LGBT agendas. Definitely, these are some of the ways in which socialism extended the class struggle into other aspects of society, creating divisions and fostering deceit with the sole purpose of absorbing taxes.
I mean, what was the ministry of women in Argentina doing? Did it manage to reduce a single femicide? No, none at all. The number of femicides exploded just the same. In fact, the most feminist president in Argentine history, Mr. Alberto Fernández, used to beat his wife. That is such a strange feminist. I mean, well… So within the ranks of feminists, let’s say, you will essentially find the largest number of rapists and women beaters. And it’s quite interesting what they do. Their hypocrisy is truly striking.
It’s not just about that though. I mean, the battle is on three fronts. You have the economic front, which is free enterprise capitalism. Then we have the political level. Currently, the system that the world has designed is a Republican liberal democracy with checks and balances. And I mean, at the cultural battle level, notice that socialism has been very successful in the cultural battle. It has been very successful politically because it was able to translate that political battle in winning many elections. But why is it falling apart? Why? Because it produces misery and because the economic system is a disaster, so people eventually realize that it is making things worse for them.
Liberal, libertarians are very good when it comes to economics. Yes. And those good economic results can actually lead to the generation of solid political processes. But what happened? The liberals neglected the cultural battle. Much of the blame was placed on Fukuyama when he said, “This is the end of history.” No, it was not the end of history because the following year, in 1990, the socialists gathered at the São Paulo Forum, and based on the ideas of Gramsci, designed a strategy to infiltrate the media, culture, and education, which ended up changing the entire discourse. And they established that what they said was politically correct and that any-
It’s the same with journalists who get upset with Twitter. They say they defend freedom but can’t stand it when those who think differently speak. Is that freedom? Yes, for them, but not for those who think differently. That’s not freedom. That’s fascism. Then, what do we say? Then we must fight on the economic front. And I believe we are implementing an extremely successful economic program that is being recognized worldwide. In fact, the other night, the president-elect, Donald Trump, indeed gave recognition for the achievements we are having in Argentina and the speed at which we have done it.
At the same time, you have to fight the political battle because, well, soccer matches are not won by shouting from the stands, they are won by playing on the field. But that alone is not enough because you have to, let’s say you need to convey to society the values of capitalism, the free market, what liberalism is, the value of freedom, right? And when you succeed in that, then we will indeed be able to advance steadily. If you don’t fight the cultural battle, what happened in Chile will happen to you. They had economic success. It was, let’s say sustained over time, but at some point it collapsed. Why did it collapse? Because they hadn’t fought the cultural battle.
Then socialism, little by little, took control of institutions in education and the media. So, they took over the media and culture and on that basis, they attacked and broke up the system. And then they found themselves with increasing doses of socialism and the only thing socialism generates is poverty. Therefore, what you must keep in mind is that you have to fight the battles on all fronts. And if you don’t keep that in mind, I can tell you are headed towards collapse.
So really, what is the point of life if it’s not in freedom, right? I mean what is the point of living without fighting for your values? If I am willing to give my life for my values, then what is the point of living without freedom? Look, can I tell you something interesting that happened to me here in the United States? Let’s say back in the year 1998, I came to the United States to take a series of courses to improve my English, which I never use in formal terms because as president, as you can imagine, if I make a mistake, I can create a serious situation. Fortunately, I have an interpreter who is a superstar, and if I make a mistake even in Spanish, he corrects me in the version of the other language.
And so back then, in that year, I went to San Francisco and I visited Alcatraz. You are young, but I mean the visit was an audio tour. You got a Walkman and you would choose the different tracks and listen to the story. The most interesting thing is that the Alcatraz story ended in the recreation yard where the basketball court, exercise area, and all recreational facilities were located. So anyone would have thought that this was the best part of Alcatraz. And yet, what they said in the guide was that that was the hardest part for the inmates. Why? Because I mean that recreation area in particular is built in front of the San Francisco Bay. So, the inmates could all see how San Francisco continued to build up and evolve and develop every day while they were locked up in there. They couldn’t take part in that. They were confined in that prison. And that made them fully aware of the value of freedom.
So, in my experience for me, the fight for freedom is relentless, okay? I mean my greatest hero in all of human history is Moses. The feat of Moses is like one person alone with his brother, Aaron, both confronting the combined forces of the United States, China, and Russia together. And it was Moses who said to Ramesses, “Let my people go.” Well, Ramesses resisted and the forces of heaven ran him over. But what I mean is I don’t see any other possible way to live other than with freedom. And I would always fight for full freedom and I would be at the forefront of this cause. I mean it’s a cause that I’m going to die with my boots on. I mean I’m not going to make do with living any other way other than with freedom. I will fight everything. I’m going to fight as much as it takes. At least that’s the way I feel. So, what good is it to be alive if you’re confined? What good is it to be alive if you’re not free? It’s no good. What good was it for Peter Fetcher to be alive in communist Germany? Well, at least he had a moment of happiness while he tried to escape.
One of the things that happened to me is that when I went to first talk to him, I thought I was going to meet a successful businessman and that I would have a typical successful businessman conversation who understands business and that some of his businesses, some of his business is slightly more exotic, but that’s the kind of talk you would expect to have. And business people are truly admirable, right? Because they are true benefactors of society, but they’re usually very much focused on their own business. And one of the things that really, really shocked me when I met Elon Musk, we had scheduled a meeting for no more than 50 minutes, the first time we were in the meeting for a little over 45 minutes because he was about to miss his flight. So obviously, if someone as important as him doesn’t fly as planned, it has to be rescheduled and he loses a lot of hours. Imagine, every minute is very valuable.
And one of the things that happened was that basically he brought up the topic of demography and we started discussing demographics and growth. I never imagined that I would end up discussing demographics and growth with him. And another very fun thing was that something funny he said to me was that since we shared our vision regarding demographic issues and the need to populate the planet, he asked me, “Now, what about you? When are you going to move in that direction?” I said, “Oh, look, I have five children.” And he said, “Well, the four-legged ones don’t count.”
That was the first meeting I had with Elon Musk. The second meeting was when, here at the universities, we started seeing anti-Semitic demonstrations where basically Palestinian flags were displayed and Jews were harassed and persecuted. And at that moment when we had that second meeting, he showed himself to be very deeply involved with that and brought up the issue of the cultural battle. So, I mean it’s not quite conventional, even in the political field.
During our last talk, which lasted for about two and a half hours, one of the things we talked about was freedom and what was at stake for the United States in this election. Therefore, he is a person, honestly. I can say he’s well above average. I mean a person of unconventional intelligence and also he’s very charming. So, I mean, again, I have a great admiration for him and I really interact very closely with him. He’s very interested in what our Ministry of Deregulation is doing, which seeks to remove regulations. But at the same time, he works with another person who is also interested in the chainsaw approach, and so I’m very pleased because they are going to try and replicate the model we are implementing in Argentina.
And also, Donald Trump himself is very enthusiastic about this and anything in the way of reducing regulations and cutting public spending and taking government out of the equation means more freedom for the people. So, I’m very pleased with what’s going on. And with Trump’s victory, because the United States will be better off, Argentina is going to be better too and the whole world is going to be better off. Today, the world is a much better place than it was just a few days ago.
So, my advice would be for them to go all the way, to push it to the very limit, and do not give up. Do not let down their guard. Furthermore, that agenda does not have political purpose because at the end of the day, you are removing privileges. Of course, there will be people complaining, but those are people who are losing privileges, so they will have to explain society why they are keeping those privileges, and that is quite uncomfortable.
Another thing I truly admire about him is his courage. In fact, thankfully, thank goodness he didn’t get assassinated or killed, but it was by a small chance occurrence that could have killed him just because he moved at the right moment. And yet, that didn’t intimidate him and he went on. And in fact, during his first campaign, and in this one as well, in the second one and third one, they criticized him, insulted him, offended him, said awful things about him, made up all sorts of horrible stories about him. In that respect, I can say I deeply relate because probably no one in our history has had such a negative campaign from all the media like they did to me. But let’s say they were quite similar.
This is why it’s so interesting, and I was so deeply moved when last night I also got to meet Sylvester Stallone, because Sylvester Stallone talks about, well, how important is that no matter how hard they hit you and keep on hitting you all the time, despite all that, you keep going on and on and on. What I’m trying to say is that so many of Sylvester Stallone’s approaches are truly inspirational, don’t you think? So imagine, I’m about to give the speech and I see Sylvester Stallone and Sylvester Stallone knows me. It was truly insane. I had to pinch myself. I mean this can’t be true.
And besides, well, the people were wonderful with me last night. They’ve been wonderful today. I’ve taken hundreds of selfies. I mean it’s truly been… I would say it’s been my break, let me say, after almost a year in office and having to face all sorts of media torture because the journalists who have vested interests and are corrupt are professional torturers. Yes, because they invade your personal life, your family, and your privacy. Let me tell you something to show you the kind of garbage the media in Argentina can do. They send three drones to spy on me at my presidential residence, to spy on me. Do you think that’s right?
So, imagine that I’ve been in office for nearly a year, a year as president, and since they can’t criticize my management except by lying and distorting the numbers, they meddle with all these things, things they have been doing all the time since the year 2021 when I officially entered politics. And I’ve seen what they’ve done to Trump. So, that also makes me relate a lot to him because he’s a true warrior. He’s a Viking, he’s a Viking, he’s literally a Viking. I mean he’s someone I admire for how he has kept fighting in the face of adversity, even against all odds. And still he managed to win. Amazing.
And that’s why I can relate that much. And I’ve also seen how he’s been unfairly criticized, like when he was accused of protectionism or when he wanted to discuss some matters within the context of public debate regarding the design of monetary policy as regards to Fed. And basically, they have accused him of things. I mean isn’t he entitled to give an opinion as a president? I mean any citizen could give their opinion, even more so a president.
Moreover, in our campaign, we were very, very clear on three main points. One, the economic pillar. We talked about cutting public spending and I would make my appearances with a chainsaw. We talked about economic freedom, deregulation, that is, and I talked about a competition of currencies, and people obviously were interested in the dollar. So, it was obvious that the economic policy was clear, all right? And not only was it clear, but we are also fulfilling it. That is the first point.
Second was our policy on security. The idea being to fight crime, I mean relentlessly as well as security, no mercy, right? And in fact, in Argentina, there are no more roadblocks, which they said were impossible to end. Not only that, we have strengthened the security forces and also our armed forces, and we are waging a tough battle against drug trafficking and narcoterrorism. Therefore, we are also strongly fulfilling that. Notice that these two points, which were the main concerns, they were the biggest concerns of Argentinians when we took office, are now in fifth and sixth place.
Today, the problem for Argentinians is corruption, whether there is unemployment, if there is poverty, but they don’t mention inflation and insecurity anymore. And besides, a third point that I made clear was that I would align with the United States and Israel internationally, and at my campaign rallies, there would be groups that would come along with flags of Israel. So, it’s clear that our international policy approach was always very clear and this is something I state during my speeches when I talk about the values of the west and the civilization of the west. In fact, yesterday, and even more so today during my speeches, I talked about how the different Greek groups or tribes go together to confront the Persians.
That is to say it seemed that from that time, 500 years before Christ until today, that struggle continues, right? But well, so of course we’re all in. We are betting on the United States becoming, once again a leader in the West. We needed someone to come back to make America great again. And as part of that process, being a commercial ally is also a great idea. So, we would really like to move forward and deepen our trade ties and our investment ties. And well, we would also like to be part of the NATO as well.
But I won’t avoid the discussion. Today, there is currency competition. If, for instance, today in Argentina, you want to make transactions in any currency, you can do it and it’s allowed. Today there is currency competition. The other thing we talk about is the concept of, let’s suppose we were discussing dollarization. We talk about endogenous dollarization. The first point is that you need to clean up the central bank. We had to deal with the issue of the CIRA. That is the central bank’s commercial debt, which was $50 billion. We still have to resolve the dividend problem of $10 billion. And in the meantime, we did a write-off and cleaned up the central bank’s balance sheet by $45 billion. So, you can’t just close the central bank if it is bankrupt, because you need to redeem the whole central bank debt, which is about the issuing of money and the interest-bearing liabilities. So once we finished with the interest-bearing liabilities, it’ll leave us with the monetary base.
Therefore, today we have a regime where the amount of money is fixed, the monetary base is not growing, and as demand for money increases, since people can use dollars, they don’t need to go and sell the dollars and make the peso appreciate, but they can do transactions in dollars. So as the economy grows, you will have a greater share of dollars relative to pesos. And at some point, the amount of pesos compared to the dollars will be so huge relatively that closing down the central bank will be done easily, which means this is working.
Of course, if you were to give me the money right now, I would go ahead and dollarize. I’d have no problem with that. For example, I did have a proposal for this, and this could have worked, because the largest creditor of the Argentine treasury is the central bank, but central bank bonds were trading at 20 cents. If I had sold those bonds at 20 cents and nowadays they are trading between 60 and 70. With the whole bunch of Neanderthals that are the opposition, who besides being ignorant in economics, also have bad intentions, I would be in jail today.
There is an article, which is quite old already now, titled Messi is Impossible. And it looks at all of the positions a soccer player plays in, that is all positions a soccer player can play in from midfield forward. And the most incredible thing is that Messi is the best in each of those positions. You can be the best in one or two positions. You see Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, was very good in two areas of the game. So much so that he was almost like Messi, but he didn’t take part in the rest. However, Messi is the best one in all respects. But at that time, of course. Nowadays, he’s an older player, right?
Some Puccini arias, for example, when you listen to them, when you listen to the famous aria from La Rondine, or the famous aria from Gianni Schicchi, you get the feeling that he was getting sat dictated by God. How can you put that into words? You can’t. There’s no way you do that. Those moments where we humans, that we have the privilege, I say it as human beings, because I’m speaking from that perspective. I say this only as an admirer.
Some human beings have the ability to vibrate so close to God that you can’t describe it, you can only enjoy it. This is why, in Judaism, they don’t use the name of God, of the Creator, because how could you put in words something like that? And I believe those are times when us humans connect closer to the Creator and create unique things, you cannot describe them. There are no words to describe that. The only thing you can do is enjoy it and be thankful that you can witness it.
And at the same time, he’s the one who suffers the most when a goal is scored, because he gets the direct impact. In fact, when the goalkeeper makes a mistake, it’s an own goal. Imagine a teammate scores a wonderful goal like the one Maradona did. It’s marvelous. And that’s just one goal. And imagine the goalkeeper picks up the ball, and then, if they bring it into the area wrongly, it’s like two goals, it’s a complete lack of proportion. So, therefore, and this, in my opinion, makes goalkeepers have a very strong temperament.
They’re used to being alone, and power is precisely that. Because when you make decisions, you are on your own. And not just that, but also when you have a responsibility, like that of a president, when you make a decision, it has an impact on millions of people. So just like goalkeepers, if you make a mistake and score an own goal, and in this context it’s negative consequences for millions of people. Therefore, that has been part of the university of life that has given me the tools to be president today. That is my training in economics, my training in liberalism, having been a goalkeeper, and also having had a very tough childhood.
Imagine if you had tried and spoken with, I don’t know, Michelangelo, you would have called him crazy too. Or if you had talked to, I don’t know, hundreds of people who have changed the world, surely they would have thought that Einstein was crazy and so on, the list would be infinite. So, what is the difference between a madman and a genius? Success.
This also implies that markets must be free. Free from state intervention, because when the state intervenes, it creates interference. And markets need to allow free entry and exit, what we call competition. However, it’s better to understand competition in the sense described by Israel Gerstner, one of the foremost figures of the Austrian school. Or in the neoclassical framework as William Baumel understood it, which was the concept of free entry and exit in so-called contestable markets. And also, let’s talk about what pertains to the division of labor and social co-operation.
The most wonderful thing about capitalism is that you can only be successful by serving others with better quality goods at a better price. If you are successful in the free market capitalism, you are a hero, you are a social benefactor, you are a prosperity machine. So the better you do, the better it is for society. This is very important. I remember when I had my first meeting with Elon Musk, and this made me admire him greatly, and this is something my sister commented on too.
Elon Musk told me something he does every day. He wakes up every morning thinking about what problem he could fix for humanity. That’s amazing. Of course, what is the counterpart? Being successful. Therefore, in that sense, and moreover in my view on how the system works, on how the market works, market failures do not exist. That is to say, that is a problem. A problem for neoclassical economies because of the mathematical tools they’ve used to develop economic analysis. But actually, it’s not a real issue in everyday life, it’s a problem in the minds of economists. In fact, my latest book called Capitalism, Socialism, and the Neoclassical Trap deals precisely with this issue.
Well, I have an economist as chairman of the President’s Advisory Council, Dr. Demian Reidel, who studied here at Harvard University and completed his PhD, was mentored by Kenneth Rogoff, the American economist. And Rogoff has said that Dr. Reidel was his best student. Nowadays, we’re actually working with Dr. Reidel specifically on all these issues that arise from the interventions proposed by the mainstream, such as the so-called correction of market failures. And a few days ago, he conducted a survey of search algorithms and policy recommendations, and that resulted in a map painted from red to blue.
And well, the redder it was, the more it was linked to socialism, there was an intermediate thing that was yellow, and blue was free market ideas. And one of the things he discovered, as part of that graph or chart, was that the largest number of policy recommendations, scandalously, are actually left-leaning. So that is the empirical evidence of what I pointed out in the book, Capitalism, Socialism, and the Neoclassical Trap.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Javier Milei. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from George Orwell. “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 3:27 – Economic freedom
- 8:52 – Anarcho-capitalism
- 18:45 – Presidency and reforms
- 38:05 – Poverty
- 44:37 – Corruption
- 53:14 – Freedom
- 1:07:26 – Elon Musk
- 1:12:54 – DOGE
- 1:14:56 – Donald Trump
- 1:20:56 – US and Argentina relations
- 1:28:05 – Messi vs Maradona
- 1:36:58 – God
- 1:39:05 – Elvis and Rolling Stones
- 1:42:45 – Free market
- 1:49:46 – Loyalty
- 1:52:23 – Advice for young people
- 1:53:49 – Hope for Argentina
Introduction
Javier Milei
So what is the difference between a madman and a genius? Success.
So what is the difference between a madman and a genius? Success.
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. He is a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and economist, who campaigned with a chainsaw that symbolized his promise to slash the corrupt bureaucracy of the state. He stepped into the presidency one year ago, with a country on the brink of hyperinflation, deepened debt and suffering from mass unemployment and poverty. He took this crisis head on, transforming one of Latin America’s largest economies through pure free market principles. In just a few months in office, he already achieved Argentina’s first fiscal surplus in 16 years, and not just avoided the hyperinflation but brought inflation down to its lowest in three years.
The following is a conversation with Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. He is a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and economist, who campaigned with a chainsaw that symbolized his promise to slash the corrupt bureaucracy of the state. He stepped into the presidency one year ago, with a country on the brink of hyperinflation, deepened debt and suffering from mass unemployment and poverty. He took this crisis head on, transforming one of Latin America’s largest economies through pure free market principles. In just a few months in office, he already achieved Argentina’s first fiscal surplus in 16 years, and not just avoided the hyperinflation but brought inflation down to its lowest in three years.
We discuss all of this in detail, both the successes and the challenges. His depth of knowledge of economic principles, metrics and data was truly impressive and refreshing to hear from a world leader. But even bigger than the economic transformation of Argentina, Javier represents the universal fight against government corruption and the fight for freedom, economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech. He has many critics, many of whom a part of the corrupt establishment he’s seeking to dismantle, but many are simply Argentinian citizens, scared of the pain his radical policies may bring, at least in the short term. But whether one disagrees with his methods or not, no one can deny that his presidency marks one of the most ambitious attempts at economic transformation in modern history, and that Javier Milei is truly a force of nature, combining the rigor of an economist with the passion of a revolutionary in the fight for freedom of a nation he loves. Argentina is one of my favorite countries, so I sincerely hope he succeeds.
This interview was conducted with the President speaking Spanish and me speaking English with an interpreter simultaneously translating. We make the episode available overdubbed and subtitled in both English and Spanish, thanks to our great friends at ElevenLabs. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can switch between English and Spanish by clicking the gear icon, selecting audio track, and then choosing the language. Same with the captions. If you’re watching on X, I’ll post both Spanish and English versions separately. If you’re watching on Spotify or listening elsewhere, I’ll probably only post the English version. This is a first time for me doing something like this in a foreign language. It was challenging, but illuminating. I hope to talking to many world leaders for two to three hours in this way, including Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, and Xi Jinping. I want to explore who they are, how they think, and how they hope to help their country and humanity flourish. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Javier Milei.
Economic freedom
Lex Fridman
When did you first understand the value of freedom, especially economic freedom?
When did you first understand the value of freedom, especially economic freedom?
Javier Milei
Well, actually, I came to understand the ideas of freedom as an economic growth specialist back in the years of 2013 to 2014. I could see that per capita GDP statistics over the last 2,000 years of the Christian era essentially looked like a hockey stick, indicating that per capita GDP remained almost constant until around 1800, after which it accelerated sharply. In the same context of that phenomenal increase in productivity and per capita GDP, the population had multiplied sevenfold over the preceding 200 years.
Well, actually, I came to understand the ideas of freedom as an economic growth specialist back in the years of 2013 to 2014. I could see that per capita GDP statistics over the last 2,000 years of the Christian era essentially looked like a hockey stick, indicating that per capita GDP remained almost constant until around 1800, after which it accelerated sharply. In the same context of that phenomenal increase in productivity and per capita GDP, the population had multiplied sevenfold over the preceding 200 years.
So basically, in economics, that means you get increasing returns, and the presence of increasing returns implies the existence of monopolies, concentrated structures, and according to traditional neoclassical economic theory, the presence of monopolies and concentrated structures is not a good thing. But at the same time, one could see that living standards had increased tremendously and that middle-income people ended up living far better than emperors did in the Roman era, and the population had gone from having 95% of people in extreme poverty to less than 10%. And in that context, the question was, how it could be that something that had lifted so many people out of poverty, that had improved human conditions so much, could be something bad for economic theory, meaning something was not right.
So in that context, I remember that one of the people who worked on my team suggested I read an article by Murray Newton Rothbard called Monopoly and Competition. I remember reading it like it was today, and after reading it carefully, I said, “Everything I’ve taught about market structure in the last 20 years in courses on microeconomics is wrong.” This caused a very strong internal commotion in me. So I called this person who used work with me, and they recommended a place to buy Austrian School of Economics books, and I remember I bought at least 20 or 30 books, which I went to pick up one Saturday afternoon. And when I visited the bookstore, I was fascinated by all the stuff they had there.
So I went back the next day and I started calculating how much money I needed to pay for my dog’s food. That’s my four-legged child, and how much I needed to spend on the taxi fare and food. And then with what I have left, I spent all of it on more books. And then I started to read very intensively, and I remember for example, the experience of reading Human Action by Mises, and this was a book that I didn’t know about. And I remember that on the following weekend, I started to read this book right from the first page, and I didn’t stop until I finished it, and that was a true revolution in my head. And having the chance to read Austrian authors like Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Hoppe and Jesus Huerta de Soto, or others like Juan Ramon Rallo, Philipp Bagus and Walter Block, for example.
That was very inspirational, and at one point I got the opportunity to read related to the works of Alberto Benegas Lynch [foreign language 00:07:38], and I also had the pleasure and honor to meet him. And today we are actually friends. So that paved the way for me to approach the ideas of freedom. And another book that was a very significant influence and impact on me was the Principles of Political Economics by Menger. It was truly eye-opening, or let’s say, for reading Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, these were things that really challenged all of my former thinking. I had a vague idea and poor about the Austrian School. The only thing I had read about the Austrian School until then had been Money and Time, a very good book by Garrison. But now that I understand a little bit more about Austrian economics, I know that it was rather poor. This doesn’t mean that the book isn’t good, but there were a whole lot of things to read that ended up being truly fascinating.
Anarcho-capitalism
Lex Fridman
So from that, what is now, today, and maybe you can talk about the evolution, is your philosophy, economics philosophy. You’ve described yourself as an anarcho-capitalist, market anarchists, libertarian. That’s the ideal, and then maybe in practice and reality, you’ve said that you’re more of a minarchist. So lay it all out. What’s your economics philosophy today?
So from that, what is now, today, and maybe you can talk about the evolution, is your philosophy, economics philosophy. You’ve described yourself as an anarcho-capitalist, market anarchists, libertarian. That’s the ideal, and then maybe in practice and reality, you’ve said that you’re more of a minarchist. So lay it all out. What’s your economics philosophy today?
Javier Milei
Strictly speaking, I am an anarcho-capitalist. I despise the state government. I despise violence. Let us suppose we take the definition of liberalism. I usually use the definition of liberalism given by Alberto Benegas Lynch [foreign language 00:09:37], which is very much in line with the definition of John Locke, which essentially matches the definition by Alberto Benegas Lynch, Jr., who said that liberalism is the unrestricted respect for the life project of others based on the principle of non-aggression and in defense of the right to life, liberty, and property. So I frame all of the discussions within those terms. And the fact is that when you get to that notion, I would dare say that you become an anarcho-capitalist de facto. And what that describes, it is an idea which represents my ideal world. I mean, that is the ideal world.
Strictly speaking, I am an anarcho-capitalist. I despise the state government. I despise violence. Let us suppose we take the definition of liberalism. I usually use the definition of liberalism given by Alberto Benegas Lynch [foreign language 00:09:37], which is very much in line with the definition of John Locke, which essentially matches the definition by Alberto Benegas Lynch, Jr., who said that liberalism is the unrestricted respect for the life project of others based on the principle of non-aggression and in defense of the right to life, liberty, and property. So I frame all of the discussions within those terms. And the fact is that when you get to that notion, I would dare say that you become an anarcho-capitalist de facto. And what that describes, it is an idea which represents my ideal world. I mean, that is the ideal world.
Now, real life poses a whole lot of restraints, and some of those you can lift, and those restrictions and others you can’t. So in real life, I am a minarchist. I advocate for minimizing state size. I try to remove as many regulations as possible. In fact, that is what I used to say during my campaign, and let’s say, that is what I’m now carrying out. We have just carried out the largest structural reform in Argentine history. It is a structural reform that is eight times larger than Menem’s, which had been the largest structural reform in history. And we did that with 15% of the representatives and 10% of the senators. Furthermore, we have a deregulation ministry where basically every day we eliminate between one and five regulations. On the other hand, we have 3,200 additional structural reforms pending, to the point that the day we finish all these reforms, we will be the freest country on the planet, with the consequences they have in terms of well-being. Think about this, when Ireland started market reforms just over 40 years ago, it was the poorest country in Europe. Today, its GDP per capita is 50% higher than that of the United States. So I have a current situation, and what I am constantly looking for, whether from my academic works and my outreach notes and books, is the world we have today, that every day we are closer, that every day we gain more freedom because there are some very interesting things here. First, I would like to quote Milton Friedman. There is a moment when they do an interview with Milton Friedman and they ask him about liberals, and then he says that there are three types of liberals. There are the classical liberals where, for example, Adam Smith or Milton Friedman himself could fit. Some say that Hayek could fit into that category. For me, Hayek is a minarchist.
Then you have the minarchists where you could clearly find in that place Mises, Hayek. One could find in philosophical terms Nozick and basically Ayn Rand. And at one point, Milton Friedman, based on his own son, he says, “But if you look closely, there are some who are anarchists.” Let’s say, probably from my point of view, the person who has been the greatest inspiration in my life is essentially Murray Newton Rothbard. So therefore, there are two dimensions. One is where I want to go, and the topic is where I stand. So the most important thing is to try each day to advance further toward that ideal of anarcho-capitalism. In that sense, sometimes we face strong and harsh criticism regarding that ideal vision. I think that’s the nirvana fallacy. If you compare yourself against paradise, everything is horrible and miserable, but you don’t live in paradise. You live on earth. Basically, what you need to understand is something called the state conditions. Let’s suppose that you don’t like rectangular tables. You prefer circular tables. Now the reality is, I have only a few hours until I go and catch my flight and the table is rectangular. You like a circular table, a round one, but there isn’t one. What you have is a rectangular table. So either we do the interview here or we just can’t do it. So what do you do? You adapt to the current conditions. This is what there is now. So then you have some restrictions that you can change and others that you cannot. The idea is to modify all the ones that can be changed in the short term, and start working on those that can be modified in the medium or long-term. For example, if you really like round tables, perhaps the next interview we may do at a round table. We’re going to try and solve it, but today it’s something that we couldn’t possibly solve. So that’s basically the idea, right?
Let’s say it’s about understanding that some restrictions you can change, others you can, and there are institutional restrictions too. There are many anarcho-capitalists who are dedicated to criticizing, and incredibly, they do so with more violence towards liberals, and many of them actually criticize me, which truly make no sense because it is precisely the nirvana fallacy but the reality is that… Look, in Argentina, for example, the most popular sport is soccer. When you go to watch an Argentina match, it is beautiful. The stands are full, and they’re all painted with sky blue and white colors. There is a lot of joy. People sing songs that are very fun, that are very distinctive. It’s very much part of Argentine folklore, so to speak. But you see that beautiful show is external. That is to say it does not determine the outcome. You place the ball in the middle of the field, and no matter how much people shout, the ball doesn’t move. The one who moves the ball and scores the goals is Messi.
So what do I mean? If you don’t get involved and don’t get into it, no, you don’t do anything. So what do I know is that there are many liberals, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who are really useless because all they do is criticize, let’s say, those of us who want to lead the world toward the ideas of freedom. And what they don’t realize is that power is a zero-sum game, and if we don’t have it, then the left will have it. Therefore, if you level your harshest criticism at those in your own ranks, you end up being subservient to socialism probably. And also, for instance, you have cases of strong hypocrisy, let’s say. I have seen cases of agorists. It’s the anarcho- capitalists who criticize Rothbard because he said that you have to get into politics, otherwise the socialists will advance. And it’s interesting because some of them, I have seen them criticizing, proposing agorism, and I remember one of them, one day the police showed up and honestly, he was peeing himself.
So it’s very easy to criticize, propose, and suggest, but if he was truly such an agonist, he should have been willing to endure going to jail. However, when it was time to face the consequences of the idea he was promoting, he froze, wet his pants and ended up, let’s say, accepting all the restrictions because clearly it was better to be out of jail than in jail. But in doing so, he sold out his ideas. So it seems to me that no, not taking into account the restrictions of the situation, only serves to be functional to socialism because all it does is strike against one’s own.
Presidency and reforms
Lex Fridman
So you became president 11 months ago. Can you, again, describe some of the actions you took? For example, you cut half the number of government ministries, layoffs, removed price controls. It’ll be interesting to lay out the first steps and what’s next.
So you became president 11 months ago. Can you, again, describe some of the actions you took? For example, you cut half the number of government ministries, layoffs, removed price controls. It’ll be interesting to lay out the first steps and what’s next.
Javier Milei
If you allow me, I will first give you a description of the situation we received, and based on that, I will tell you each of the things we did. When we first took office, basically what we found was that in the first week of December, inflation was rising at the rate of 1% per day, which means 3,700% annually. In the first half of December, it had accelerated to 7,500% annually. When you look at wholesale inflation in December of last year, it was 54%, which if annualized would equate to an inflation rate of 17,000% per year. And in addition, Argentina for the previous 10 years had not been growing, with a drop in GDP per capita of approximately 15%. And the reality was that nearly 50% were living in poverty.
If you allow me, I will first give you a description of the situation we received, and based on that, I will tell you each of the things we did. When we first took office, basically what we found was that in the first week of December, inflation was rising at the rate of 1% per day, which means 3,700% annually. In the first half of December, it had accelerated to 7,500% annually. When you look at wholesale inflation in December of last year, it was 54%, which if annualized would equate to an inflation rate of 17,000% per year. And in addition, Argentina for the previous 10 years had not been growing, with a drop in GDP per capita of approximately 15%. And the reality was that nearly 50% were living in poverty.
Now, later I will get deeper into that discussion, and the reality is that we had a fiscal deficit, which amounted to 15% of GDP. Five points were in the Treasury, 10 points were in the Central Bank, which was endogenous monetary issuance. And the reality is that we also had interest-bearing liabilities at the Central Bank, equivalent to four monetary bases maturing in one day, meaning we could have quintupled the amount of money in one day. We had peso-denominated maturities, amounting to the equivalent of $90 billion. The Central Bank had negative net currency foreign reserves, minus $12 billion. We had commercial debts in the Central Bank equivalent to $50 billion. There were company dividends held back amounting to $10 billion. Therefore, if we had instantly opened up… You see, I say we are liberal libertarians. We are not liberal fools. That’s what some anarchist liberals suggested, meaning that we basically open everything on the first day.
So in that context, of course, if we had done that, we would’ve encountered hyperinflation. Therefore, that would have led to the number of poor people being around 95% and probably, and by December, the Peronist party would have organized supermarket’s lootings, and would’ve done all sorts of things, and would’ve probably been ousted. And by the first part of the year, the Peronists would’ve gone back to office. So to us, it was crucial to end fiscal deficit.
One of the things we promised during the campaign had been to reduce the number of ministries, and indeed we reduced to less than half the number of ministries because we went to nine ministries, today we have eight. We have also laid off a large number of civil employees. Today, I can say that we’ve already dismissed about 50,000 of them, and we practically don’t renew any contracts unless the positions are absolutely necessary. At the same time, we have stopped public works and we have eliminated discretionary transfers to the provinces. We have also diluted public sector wages. Also, we have eliminated economic subsidies by restoring utility rates to the right levels. And in that, let’s say, in this context, we achieved fiscal balance as far as the Treasury is concerned. This is very important because in the last 123 years, Argentina had a deficit for 113 of them, and in the 10 years it did not have a deficit because it was not paying the debt. So that was absolutely false, and they told us it would be impossible to do that.
We had planned to do so within a year, and they said it wasn’t possible to adjust by more than one percentage point, and we achieved fiscal balance in the month of January. That is the first month of administration. At the same time, we also cut social plans linked to intermediation. This is very important because we knew we were going to make a very tough adjustment, and we knew that this was going to have a court in social terms, and we knew that we had to offer support during the first month, I mean, the first quarter and second quarter in office. One of the things we did was to eliminate what are known as poverty managers. That is intermediaries. Basically, people have a guard through which they receive assistance, but it happens that they had to provide a counter service, and that counter service was verified by a group called the piqueteros.
So in that context, when they were going to sign, the counter service took away half of the money. So by removing that payoff, they stopped extorting them, stopped stealing their money, and with the same amount of money, they received double the resources. And of course, we also provided an additional boost. So let’s say that this is related to the five adjustment points in the Treasury. Now, what happens, as we began to achieve fiscal balance and no longer needed to issue money to finance ourselves, and as we also met interest payments and some capital repayments, one of the things that happened is that the debt market began to be recreated. So we were able to take debt out of the Central Bank and transfer it to the Treasury where it should have always been, and that meant an adjustment of approximately 10% of GDP. Everyone said this would be impossible and couldn’t be fixed.
Essentially, what we did was implement a fiscal adjustment at the Central Bank, amounting to 10% of GDP. So if you ask me, it’s clear that we have not only made the biggest fiscal adjustment in the history of humanity, because we made a fiscal adjustment of 15 points of the GDP, but also most of that went back to the people as less seigniorage, as a lower inflation rate. It’s true that we temporarily raised the country tax, but we lowered it in September, and now in December, we’re going to eliminate it. Today, for example, we also announced that in December we are eliminating import taxes. In fact, in that regard, what you have is that we return to the people 13 and a half points of GDP because the real tax burden is the size of the state. So while back in December we were discussing hyperinflation, today we are discussing 30-year loans.
In other words, all those resources that the national government used to take are now back in the private sector. And that’s what has allowed it to be very dynamic. And this has two very strong impacts. The first one is that if you look at wholesale inflation, it went down from 54% to 2%. So it went down by 27 times. It was divided into 27. So we had inflation at the rate of 17,000% annually, and it’s now close to about 28% a year, but it’s not only that. You could consider consumer inflation, the latest consumer inflation rate was 2.7%. Now, it happens that we essentially, due to a matter that is related to the Central Bank’s balance sheets and also due to the debt stocks, we still have controls in place and we are eliminating restrictions, day by day. Now, the interesting thing is that we have a 2% monthly devaluation standard, and there’s international inflation of course, which means that you then have to subtract two and a half points from the inflation observed by the consumer.
This indicates that inflation in Argentina, the true inflation, not the induced one, but the actual monetary inflation is 0.2% per month. At 0.2% per month, this equates to 2.4% annually. What I’m saying is, the original discussion was about whether inflation could reach 17,000%. Now we are bringing inflation down to levels of 2.5% annually, and that is amazing. And we achieved this by considering a number of factors. The first one is that we did not experience a previous hyperinflation, which would’ve simplified the process of implementing a stabilization program. Typically, when hyperinflation occurs, monetary assets are diluted, leading to a natural restoration of demand. And besides, we did not resort to any expropriation. For example, before the Convertibility plan, which was the most successful program in Argentina’s history, Argentina experienced two instances of hyperinflation. During Alfonsin’s administration, inflation reached 5,000%, and under Menem was 1,200%.
Additionally, there was the BONEX plan, under which debt was exchanged on a compulsory basis. In other words, what we did instead was clean up the Central Bank balance sheet. So with that, we cleaned up the Central Bank’s balance sheet. We cleared a loss of $45 billion, all voluntarily. And the most amazing thing is that we did it in just six months, and at the same time, we have not controlled prices.
Javier Milei
And at the same time, we have not controlled prices nor have we fixed the exchange rate. And this is very important. All previous stabilization programs in an effort to show quick results used to do this. What they would do is, before announcing the plan, they would adjust the rates. And once the rates were adjusted, they would launch the plan. But in our case, we couldn’t afford that luxury, so we had to implement it on the go. And also over the past few months, that is to say companies brought in rates that covered only about 10%, whereas today they cover 80% so you get the picture. Just imagine the adjustment we are making. And in that sense, it is also incredible what we have achieved because if we were to work with the inflation we have in our country today, considering the exchange rate situation, the figures are even better than during the convertibility program, which was the most successful economic program in Argentina’s history.
And at the same time, we have not controlled prices nor have we fixed the exchange rate. And this is very important. All previous stabilization programs in an effort to show quick results used to do this. What they would do is, before announcing the plan, they would adjust the rates. And once the rates were adjusted, they would launch the plan. But in our case, we couldn’t afford that luxury, so we had to implement it on the go. And also over the past few months, that is to say companies brought in rates that covered only about 10%, whereas today they cover 80% so you get the picture. Just imagine the adjustment we are making. And in that sense, it is also incredible what we have achieved because if we were to work with the inflation we have in our country today, considering the exchange rate situation, the figures are even better than during the convertibility program, which was the most successful economic program in Argentina’s history.
And in fact, there is an article called Passing the Buck, which is by Gerardo della Paolera, Bózzoli, and Irigoin that demonstrates that Menem’s first government was the best government in history. And basically, it argues two things in the success of the stabilization of the convertibility program. So if you take a closer look, when you examine it carefully, when you account for all these factors, our disinflation process is actually much more genuine. And not only that, it’s also much deeper. We are restored freedoms to Argentinians while simultaneously implementing a structural reform eight times larger. And we accomplished this with only with 15% of the representatives, 10% of the senators, and within the first six months of government. In other words, our deregulation agenda continues daily and we still have 3,200 structural reforms pending. This will ultimately make Argentina the freest country in the world.
Moreover, to have a sense of magnitude, the reforms that we already have made with the executive order 7023, and with the basis law, we have actually jumped 90 places in terms of economic freedom. What this means is that today, Argentina has institutions similar to those of Germany, France, Italy, and we obviously want this to continue. And let’s say we are going to surpass no doubt the levels of economic freedom that Ireland reached in its best moment. And not only that, we’re going to exceed the levels of economic freedom of Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland. We are undoubtedly going to be the freest country in the world.
And this means that thanks to what we’ve done today, we are on a path that allows us to multiply our per capita GDP by 2.5 times when you apply the relevant correction. And this of course is something very interesting because it implies a huge increase in well-being. And furthermore, today the Argentinian economy is already strongly and amazingly recovering. And we can say analysts’ hypotheses were suggesting that next year we will be growing between five and 6%. Today, JP Morgan has now corrected or let’s say revised the projections upwards. And besides, when we normalized the price situation, the true poverty rate came up and it was 57% in January. Today it is at 46%, meaning we lowered poverty by 11 percentage points. Let’s say, I mean, it seems truly like a miracle. And not only that, but actually not a single job was lost in the process.
When it comes to all of this inflation reduction process, people said that our economy and economic activity would collapse. And actually when you look at the de-seasonalized data, you see that in August there was a recovery that took us back to December levels, to December levels. That means that in the year, we made the largest fiscal adjustment in the history of humanity. We will end up with less inflation, fewer poor people, better real wages, and additionally, a GDP higher than what we started with.
And if you look at it in dollars, I can assure you that the numbers are phenomenal because basically today the dollar is below the levels we had when we took office. So the reality is that in all of this, when you take my popularity levels and the government’s acceptance levels, today they are above the moment. We assumed office if you know that the moment of maximum popularity is when you take office. Therefore this means that far from resting on our laurels with this, we’re going for more reforms. We’re going to deepen the reforms. And I tell you, we won’t stop until Argentina is the freest country in the world.
Furthermore, a recent work by an Argentinian economist named Juan Pablo Nicolini was presented at the central bank’s monetary meetings and he works at the Federal Reserve. And it’s interesting because he shows that only on the basis of what we have done in fiscal matters it ensures that in the span of 10 years we can double the GDP per capita, meaning that Argentina could grow at rates of 7% annually, which is very much, very much, and that has strong consequences in terms of improving quality of life, reducing poverty, reducing indigence. Therefore, if during the worst moment our image didn’t suffer and we stayed strong in our ideas, now that everything is working much better, why should we change?
On the contrary, we are ready to redouble the bet, to redouble our efforts because we’ve done things that no one else has done. I will give you an example. There’s something that seems trivial, but there’s what’s called the single paper ballot. Argentina used to vote with huge ballots, which were above all very costly. And that reform, it never… Let’s say it wasn’t done because it always harmed the ruling party. So everyone talked about going to the single paper ballot, but no one did it when they were in power. They didn’t want to implement it because they preferred to commit fraud or use some kind of trickery to avoid applying that rule that makes the election more competitive. Well, what’s interesting, we sent that law and it was approved.
What’s more? Now we are finishing with the open, simultaneous and mandatory primaries because it was a mechanism by which politics was also stealing. We are eliminating the financing of political parties. If you look, we have reduced the fiscal pressure by 15 points to the Argentinians. We are restoring freedoms with a deep set of structural and regulatory reforms that is I think that any sensible liberal could perceive. We are already delivering a wonderful government. In fact, it’s the best government in the history of Argentina. If the best had been that of Menem, we’ve already outpaced him.
Poverty
Lex Fridman
Maybe you can explain to me the metrics of poverty and unemployment. As you said, unemployment went down, real unemployment went down, real poverty went down. But even that aside, what have been the most painful impacts of these radical reforms and how many of them are required in the short term to have a big positive impact in the long term?
Maybe you can explain to me the metrics of poverty and unemployment. As you said, unemployment went down, real unemployment went down, real poverty went down. But even that aside, what have been the most painful impacts of these radical reforms and how many of them are required in the short term to have a big positive impact in the long term?
Javier Milei
Let’s take it step by step, all right? That is in fact, we started to do things right, therefore we did not create poverty. The poverty was an inherited poverty. The point is that what we did was to reveal it.
Let’s take it step by step, all right? That is in fact, we started to do things right, therefore we did not create poverty. The poverty was an inherited poverty. The point is that what we did was to reveal it.
I’ll try to explain it with an example that I think clarifies what’s happening in Argentina. Argentina was an economy that had a total price controls. It had a fiscal deficit which was financed through money printing. Just for you to give you an idea, in the last year, Argentina financed 13 points of the gross domestic product with money printing. In other words, a real disaster. So that situation provoked this artificially demand and puts pressure on prices. The issue is that price controls are applied additionally over the prices that they enter the price index with which inflation was… I’m not saying they were lying about it. It was distorted.
And since Argentina measures poverty and indigence by income line, then what happens? That distorted the true levels of poverty, of course. But that’s not the only effect. I mean, let’s say the real poverty levels were higher, quite a bit higher than those shown by the previous government, which showed them at 41% and also did so on a six-monthly basis. So if you, let’s say, have a growing trend, they are actually leaving you a bomb and you don’t see it because let’s say basically the indicator was measured with a delayed form. But not only that, imagine that you are also given… You are in the middle of an island alone and they give you $1 million. What can you do with that? You cannot do anything because you cannot buy anything. It is the same as if someone tells you that the price of glasses is $10, but when you want to buy it, it’s not available.
Actually, there’s a joke told by an Argentinian professor named Juan Carlos de Pablo, who says that a man goes to a bazaar and asks for a vase. Then he says to him, “Well, I want that vase. How much would you charge me?” Then he says, “$5,000.”
“Oh, okay, $5,000. But why $5,000 if across the street it’s 1,000?” He says, “Well, go buy it across the street for 1,000.”
“Ah, there’s none for 1,000.”
“Well then, here when there’s more, it’ll also cost 1,000.” In other words, prices at which they are available. So what happens? When you are faced with that situation, the supermarket shelves were empty. So what was the point of having a price at which you couldn’t buy anything? You left those prices. The shelves were empty. So the statistics showed that you were much better, but the reality is you couldn’t buy anything. You couldn’t make it happen.
So if you left the situation as it was, people were going to starve because they couldn’t buy anything. Yes, they had a certain amount of money that could supposedly buy certain goods, but those goods were not available. What is the only thing you can do to save people? Make the prices transparent and allow products to reappear. Well, when you make the prices transparent, you also make transparent the cost of the basic food basket and the total basic basket, meaning the poverty line… Sorry, the indigence line and the poverty line respectively. And when you do that, clearly you will see a jump in poverty. That brought poverty up to 57%.
Now, Argentina found its activity floor in the month of April. From that moment, Argentina began to invent a cyclical recovery. Real wages have been growing every month above inflation. Therefore, nominal wages are beating inflation. In fact, we are already at level similar to those we had in November. The same goes for pensions.
Moreover, also, let’s say there is a rebound in activity due to the recovery of the stock cycle. Therefore, this is also contributing to more and better-paid jobs. In fact, this is so strong and evident that the wages growing the most are in the informal sector. This means that poverty and extreme poverty are decreasing much faster than we imagined. But not only that, by eliminating inflation, you remove the inflationary tax, but the real burden is the fiscal deficit, which was 15 points of the GDP.
Okay, we temporarily raised the country tax, now we lower it, but we return that to the Argentinians. We gave back 15 points of the GDP. Not only that, but also when you eliminate inflation, you remove the distortion of relative prices. Therefore, the allocation of resources is much better. Not only that, but also with the strong fiscal adjustment we made, we have reduced the country risk from 3000 basis points to 770. Today, Fitch raised Argentina’s rating to CCC. So what do I mean? That translates into a lower country risk and interest rates. And that generates an increase in investment, also generates an increase in consumption.
In other words, the Argentinian economy is currently in an absolutely flourishing moment. And how is that sustained in the long term? With structural reforms which we implement daily, deregulating the economy and introducing new laws that free Argentinians from the many oppressive measures that have burdened it over the past 100 years.
Corruption
Lex Fridman
You’ve spoken about the caste, the corrupt political establishment. So there’s a lot of powerful people and groups that are against your ideas. What does it take to fight when so much power is against you?
You’ve spoken about the caste, the corrupt political establishment. So there’s a lot of powerful people and groups that are against your ideas. What does it take to fight when so much power is against you?
Javier Milei
Look, we have fought against corruption like never before in Argentina. In fact, when we took office for example, there were about 900 roadblocks per year. That is people who made a habit of blocking the streets. They prevented free movement. And besides, they were given social plans and they were given a lot of money. If you remember when I started by explaining the cuts, one of the things I said was that we removed the middlemen of poverty. In other words, the managers of poverty, those who lived by stealing from the poor. Well, that is a huge source of corruption.
Look, we have fought against corruption like never before in Argentina. In fact, when we took office for example, there were about 900 roadblocks per year. That is people who made a habit of blocking the streets. They prevented free movement. And besides, they were given social plans and they were given a lot of money. If you remember when I started by explaining the cuts, one of the things I said was that we removed the middlemen of poverty. In other words, the managers of poverty, those who lived by stealing from the poor. Well, that is a huge source of corruption.
In fact, when we did that, two days later, one of the most renowned and influential Piqueteros called for a demonstration. He claimed that 50,000 people would attend because he was actually expecting 100,000. So he wanted to showcase it as a success. And so then let’s say with the decision made in human capital to cut their funding, the anti-blockade protocol was also enacted, where those who blocked the streets wouldn’t receive welfare benefits.
And those who broke the law would go to jail. All of that. And also we were informing this through transportation channels. Well, in that march, they expected to have 100,000 people there. And actually it turned out to be 3,000 people. And from that point on, they didn’t block the streets anymore.
We also evidently put an end to that corruption. One of the things that also generated a lot of corruption was public works. Another thing that led to significant acts of corruption were the discretionary transfers to provinces. In general, these transfers were made to the provinces with accounting as obscure as possible. So the national government, in collusion with the governors let’s say, the money ended up being used for other things. Not only that, with which we have already done many things.
Furthermore, the ministry of human capital is always filing complaints in court. Not in the media, in court. Acts of corruption like never before in Argentine history. Not only that, but also in terms of condemning corruption. That is, we have done, for example, two days ago, it was condemned, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner got a sentence for corruption, I mean, due to corruption. And the next day, that is yesterday, we took away their privileged pensions.
At the same time, we are, for example, we have discovered that Kirchnerism used disability pensions for acts of corruption. For example, there is a city that has more disability pensions than people. In other words, to give you an idea of the things being done in Argentina.
And also in Argentina, we have restored freedom to the judiciary. We do not pressure the judiciary. And this is so true that during my government, not only was Cristina Fernández de Kirchner convicted, but also the two terrorist attacks carried out by Iran were condemned. So if there is a government that is truly fighting against corruption, it is us. Not only that, but also with each deregulation, it is a privilege that we take away either from a politician, a prebendary company, or a power group. That is also very powerful. No one in Argentina has ever fought against corruption the way we have. In fact, I will move on to something that is deeply corrupt and one of my great battles, the corruption of the media and social media. That is to say, I removed the official advertising. That’s why you will see that even though we generate wonderful news, every week in large quantity, the media speak terribly. In other words, they demand to have a monopoly on the microphone. That is they are entitled to insult, hurt, offend, and they don’t want anyone to bother them, and they expect me not to even respond. That’s why a large part of journalism in Argentina hates the X Network. And that’s why the liberal libertarians love the X network, because we can all say what we want.
However, let’s say these supposed journalists who defend freedom of expression, actually what they want is to censor the ideas they don’t like. And of course, because they are leftists, because they are wokes, because they can’t stand the competition, because if they had to fight face-to-face, hand to hand, on a level playing field, when it comes to ideas, they would lose because they were a failure in the economic, social, and cultural aspects. And also, we must not forget that those murderers called socialists killed 150 million people. So they clearly cannot fight on equal terms. Therefore, they demand that social networks have censorship and that the truth cannot be told to them. Because when you tell a socialist the truth, they cry, claiming it’s hate speech. No, it’s not hate speech. It’s that you are useless people who have ruined the planet. They have made the planet much worse.
And fortunately today, thanks to social media, especially due to the enormous and brave work of Elon Musk and the role of Twitter, today X, allows information to flow, which makes it possible, let’s say, to expose politicians and also expose the media. And that’s why journalists in Argentina are so violent. Why? Because before they could, for instance, a journalist went and for example, he would go to a person and he would throw a folder at them and say, “If you don’t give me X amount of money, I am going to publish all of this and tarnish your reputation.” And I know for a fact a case of a journalist who carried out this extortion twice to a businessman, that businessman told him that he wasn’t going to pay. And evidently the journalist did it. Obviously they went to court, there was a trial, and that journalist lost both times. But that process is very slow. And in the meantime, they smeared.
So since the justice system takes a long time, so what is the problem? The problem is that in the meantime, your life got dirtied. So why can’t journalists do all this? Well, that’s why they dislike X. They dislike social media. They dislike the new form of communication because it took away their monopoly over the microphone. And by taking away the monopoly over the microphone, it removed the economic benefits of extortion.
So clearly, that’s another battle I’m fighting. You read a newspaper in Argentina, and 85% of what you read is a lie. That is to say the fundamental characteristic of most journalists, not all, but the vast majority of journalists in Argentina with some honorable exceptions, is that they are liars, slanderers, and defamers. And if the monopoly they demand were still in place that they want to reign again, I have no doubt that they will demand money in exchange for silence, because that’s what they are. They are extortionists, they are thieves, they are corrupt. And then of course, obviously when you take away a privilege from a sector, they get upset. Well, welcome to freedom.
Freedom
Lex Fridman
So you’re not only fighting for economic freedom, you’re fighting for freedom of speech?
So you’re not only fighting for economic freedom, you’re fighting for freedom of speech?
Javier Milei
Exactly. I fight for freedom in all aspects of life. That is to say, one of the things that seems most interesting to me is that when the Berlin Wall fell, it’s true that officially it fell in the year 1989. But the reality is that the wall or socialism fell in the year 1961 when they had to build the wall. I mean, they built it because people were leaving Communist Germany for capitalist Germany. They realized that those on the western side were much better off. And of course, to prevent people from leaving. They put what a wonderful system, right? So I mean, they had to trap people. They couldn’t let them go. I mean, these are such wonderful ideas that they had to apply them at gunpoint.
Exactly. I fight for freedom in all aspects of life. That is to say, one of the things that seems most interesting to me is that when the Berlin Wall fell, it’s true that officially it fell in the year 1989. But the reality is that the wall or socialism fell in the year 1961 when they had to build the wall. I mean, they built it because people were leaving Communist Germany for capitalist Germany. They realized that those on the western side were much better off. And of course, to prevent people from leaving. They put what a wonderful system, right? So I mean, they had to trap people. They couldn’t let them go. I mean, these are such wonderful ideas that they had to apply them at gunpoint.
Well, it’s no coincidence that they killed 150 million human beings. So what happened then? The official fall of the wall in the year 1989 made it clear that socialism had failed. In that context, the socialists, they moved the discussion of class struggle in economics and took it to other areas. So for example, socialism or what is of the 21st century or cultural Marxism or post-Marxism, whatever definition you want, is to take class struggle to different aspects of life.
For example, one of the aspects of life where you, let’s say, have this is in gender ideology. I mean, it’s incredible because the first ones to defend equality before the law were the liberals. The first to defend women’s rights were the liberals. Jeremy Bentham in the year 1750 was the first to demand equality before the law for women. I mean the cause of equality, equality before the law for women and equality of rights. The first ones who advocated for this were the liberals, did you know? However, what does the left do? They just go on to radicalize it. And then it moves to what is called female chauvinism.
Female chauvinism is, let’s say, the fight against males. And then, I mean, how do they do it? They do it by assigning rights. But when you assign a right, someone has to pay for it. And that has consequences. And in general, let’s say this always happens, the consequences are that the results are worse than what you had before. I mean, in any state intervention, the subsequent result is often worse than what you originally had. So that’s one thing. And not only that, but the other side of this is the environmental agenda, which sets man against nature involving all aspects of environmentalism and everything related to climate change.
In other words, they can’t stand any serious discussion. Therefore, all environmental policies are nothing more than an excuse to collect taxes so that a group of parasitic bureaucrats can live at the expense of others and finance sinister ideas, where the most sinister idea of all is that there is no room for everyone on planet earth. That is an idea that failed with Malthus at the beginning of the 19th century, a murderous idea that was also applied by the Egyptians against the Jews. And this is famously recorded in the Book of Shemot or Exodus.
Or for example, another thing is Black Lives matter, that is Black people against white people or indigenous people against the established communities, or I mean everything related to LGBT agendas. Definitely, these are some of the ways in which socialism extended the class struggle into other aspects of society, creating divisions and fostering deceit with the sole purpose of absorbing taxes.
I mean, what was the ministry of women in Argentina doing? Did it manage to reduce a single femicide? No, none at all. The number of femicides exploded just the same. In fact, the most feminist president in Argentine history, Mr. Alberto Fernández, used to beat his wife. That is such a strange feminist. I mean, well… So within the ranks of feminists, let’s say, you will essentially find the largest number of rapists and women beaters. And it’s quite interesting what they do. Their hypocrisy is truly striking.
It’s not just about that though. I mean, the battle is on three fronts. You have the economic front, which is free enterprise capitalism. Then we have the political level. Currently, the system that the world has designed is a Republican liberal democracy with checks and balances. And I mean, at the cultural battle level, notice that socialism has been very successful in the cultural battle. It has been very successful politically because it was able to translate that political battle in winning many elections. But why is it falling apart? Why? Because it produces misery and because the economic system is a disaster, so people eventually realize that it is making things worse for them.
Liberal, libertarians are very good when it comes to economics. Yes. And those good economic results can actually lead to the generation of solid political processes. But what happened? The liberals neglected the cultural battle. Much of the blame was placed on Fukuyama when he said, “This is the end of history.” No, it was not the end of history because the following year, in 1990, the socialists gathered at the São Paulo Forum, and based on the ideas of Gramsci, designed a strategy to infiltrate the media, culture, and education, which ended up changing the entire discourse. And they established that what they said was politically correct and that any-
Javier Milei
… was politically correct and that any idea outside of it was to be considered reactionary and had to be censored or even persecuted, and they claimed to be the ones defending freedom even though they were the ones persecuting people.
… was politically correct and that any idea outside of it was to be considered reactionary and had to be censored or even persecuted, and they claimed to be the ones defending freedom even though they were the ones persecuting people.
It’s the same with journalists who get upset with Twitter. They say they defend freedom but can’t stand it when those who think differently speak. Is that freedom? Yes, for them, but not for those who think differently. That’s not freedom. That’s fascism. Then, what do we say? Then we must fight on the economic front. And I believe we are implementing an extremely successful economic program that is being recognized worldwide. In fact, the other night, the president-elect, Donald Trump, indeed gave recognition for the achievements we are having in Argentina and the speed at which we have done it.
At the same time, you have to fight the political battle because, well, soccer matches are not won by shouting from the stands, they are won by playing on the field. But that alone is not enough because you have to, let’s say you need to convey to society the values of capitalism, the free market, what liberalism is, the value of freedom, right? And when you succeed in that, then we will indeed be able to advance steadily. If you don’t fight the cultural battle, what happened in Chile will happen to you. They had economic success. It was, let’s say sustained over time, but at some point it collapsed. Why did it collapse? Because they hadn’t fought the cultural battle.
Then socialism, little by little, took control of institutions in education and the media. So, they took over the media and culture and on that basis, they attacked and broke up the system. And then they found themselves with increasing doses of socialism and the only thing socialism generates is poverty. Therefore, what you must keep in mind is that you have to fight the battles on all fronts. And if you don’t keep that in mind, I can tell you are headed towards collapse.
Lex Fridman
Like you said, in this fight against corruption, you are challenging some very powerful people, a powerful establishment. Are you ever afraid for your life? Potential assassinations?
Like you said, in this fight against corruption, you are challenging some very powerful people, a powerful establishment. Are you ever afraid for your life? Potential assassinations?
Javier Milei
No. Tell me what good is it to live life, I mean, in slavery? Look, there is a song by a Spanish singer called Nino Bravo. Just to be clear, he has already left this earth, so we can say he has passed onto the beyond. The song is called Libre, and the song, it tells the story of Peter Fetcher, an 18-year-old boy who when the separation was made, and I mean the construction of the Berlin Wall begins. His family ends up on the western side and he accidentally ends up on the eastern side. And for a whole year, he plans his escape to the western side. And in that context, when he tries to escape, he gets murdered.
No. Tell me what good is it to live life, I mean, in slavery? Look, there is a song by a Spanish singer called Nino Bravo. Just to be clear, he has already left this earth, so we can say he has passed onto the beyond. The song is called Libre, and the song, it tells the story of Peter Fetcher, an 18-year-old boy who when the separation was made, and I mean the construction of the Berlin Wall begins. His family ends up on the western side and he accidentally ends up on the eastern side. And for a whole year, he plans his escape to the western side. And in that context, when he tries to escape, he gets murdered.
So really, what is the point of life if it’s not in freedom, right? I mean what is the point of living without fighting for your values? If I am willing to give my life for my values, then what is the point of living without freedom? Look, can I tell you something interesting that happened to me here in the United States? Let’s say back in the year 1998, I came to the United States to take a series of courses to improve my English, which I never use in formal terms because as president, as you can imagine, if I make a mistake, I can create a serious situation. Fortunately, I have an interpreter who is a superstar, and if I make a mistake even in Spanish, he corrects me in the version of the other language.
And so back then, in that year, I went to San Francisco and I visited Alcatraz. You are young, but I mean the visit was an audio tour. You got a Walkman and you would choose the different tracks and listen to the story. The most interesting thing is that the Alcatraz story ended in the recreation yard where the basketball court, exercise area, and all recreational facilities were located. So anyone would have thought that this was the best part of Alcatraz. And yet, what they said in the guide was that that was the hardest part for the inmates. Why? Because I mean that recreation area in particular is built in front of the San Francisco Bay. So, the inmates could all see how San Francisco continued to build up and evolve and develop every day while they were locked up in there. They couldn’t take part in that. They were confined in that prison. And that made them fully aware of the value of freedom.
So, in my experience for me, the fight for freedom is relentless, okay? I mean my greatest hero in all of human history is Moses. The feat of Moses is like one person alone with his brother, Aaron, both confronting the combined forces of the United States, China, and Russia together. And it was Moses who said to Ramesses, “Let my people go.” Well, Ramesses resisted and the forces of heaven ran him over. But what I mean is I don’t see any other possible way to live other than with freedom. And I would always fight for full freedom and I would be at the forefront of this cause. I mean it’s a cause that I’m going to die with my boots on. I mean I’m not going to make do with living any other way other than with freedom. I will fight everything. I’m going to fight as much as it takes. At least that’s the way I feel. So, what good is it to be alive if you’re confined? What good is it to be alive if you’re not free? It’s no good. What good was it for Peter Fetcher to be alive in communist Germany? Well, at least he had a moment of happiness while he tried to escape.
Elon Musk
Lex Fridman
Another guy who fights for freedom, freedom of speech in this case, is your new friend, Elon Musk. What do you admire and what have you learned from your interactions with Elon?
Another guy who fights for freedom, freedom of speech in this case, is your new friend, Elon Musk. What do you admire and what have you learned from your interactions with Elon?
Javier Milei
I have a huge admiration for Elon Musk. He is an absolutely unconventional person. He’s a great fighter for the ideas of freedom. What he has done on Twitter, now known as X, and how he is helping the world nowadays to wake up once and for all and become aware of the socialist virus, the woke virus, that in itself makes him a hero in the history of humanity. But it’s not just that.
I have a huge admiration for Elon Musk. He is an absolutely unconventional person. He’s a great fighter for the ideas of freedom. What he has done on Twitter, now known as X, and how he is helping the world nowadays to wake up once and for all and become aware of the socialist virus, the woke virus, that in itself makes him a hero in the history of humanity. But it’s not just that.
One of the things that happened to me is that when I went to first talk to him, I thought I was going to meet a successful businessman and that I would have a typical successful businessman conversation who understands business and that some of his businesses, some of his business is slightly more exotic, but that’s the kind of talk you would expect to have. And business people are truly admirable, right? Because they are true benefactors of society, but they’re usually very much focused on their own business. And one of the things that really, really shocked me when I met Elon Musk, we had scheduled a meeting for no more than 50 minutes, the first time we were in the meeting for a little over 45 minutes because he was about to miss his flight. So obviously, if someone as important as him doesn’t fly as planned, it has to be rescheduled and he loses a lot of hours. Imagine, every minute is very valuable.
And one of the things that happened was that basically he brought up the topic of demography and we started discussing demographics and growth. I never imagined that I would end up discussing demographics and growth with him. And another very fun thing was that something funny he said to me was that since we shared our vision regarding demographic issues and the need to populate the planet, he asked me, “Now, what about you? When are you going to move in that direction?” I said, “Oh, look, I have five children.” And he said, “Well, the four-legged ones don’t count.”
That was the first meeting I had with Elon Musk. The second meeting was when, here at the universities, we started seeing anti-Semitic demonstrations where basically Palestinian flags were displayed and Jews were harassed and persecuted. And at that moment when we had that second meeting, he showed himself to be very deeply involved with that and brought up the issue of the cultural battle. So, I mean it’s not quite conventional, even in the political field.
During our last talk, which lasted for about two and a half hours, one of the things we talked about was freedom and what was at stake for the United States in this election. Therefore, he is a person, honestly. I can say he’s well above average. I mean a person of unconventional intelligence and also he’s very charming. So, I mean, again, I have a great admiration for him and I really interact very closely with him. He’s very interested in what our Ministry of Deregulation is doing, which seeks to remove regulations. But at the same time, he works with another person who is also interested in the chainsaw approach, and so I’m very pleased because they are going to try and replicate the model we are implementing in Argentina.
And also, Donald Trump himself is very enthusiastic about this and anything in the way of reducing regulations and cutting public spending and taking government out of the equation means more freedom for the people. So, I’m very pleased with what’s going on. And with Trump’s victory, because the United States will be better off, Argentina is going to be better too and the whole world is going to be better off. Today, the world is a much better place than it was just a few days ago.
DOGE
Lex Fridman
Like you said, Elon and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading the DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency. So from your experience this year as president of Argentina and every chainsaw economic policies that you’ve implemented, what advice would you give to Elon and Vivek about how to do it in the United States?
Like you said, Elon and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading the DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency. So from your experience this year as president of Argentina and every chainsaw economic policies that you’ve implemented, what advice would you give to Elon and Vivek about how to do it in the United States?
Javier Milei
Just cut to the chase. Cut to the chase. Simple as that. I’ll tell you a story and you’re going to love it. Currently in Argentina, due to the political balance we’ve achieved, we have had certain powers delegated from Congress to the executive branch, and therefore we can resolve it by decree that the deregulation minister, Federico Sturzenegger, in his ministry shows a counter that displays in front of everyone there. He displays the number of days, all right, during which the delegated powers will continue to be valid. Therefore, he has a whole deregulation division, also a public spending cut division, and government structure reduction division, and he also has an elite corps that’s cleaning up all of the laws that hinder the economic system and progress. And every day, he removes between one and five economic restrictions.
Just cut to the chase. Cut to the chase. Simple as that. I’ll tell you a story and you’re going to love it. Currently in Argentina, due to the political balance we’ve achieved, we have had certain powers delegated from Congress to the executive branch, and therefore we can resolve it by decree that the deregulation minister, Federico Sturzenegger, in his ministry shows a counter that displays in front of everyone there. He displays the number of days, all right, during which the delegated powers will continue to be valid. Therefore, he has a whole deregulation division, also a public spending cut division, and government structure reduction division, and he also has an elite corps that’s cleaning up all of the laws that hinder the economic system and progress. And every day, he removes between one and five economic restrictions.
So, my advice would be for them to go all the way, to push it to the very limit, and do not give up. Do not let down their guard. Furthermore, that agenda does not have political purpose because at the end of the day, you are removing privileges. Of course, there will be people complaining, but those are people who are losing privileges, so they will have to explain society why they are keeping those privileges, and that is quite uncomfortable.
Donald Trump
Lex Fridman
You’ve spoken with Donald Trump, allegedly he called you his favorite president. What did you discuss? And maybe, again, what do you admire about President Trump and what do you learn from him?
You’ve spoken with Donald Trump, allegedly he called you his favorite president. What did you discuss? And maybe, again, what do you admire about President Trump and what do you learn from him?
Javier Milei
There are several things that I admire about President Trump. The first is that he probably… I think he’s provided ample proof of this in his first presidency. He understands the nature of the cultural battle. He has openly confronted socialism, his speeches openly target socialism, he perfectly understands the woke virus, and that is of great value because it means understanding what it’s all about.
There are several things that I admire about President Trump. The first is that he probably… I think he’s provided ample proof of this in his first presidency. He understands the nature of the cultural battle. He has openly confronted socialism, his speeches openly target socialism, he perfectly understands the woke virus, and that is of great value because it means understanding what it’s all about.
Another thing I truly admire about him is his courage. In fact, thankfully, thank goodness he didn’t get assassinated or killed, but it was by a small chance occurrence that could have killed him just because he moved at the right moment. And yet, that didn’t intimidate him and he went on. And in fact, during his first campaign, and in this one as well, in the second one and third one, they criticized him, insulted him, offended him, said awful things about him, made up all sorts of horrible stories about him. In that respect, I can say I deeply relate because probably no one in our history has had such a negative campaign from all the media like they did to me. But let’s say they were quite similar.
This is why it’s so interesting, and I was so deeply moved when last night I also got to meet Sylvester Stallone, because Sylvester Stallone talks about, well, how important is that no matter how hard they hit you and keep on hitting you all the time, despite all that, you keep going on and on and on. What I’m trying to say is that so many of Sylvester Stallone’s approaches are truly inspirational, don’t you think? So imagine, I’m about to give the speech and I see Sylvester Stallone and Sylvester Stallone knows me. It was truly insane. I had to pinch myself. I mean this can’t be true.
And besides, well, the people were wonderful with me last night. They’ve been wonderful today. I’ve taken hundreds of selfies. I mean it’s truly been… I would say it’s been my break, let me say, after almost a year in office and having to face all sorts of media torture because the journalists who have vested interests and are corrupt are professional torturers. Yes, because they invade your personal life, your family, and your privacy. Let me tell you something to show you the kind of garbage the media in Argentina can do. They send three drones to spy on me at my presidential residence, to spy on me. Do you think that’s right?
Lex Fridman
No.
No.
Javier Milei
Exactly. But that kind of thing happens in Argentina, not to mention the many lies and horrible things they say. I, for instance, remember that time when my father was hospitalized. My father is a man of a really strong character who has had two heart surgeries, all right? And one day, a journalist was saying all sorts of lies about my father. My father was hospitalized and he almost died of a heart attack. So that kind of thing is what journalism and the press do in Argentina. So they start to attack your private life, your mother, your father, your sister. Even my dogs that I absolutely adore, they are the most wonderful beings in the universe, they even target my four-legged children.
Exactly. But that kind of thing happens in Argentina, not to mention the many lies and horrible things they say. I, for instance, remember that time when my father was hospitalized. My father is a man of a really strong character who has had two heart surgeries, all right? And one day, a journalist was saying all sorts of lies about my father. My father was hospitalized and he almost died of a heart attack. So that kind of thing is what journalism and the press do in Argentina. So they start to attack your private life, your mother, your father, your sister. Even my dogs that I absolutely adore, they are the most wonderful beings in the universe, they even target my four-legged children.
So, imagine that I’ve been in office for nearly a year, a year as president, and since they can’t criticize my management except by lying and distorting the numbers, they meddle with all these things, things they have been doing all the time since the year 2021 when I officially entered politics. And I’ve seen what they’ve done to Trump. So, that also makes me relate a lot to him because he’s a true warrior. He’s a Viking, he’s a Viking, he’s literally a Viking. I mean he’s someone I admire for how he has kept fighting in the face of adversity, even against all odds. And still he managed to win. Amazing.
And that’s why I can relate that much. And I’ve also seen how he’s been unfairly criticized, like when he was accused of protectionism or when he wanted to discuss some matters within the context of public debate regarding the design of monetary policy as regards to Fed. And basically, they have accused him of things. I mean isn’t he entitled to give an opinion as a president? I mean any citizen could give their opinion, even more so a president.
US and Argentina relations
Lex Fridman
Why is it important to you that Argentina has a close relationship with the United States?
Why is it important to you that Argentina has a close relationship with the United States?
Javier Milei
Well, to us, that is truly important, okay? Because we’ve decided to be geopolitical allies of the United States ever since our campaign, we have decided that our allies will be the United States and Israel because they basically represent the ideas of the western world, they represent the free world. That is to say, what we would call today, let’s say, a liberal democracy by confronting the autocrats. And in that sense, that is the geopolitical alignment.
Well, to us, that is truly important, okay? Because we’ve decided to be geopolitical allies of the United States ever since our campaign, we have decided that our allies will be the United States and Israel because they basically represent the ideas of the western world, they represent the free world. That is to say, what we would call today, let’s say, a liberal democracy by confronting the autocrats. And in that sense, that is the geopolitical alignment.
Moreover, in our campaign, we were very, very clear on three main points. One, the economic pillar. We talked about cutting public spending and I would make my appearances with a chainsaw. We talked about economic freedom, deregulation, that is, and I talked about a competition of currencies, and people obviously were interested in the dollar. So, it was obvious that the economic policy was clear, all right? And not only was it clear, but we are also fulfilling it. That is the first point.
Second was our policy on security. The idea being to fight crime, I mean relentlessly as well as security, no mercy, right? And in fact, in Argentina, there are no more roadblocks, which they said were impossible to end. Not only that, we have strengthened the security forces and also our armed forces, and we are waging a tough battle against drug trafficking and narcoterrorism. Therefore, we are also strongly fulfilling that. Notice that these two points, which were the main concerns, they were the biggest concerns of Argentinians when we took office, are now in fifth and sixth place.
Today, the problem for Argentinians is corruption, whether there is unemployment, if there is poverty, but they don’t mention inflation and insecurity anymore. And besides, a third point that I made clear was that I would align with the United States and Israel internationally, and at my campaign rallies, there would be groups that would come along with flags of Israel. So, it’s clear that our international policy approach was always very clear and this is something I state during my speeches when I talk about the values of the west and the civilization of the west. In fact, yesterday, and even more so today during my speeches, I talked about how the different Greek groups or tribes go together to confront the Persians.
That is to say it seemed that from that time, 500 years before Christ until today, that struggle continues, right? But well, so of course we’re all in. We are betting on the United States becoming, once again a leader in the West. We needed someone to come back to make America great again. And as part of that process, being a commercial ally is also a great idea. So, we would really like to move forward and deepen our trade ties and our investment ties. And well, we would also like to be part of the NATO as well.
Lex Fridman
Do you think it’s still possible… One of the radical ideas you had as you were running for president was to dollarize the Argentine economy. Do you think that’s still a good idea? Are you still thinking about that?
Do you think it’s still possible… One of the radical ideas you had as you were running for president was to dollarize the Argentine economy. Do you think that’s still a good idea? Are you still thinking about that?
Javier Milei
Let’s see, let’s break it down. Let’s say, if you review all my statements, I talk about currency competition. I’m not strictly talking about dollarization, I’m talking about currency competition and eliminating the central bank. If people later decide to embrace the dollar, that is their choice. Ultimately, in the model I propose, what happens is the formation of a currency basket tailored to the needs of individuals.
Let’s see, let’s break it down. Let’s say, if you review all my statements, I talk about currency competition. I’m not strictly talking about dollarization, I’m talking about currency competition and eliminating the central bank. If people later decide to embrace the dollar, that is their choice. Ultimately, in the model I propose, what happens is the formation of a currency basket tailored to the needs of individuals.
But I won’t avoid the discussion. Today, there is currency competition. If, for instance, today in Argentina, you want to make transactions in any currency, you can do it and it’s allowed. Today there is currency competition. The other thing we talk about is the concept of, let’s suppose we were discussing dollarization. We talk about endogenous dollarization. The first point is that you need to clean up the central bank. We had to deal with the issue of the CIRA. That is the central bank’s commercial debt, which was $50 billion. We still have to resolve the dividend problem of $10 billion. And in the meantime, we did a write-off and cleaned up the central bank’s balance sheet by $45 billion. So, you can’t just close the central bank if it is bankrupt, because you need to redeem the whole central bank debt, which is about the issuing of money and the interest-bearing liabilities. So once we finished with the interest-bearing liabilities, it’ll leave us with the monetary base.
Therefore, today we have a regime where the amount of money is fixed, the monetary base is not growing, and as demand for money increases, since people can use dollars, they don’t need to go and sell the dollars and make the peso appreciate, but they can do transactions in dollars. So as the economy grows, you will have a greater share of dollars relative to pesos. And at some point, the amount of pesos compared to the dollars will be so huge relatively that closing down the central bank will be done easily, which means this is working.
Of course, if you were to give me the money right now, I would go ahead and dollarize. I’d have no problem with that. For example, I did have a proposal for this, and this could have worked, because the largest creditor of the Argentine treasury is the central bank, but central bank bonds were trading at 20 cents. If I had sold those bonds at 20 cents and nowadays they are trading between 60 and 70. With the whole bunch of Neanderthals that are the opposition, who besides being ignorant in economics, also have bad intentions, I would be in jail today.
Messi vs Maradona
Lex Fridman
Let me ask you a very important, difficult question. I’m a huge fan, have been my whole life, of Diego Maradona and Messi. So who, to you, is the greatest football player of all time?
Let me ask you a very important, difficult question. I’m a huge fan, have been my whole life, of Diego Maradona and Messi. So who, to you, is the greatest football player of all time?
Javier Milei
The way I see it, I have seen Maradona play, all right? I saw Maradona play in the past, I used to watch him, and I saw him during his last year at Argentinos Juniors before Boca Juniors in the year 1980, and I saw him in ’81. Playing for Boca, I saw him play in the youth selection in Japan in 1979. I truly have immensely enjoyed the talent of Maradona, but without a doubt, the best soccer player of all time, not just from Argentina, of all time, even better than Pelé, is Messi, of course.
The way I see it, I have seen Maradona play, all right? I saw Maradona play in the past, I used to watch him, and I saw him during his last year at Argentinos Juniors before Boca Juniors in the year 1980, and I saw him in ’81. Playing for Boca, I saw him play in the youth selection in Japan in 1979. I truly have immensely enjoyed the talent of Maradona, but without a doubt, the best soccer player of all time, not just from Argentina, of all time, even better than Pelé, is Messi, of course.
There is an article, which is quite old already now, titled Messi is Impossible. And it looks at all of the positions a soccer player plays in, that is all positions a soccer player can play in from midfield forward. And the most incredible thing is that Messi is the best in each of those positions. You can be the best in one or two positions. You see Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, was very good in two areas of the game. So much so that he was almost like Messi, but he didn’t take part in the rest. However, Messi is the best one in all respects. But at that time, of course. Nowadays, he’s an older player, right?
Javier Milei
He is an older player, right? And I’m not sure whether he can still keep that performance on all fronts, but honestly, I have never in my life seen a player like Messi. I have never seen no one like him, for real. Considering the goal average in the days of Pelé compared to Messi’s golden era and his career now, the number of equivalent goals is much greater than that of Pelé, therefore, without a doubt, Messi is the greatest soccer player of all time. No one compares to him.
He is an older player, right? And I’m not sure whether he can still keep that performance on all fronts, but honestly, I have never in my life seen a player like Messi. I have never seen no one like him, for real. Considering the goal average in the days of Pelé compared to Messi’s golden era and his career now, the number of equivalent goals is much greater than that of Pelé, therefore, without a doubt, Messi is the greatest soccer player of all time. No one compares to him.
Lex Fridman
But it’s not just the numbers or the World Cup win, it’s the moments of genius on the field. Messi is unlike any other in that way.
But it’s not just the numbers or the World Cup win, it’s the moments of genius on the field. Messi is unlike any other in that way.
Javier Milei
Messi does things that seem technically impossible, they seem physically impossible. The moves he makes don’t respect human logic. It’s like watching Usain Bolt run. It doesn’t feel possible. He moves in a way that doesn’t respect human logic, am I right?
Messi does things that seem technically impossible, they seem physically impossible. The moves he makes don’t respect human logic. It’s like watching Usain Bolt run. It doesn’t feel possible. He moves in a way that doesn’t respect human logic, am I right?
Lex Fridman
Did you watch the 1986 World Cup with Maradona, with the hand of God, with the game against England? What was that like?
Did you watch the 1986 World Cup with Maradona, with the hand of God, with the game against England? What was that like?
Javier Milei
Oh, yes, I do remember that very well. We watched it in the home of my godfather and saw how he did his gambit and dodged the England team. It was absolutely indescribable. There’s no way to put it into words. It’s as if I asked you to describe for me the love you have for your partner. You can’t do that, right? It’s something wonderful. You can’t describe it, you cannot put it into words. There are things where words just seem to fail, am I right? I really think that there are times when humans, or some humans, not all of them, actually. Some humans have the privilege of being able to vibrate closer to God.
Oh, yes, I do remember that very well. We watched it in the home of my godfather and saw how he did his gambit and dodged the England team. It was absolutely indescribable. There’s no way to put it into words. It’s as if I asked you to describe for me the love you have for your partner. You can’t do that, right? It’s something wonderful. You can’t describe it, you cannot put it into words. There are things where words just seem to fail, am I right? I really think that there are times when humans, or some humans, not all of them, actually. Some humans have the privilege of being able to vibrate closer to God.
Some Puccini arias, for example, when you listen to them, when you listen to the famous aria from La Rondine, or the famous aria from Gianni Schicchi, you get the feeling that he was getting sat dictated by God. How can you put that into words? You can’t. There’s no way you do that. Those moments where we humans, that we have the privilege, I say it as human beings, because I’m speaking from that perspective. I say this only as an admirer.
Some human beings have the ability to vibrate so close to God that you can’t describe it, you can only enjoy it. This is why, in Judaism, they don’t use the name of God, of the Creator, because how could you put in words something like that? And I believe those are times when us humans connect closer to the Creator and create unique things, you cannot describe them. There are no words to describe that. The only thing you can do is enjoy it and be thankful that you can witness it.
Lex Fridman
You were a great footballer yourself in your youth. You were a goalkeeper. Many people would say that’s the toughest and the most important position in football. Maybe you could speak about that experience and, in general, what’s harder; being a goalkeeper or president?
You were a great footballer yourself in your youth. You were a goalkeeper. Many people would say that’s the toughest and the most important position in football. Maybe you could speak about that experience and, in general, what’s harder; being a goalkeeper or president?
Javier Milei
Lovely question. Well, indeed, I used to be a goalkeeper, but I’m not so sure about whether I was any good. But the experience of having been a goalkeeper is very valuable. First, the goalkeeper is the only player that can use their hands, in a certain sector of the pitch in the area. The other thing is that he’s also the only player who dresses differently. Moreover, their training is a solitary one. And the most important, it is the very climax, the goal, right? When the goal is called by their team, everyone is celebrating on the other side and the goalkeeper is on his own.
Lovely question. Well, indeed, I used to be a goalkeeper, but I’m not so sure about whether I was any good. But the experience of having been a goalkeeper is very valuable. First, the goalkeeper is the only player that can use their hands, in a certain sector of the pitch in the area. The other thing is that he’s also the only player who dresses differently. Moreover, their training is a solitary one. And the most important, it is the very climax, the goal, right? When the goal is called by their team, everyone is celebrating on the other side and the goalkeeper is on his own.
And at the same time, he’s the one who suffers the most when a goal is scored, because he gets the direct impact. In fact, when the goalkeeper makes a mistake, it’s an own goal. Imagine a teammate scores a wonderful goal like the one Maradona did. It’s marvelous. And that’s just one goal. And imagine the goalkeeper picks up the ball, and then, if they bring it into the area wrongly, it’s like two goals, it’s a complete lack of proportion. So, therefore, and this, in my opinion, makes goalkeepers have a very strong temperament.
They’re used to being alone, and power is precisely that. Because when you make decisions, you are on your own. And not just that, but also when you have a responsibility, like that of a president, when you make a decision, it has an impact on millions of people. So just like goalkeepers, if you make a mistake and score an own goal, and in this context it’s negative consequences for millions of people. Therefore, that has been part of the university of life that has given me the tools to be president today. That is my training in economics, my training in liberalism, having been a goalkeeper, and also having had a very tough childhood.
God
Lex Fridman
How hard is it? What’s been the personal toll of carrying the hope of a nation on your shoulders?
How hard is it? What’s been the personal toll of carrying the hope of a nation on your shoulders?
Javier Milei
Well, being defamed, insulted, and attacked every single day, but again, there’s no point in life if it’s not with freedom. So, like Sylvester Stallone once said, “The secret to life is to carry on in spite of the blows you get, the punches you take.” And fortunately, we have been able to carry on in spite of the blows, both coming at us from in front and from behind our backs, because it have been more honest if we had been attacked directly. But well, in Argentina politics and the mass media, they do love to attack behind your back.
Well, being defamed, insulted, and attacked every single day, but again, there’s no point in life if it’s not with freedom. So, like Sylvester Stallone once said, “The secret to life is to carry on in spite of the blows you get, the punches you take.” And fortunately, we have been able to carry on in spite of the blows, both coming at us from in front and from behind our backs, because it have been more honest if we had been attacked directly. But well, in Argentina politics and the mass media, they do love to attack behind your back.
Lex Fridman
What role has God played in your life? And who is God?
What role has God played in your life? And who is God?
Javier Milei
Well, faith, I’d say, has been a very fundamental element. And especially in recent times, during which I’ve become actively involved, particularly in the teachings of Judaism and in the study of the Torah. This has given me, let’s say, a huge background to face the many adversities which I’ve encountered and had to overcome in the last few years. And as to who God is, He’s the Creator, the Maker. I call Him, The One.
Well, faith, I’d say, has been a very fundamental element. And especially in recent times, during which I’ve become actively involved, particularly in the teachings of Judaism and in the study of the Torah. This has given me, let’s say, a huge background to face the many adversities which I’ve encountered and had to overcome in the last few years. And as to who God is, He’s the Creator, the Maker. I call Him, The One.
Lex Fridman
What is a better guide for humanity; the invisible hand of the market or the hand of God?
What is a better guide for humanity; the invisible hand of the market or the hand of God?
Javier Milei
They’re perfectly in sync.
They’re perfectly in sync.
Elvis and Rolling Stones
Lex Fridman
Well enough. Again, going back to your youth, you were a lead singer in a rock band. Who’s the greatest rock star of all time?
Well enough. Again, going back to your youth, you were a lead singer in a rock band. Who’s the greatest rock star of all time?
Javier Milei
Okay. Well, the way I see it, the most amazing rock singer in history of mankind was definitely Elvis Presley. And my favorite band is the Rolling Stones. So I also greatly admire Mick Jagger, and I still have this dream of getting to meet him in person.
Okay. Well, the way I see it, the most amazing rock singer in history of mankind was definitely Elvis Presley. And my favorite band is the Rolling Stones. So I also greatly admire Mick Jagger, and I still have this dream of getting to meet him in person.
Lex Fridman
How fun would it be to play together with the Stones?
How fun would it be to play together with the Stones?
Javier Milei
That would be a big, big dream. Don’t get my hopes up, because I set goals and then I go and achieve them.
That would be a big, big dream. Don’t get my hopes up, because I set goals and then I go and achieve them.
Lex Fridman
Well, I’m close friends with a band that opens for the Stones, so I would love to see this happen.
Well, I’m close friends with a band that opens for the Stones, so I would love to see this happen.
Javier Milei
Oh, well, that would be great. Or we could also watch the whole concert from the stage. I can’t keep ruining the Rolling Stones’ music. I already had a tribute band and did quite a lot of damage to their music.
Oh, well, that would be great. Or we could also watch the whole concert from the stage. I can’t keep ruining the Rolling Stones’ music. I already had a tribute band and did quite a lot of damage to their music.
Lex Fridman
How much does your rock star roots define your approach to politics, to life? Do you see yourself as a showman in part?
How much does your rock star roots define your approach to politics, to life? Do you see yourself as a showman in part?
Javier Milei
Of course. Absolutely. My idea is that, when you attend one of our events, it feels like going to a Rolling Stones concert. In fact, in one of my most recent performances at Luna Park, I even had the pleasure of singing in front of 10,000 people. It’s on YouTube. No, sorry, not on YouTube, it’s on my Instagram feed. At that event, I sang a song called Panic Show, and the song starts by saying, “Hi, everybody. I am the lion.”
Of course. Absolutely. My idea is that, when you attend one of our events, it feels like going to a Rolling Stones concert. In fact, in one of my most recent performances at Luna Park, I even had the pleasure of singing in front of 10,000 people. It’s on YouTube. No, sorry, not on YouTube, it’s on my Instagram feed. At that event, I sang a song called Panic Show, and the song starts by saying, “Hi, everybody. I am the lion.”
Lex Fridman
Your intensity and passion have earned you the nickname El Loco, the madman. Do you think some madness is necessary to challenge the powerful establishment?
Your intensity and passion have earned you the nickname El Loco, the madman. Do you think some madness is necessary to challenge the powerful establishment?
Javier Milei
Well, maybe it’s a matter of perspective. It could be the other way around, that everyone else is crazy by living in a way contrary to the ideas of freedom. And so, maybe the sane person who wants to fix that is then considered a madman. Anyway, the nickname doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I even enjoy it, because I’ve been called like that since I was 10 years old, so it’s not something that particularly bothers me, because it’s a nickname that… Well, it has been used for many years, but actually, if I present to you the case of San Martin, when he said he was going to cross the Andes to liberate not only Argentina, not only our country, but also Chile and Peru, and people called him crazy.
Well, maybe it’s a matter of perspective. It could be the other way around, that everyone else is crazy by living in a way contrary to the ideas of freedom. And so, maybe the sane person who wants to fix that is then considered a madman. Anyway, the nickname doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I even enjoy it, because I’ve been called like that since I was 10 years old, so it’s not something that particularly bothers me, because it’s a nickname that… Well, it has been used for many years, but actually, if I present to you the case of San Martin, when he said he was going to cross the Andes to liberate not only Argentina, not only our country, but also Chile and Peru, and people called him crazy.
Imagine if you had tried and spoken with, I don’t know, Michelangelo, you would have called him crazy too. Or if you had talked to, I don’t know, hundreds of people who have changed the world, surely they would have thought that Einstein was crazy and so on, the list would be infinite. So, what is the difference between a madman and a genius? Success.
Free market
Lex Fridman
Let me ask you about the market. It’s so interesting, from your view of the world, how powerful the market is at figuring out what’s best for society. Why do you think the market works so well as a guide for humanity?
Let me ask you about the market. It’s so interesting, from your view of the world, how powerful the market is at figuring out what’s best for society. Why do you think the market works so well as a guide for humanity?
Javier Milei
One must first understand what the market is. Simply put, the market is a process of voluntary exchange, where individuals cooperate through the transfer of property rights, in which private property is upheld. This is the system that drives the allocation of resources. In essence, socialism, and this is what Mises condemns in his book, Socialism, shows that without private property, prices cease to exist and therefore resources are diverted. Why don’t you think it’s the same to make a road of asphalt or gold? Why not make it of gold? Because you have an understanding of economic calculation, you have an idea of prices in your mind. So, in this context, if there is no private property, there are no prices, and as a result, the free market capitalism is the best mechanism ever developed by humankind for resource allocation.
One must first understand what the market is. Simply put, the market is a process of voluntary exchange, where individuals cooperate through the transfer of property rights, in which private property is upheld. This is the system that drives the allocation of resources. In essence, socialism, and this is what Mises condemns in his book, Socialism, shows that without private property, prices cease to exist and therefore resources are diverted. Why don’t you think it’s the same to make a road of asphalt or gold? Why not make it of gold? Because you have an understanding of economic calculation, you have an idea of prices in your mind. So, in this context, if there is no private property, there are no prices, and as a result, the free market capitalism is the best mechanism ever developed by humankind for resource allocation.
This also implies that markets must be free. Free from state intervention, because when the state intervenes, it creates interference. And markets need to allow free entry and exit, what we call competition. However, it’s better to understand competition in the sense described by Israel Gerstner, one of the foremost figures of the Austrian school. Or in the neoclassical framework as William Baumel understood it, which was the concept of free entry and exit in so-called contestable markets. And also, let’s talk about what pertains to the division of labor and social co-operation.
The most wonderful thing about capitalism is that you can only be successful by serving others with better quality goods at a better price. If you are successful in the free market capitalism, you are a hero, you are a social benefactor, you are a prosperity machine. So the better you do, the better it is for society. This is very important. I remember when I had my first meeting with Elon Musk, and this made me admire him greatly, and this is something my sister commented on too.
Elon Musk told me something he does every day. He wakes up every morning thinking about what problem he could fix for humanity. That’s amazing. Of course, what is the counterpart? Being successful. Therefore, in that sense, and moreover in my view on how the system works, on how the market works, market failures do not exist. That is to say, that is a problem. A problem for neoclassical economies because of the mathematical tools they’ve used to develop economic analysis. But actually, it’s not a real issue in everyday life, it’s a problem in the minds of economists. In fact, my latest book called Capitalism, Socialism, and the Neoclassical Trap deals precisely with this issue.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, you’ve outlined these ideas in Capitalism, Socialism, and the Neoclassical Trap. So the trap is that there’s no such thing as a middle ground. It’s either capitalism, socialism, and every middle ground ends up in a state of socialism.
Yeah, you’ve outlined these ideas in Capitalism, Socialism, and the Neoclassical Trap. So the trap is that there’s no such thing as a middle ground. It’s either capitalism, socialism, and every middle ground ends up in a state of socialism.
Javier Milei
Well, actually, that is what Mises said. He said that there are only two systems; free enterprise capitalism and socialism. And he also pointed out, and this is proven in Hayek’s book, the Road to Serfdom, that any middle ground solution is unstable in terms of capitalism, meaning it tends towards socialism. So when you implement an intervention, it causes government failure, which then triggers further intervention, setting up a trap that results in more and more intervention. And in this context, the neoclassicals, with their market failure theory, are in fact dealing with problems that are fundamentally mathematical. Rather than making the world a better place, they have, if you will, been instrumental in increasing the levels of intervention. Let me tell you something.
Well, actually, that is what Mises said. He said that there are only two systems; free enterprise capitalism and socialism. And he also pointed out, and this is proven in Hayek’s book, the Road to Serfdom, that any middle ground solution is unstable in terms of capitalism, meaning it tends towards socialism. So when you implement an intervention, it causes government failure, which then triggers further intervention, setting up a trap that results in more and more intervention. And in this context, the neoclassicals, with their market failure theory, are in fact dealing with problems that are fundamentally mathematical. Rather than making the world a better place, they have, if you will, been instrumental in increasing the levels of intervention. Let me tell you something.
Well, I have an economist as chairman of the President’s Advisory Council, Dr. Demian Reidel, who studied here at Harvard University and completed his PhD, was mentored by Kenneth Rogoff, the American economist. And Rogoff has said that Dr. Reidel was his best student. Nowadays, we’re actually working with Dr. Reidel specifically on all these issues that arise from the interventions proposed by the mainstream, such as the so-called correction of market failures. And a few days ago, he conducted a survey of search algorithms and policy recommendations, and that resulted in a map painted from red to blue.
And well, the redder it was, the more it was linked to socialism, there was an intermediate thing that was yellow, and blue was free market ideas. And one of the things he discovered, as part of that graph or chart, was that the largest number of policy recommendations, scandalously, are actually left-leaning. So that is the empirical evidence of what I pointed out in the book, Capitalism, Socialism, and the Neoclassical Trap.
Loyalty
Lex Fridman
You mentioned your four-legged children. What have you learned about life from your dogs?
You mentioned your four-legged children. What have you learned about life from your dogs?
Javier Milei
Well, from my four-legged children, I have learned unconditional love. In fact, well, my name in Hebrew means loyal friend, faithful friend, and on the Chinese horoscope, I am dog. And if there’s one thing that defines me is loyalty, being decent. And those virtues, you can find them in those wonderful beings that dogs are, who love unconditionally. In fact, they are superior beings, spiritually speaking in my case, because I don’t forget or forgive those who have harmed me. That is to say, all those who have insulted, defamed me, and criticized me, I remember each one of them, but I don’t have the greatness needed to forgive them.
Well, from my four-legged children, I have learned unconditional love. In fact, well, my name in Hebrew means loyal friend, faithful friend, and on the Chinese horoscope, I am dog. And if there’s one thing that defines me is loyalty, being decent. And those virtues, you can find them in those wonderful beings that dogs are, who love unconditionally. In fact, they are superior beings, spiritually speaking in my case, because I don’t forget or forgive those who have harmed me. That is to say, all those who have insulted, defamed me, and criticized me, I remember each one of them, but I don’t have the greatness needed to forgive them.
Lex Fridman
On the topic of loyalty in politics, I’m sure there’s been a lot of people, some people, who have betrayed you. Does that hurt your heart?
On the topic of loyalty in politics, I’m sure there’s been a lot of people, some people, who have betrayed you. Does that hurt your heart?
Javier Milei
It depends, because you sometimes think that you can expect some people to be loyal, and if they betray you, of course that hurts. But some people, you actually don’t expect anything from them, so if there’s betrayal, you won’t be annoyed or feel bad, because you owe it to someone who didn’t share your values. But politics does have that. Sometimes, many of the people you may come across don’t have the values you advocate for, but it’s cost benefit. You need to let the ship sail on. Or would you rather let it sink? That’s not my case. I fight until the end. There are traitors, but that’s part of politics. And that’s not my line, but of course, they do exist.
It depends, because you sometimes think that you can expect some people to be loyal, and if they betray you, of course that hurts. But some people, you actually don’t expect anything from them, so if there’s betrayal, you won’t be annoyed or feel bad, because you owe it to someone who didn’t share your values. But politics does have that. Sometimes, many of the people you may come across don’t have the values you advocate for, but it’s cost benefit. You need to let the ship sail on. Or would you rather let it sink? That’s not my case. I fight until the end. There are traitors, but that’s part of politics. And that’s not my line, but of course, they do exist.
Advice for young people
Lex Fridman
There are a lot of people who admire your revolutionary spirit. What advice would you give them, maybe young people, on how to live a life like yours and have an impact on the world, like you have begun to do?
There are a lot of people who admire your revolutionary spirit. What advice would you give them, maybe young people, on how to live a life like yours and have an impact on the world, like you have begun to do?
Javier Milei
I didn’t do this thinking about having an impact on the world. I have defined what makes me happy and I live according to that. I live consistently by that. And most importantly, I would say never give up. Moreover, and above all, never be half-hearted. I would rather cry because I failed, rather than not crying because I never tried. I’m a perfectionist, so when I do err, of course, I have a bad time. But still, I prefer to go and get things done. If it goes wrong, it’s part of life, but I will never have to regret not having done what I thought needed to be done at that moment.
I didn’t do this thinking about having an impact on the world. I have defined what makes me happy and I live according to that. I live consistently by that. And most importantly, I would say never give up. Moreover, and above all, never be half-hearted. I would rather cry because I failed, rather than not crying because I never tried. I’m a perfectionist, so when I do err, of course, I have a bad time. But still, I prefer to go and get things done. If it goes wrong, it’s part of life, but I will never have to regret not having done what I thought needed to be done at that moment.
Hope for Argentina
Lex Fridman
What gives you hope about the future of Argentina and the future of humanity?
What gives you hope about the future of Argentina and the future of humanity?
Javier Milei
Well, the fact that, thanks to social media and to the whole tech revolution going on, every day, more and more people are becoming aware of how important freedom is to live. To live in peace and prosperity. And I believe, even though bureaucrats and the elites fight untiringly to enslave us, a wave of freedom has been unleashed, which, if we do wage the fight, we’ll have a much better world.
Well, the fact that, thanks to social media and to the whole tech revolution going on, every day, more and more people are becoming aware of how important freedom is to live. To live in peace and prosperity. And I believe, even though bureaucrats and the elites fight untiringly to enslave us, a wave of freedom has been unleashed, which, if we do wage the fight, we’ll have a much better world.
Lex Fridman
What does your famous words of viva la libertad… How did that come about and what does it mean to you?
What does your famous words of viva la libertad… How did that come about and what does it mean to you?
Javier Milei
Long live freedom, dammit. That first started while I was giving my book presentations. At the end of my presentation, I would say, “Viva la libertad, carajo,” and that really stuck with me since then. Without thinking about it, throughout my life, it was going to continue being present. In fact, today, my presentations, all of my speeches end with, “May God bless the Argentinians. May the forces of heaven be with us. And viva la libertad, carajo.” The first phrase reflects my faith in God, fervently, and that I’m deeply thankful to the Creator for the wonderful things He has bestowed upon me daily. The second one has to do with a quote from the book of Maccabees 3:19, which says that “victory in battle doesn’t depend on the size of the army, but on the forces of heaven.” This has to do with the victory of the Jewish people, the Maccabeans, against the Greeks and how they recovered the temple. And the last one, well, is my war cry.
Long live freedom, dammit. That first started while I was giving my book presentations. At the end of my presentation, I would say, “Viva la libertad, carajo,” and that really stuck with me since then. Without thinking about it, throughout my life, it was going to continue being present. In fact, today, my presentations, all of my speeches end with, “May God bless the Argentinians. May the forces of heaven be with us. And viva la libertad, carajo.” The first phrase reflects my faith in God, fervently, and that I’m deeply thankful to the Creator for the wonderful things He has bestowed upon me daily. The second one has to do with a quote from the book of Maccabees 3:19, which says that “victory in battle doesn’t depend on the size of the army, but on the forces of heaven.” This has to do with the victory of the Jewish people, the Maccabeans, against the Greeks and how they recovered the temple. And the last one, well, is my war cry.
Lex Fridman
Well, there’s no better way to end it. Thank you for being a warrior for freedom, and thank you for talking today.
Well, there’s no better way to end it. Thank you for being a warrior for freedom, and thank you for talking today.
Javier Milei
Thank you very much indeed for your interview. And thank you for being so well-educated, because very often interviewers are not like that. And you did have windows to play foul and you didn’t, and I recognize that and I thank you for that.
Thank you very much indeed for your interview. And thank you for being so well-educated, because very often interviewers are not like that. And you did have windows to play foul and you didn’t, and I recognize that and I thank you for that.
Lex Fridman
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Javier Milei. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from George Orwell. “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #452
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #452 with Dario Amodei.
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I think there are still worlds where it doesn’t happen in 100 years. The number of those worlds is rapidly decreasing. We are rapidly running out of truly convincing blockers, truly compelling reasons why this will not happen in the next few years. The scale-up is very quick. We do this today, we make a model, and then we deploy thousands, maybe tens of thousands of instances of it. I think by the time, certainly within two to three years, whether we have these super powerful AIs or not, clusters are going to get to the size where you’ll be able to deploy millions of these.
I am optimistic about meaning. I worry about economics and the concentration of power. That’s actually what I worry about more, the abuse of power.
I’m also joined afterwards by two other brilliant people from Anthropic. First Amanda Askell, who is a researcher working on alignment and fine-tuning of Claude, including the design of Claude’s character and personality. A few folks told me she has probably talked with Claude more than any human at Anthropic. So she was definitely a fascinating person to talk to about prompt engineering and practical advice on how to get the best out of Claude.
After that, Chris Olah stopped by for a chat. He’s one of the pioneers of the field of mechanistic interpretability, which is an exciting set of efforts that aims to reverse engineering neural networks, to figure out what’s going on inside, inferring behaviors from neural activation patterns inside the network. This is a very promising approach for keeping future super-intelligent AI systems safe. For example, by detecting from the activations when the model is trying to deceive the human it is talking to.
This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Dario Amodei.
And in some ways it was fortunate, you can have almost beginner’s luck. I was like a newcomer to the field. And I looked at the neural net that we were using for speech, the recurrent neural networks, and I said, “I don’t know, what if you make them bigger and give them more layers? And what if you scale up the data along with this?” I just saw these as independent dials that you could turn. And I noticed that the models started to do better and better as you gave them more data, as you made the models larger, as you trained them for longer. And I didn’t measure things precisely in those days, but along with colleagues, we very much got the informal sense that the more data and the more compute and the more training you put into these models, the better they perform.
And so initially my thinking was, “Hey, maybe that is just true for speech recognition systems. Maybe that’s just one particular quirk, one particular area.” I think it wasn’t until 2017 when I first saw the results from GPT-1 that it clicked for me that language is probably the area in which we can do this. We can get trillions of words of language data, we can train on them. And the models we were trained in those days were tiny. You could train them on one to eight GPUs, whereas now we train jobs on tens of thousands, soon going to hundreds of thousands of GPUs.
And so when I saw those two things together, and there were a few people like Ilya Sudskever who you’ve interviewed, who had somewhat similar views. He might’ve been the first one, although I think a few people came to similar views around the same time, right? There was Rich Sutton’s bitter lesson, Gwern wrote about the scaling hypothesis. But I think somewhere between 2014 and 2017 was when it really clicked for me, when I really got conviction that, “Hey, we’re going to be able to these incredibly wide cognitive tasks if we just scale up the models.”
And at every stage of scaling, there are always arguments. And when I first heard them honestly, I thought, “Probably I’m the one who’s wrong and all these experts in the field are right. They know the situation better than I do, right?” There’s the Chomsky argument about, “You can get syntactics but you can’t get semantics.” There was this idea, “Oh, you can make a sentence make sense, but you can’t make a paragraph make sense.” The latest one we have today is, “We’re going to run out of data, or the data isn’t high quality enough or models can’t reason.”
And each time, every time, we manage to either find a way around or scaling just is the way around. Sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other. And so I’m now at this point, I still think it’s always quite uncertain. We have nothing but inductive inference to tell us that the next two years are going to be like the last 10 years. But I’ve seen the movie enough times, I’ve seen the story happen for enough times to really believe that probably the scaling is going to continue, and that there’s some magic to it that we haven’t really explained on a theoretical basis yet.
And I think what it amounts to, is that if you look at a lot of things that are produced by some natural process that has a lot of different scales, not a Gaussian, which is kind of narrowly distributed, but if I look at large and small fluctuations that lead to electrical noise, they have this decaying one over X distribution. And so now I think of patterns in the physical world or in language. If I think about the patterns in language, there are some really simple patterns, some words are much more common than others, like the. Then there’s basic noun-verb structure. Then there’s the fact that nouns and verbs have to agree, they have to coordinate. And there’s the higher-level sentence structure. Then there’s the thematic structure of paragraphs. And so the fact that there’s this regressing structure, you can imagine that as you make the networks larger, first they capture the really simple correlations, the really simple patterns, and there’s this long tail of other patterns.
And if that long tail of other patterns is really smooth like it is with the one over F noise in physical processes like resistors, then you can imagine as you make the network larger, it’s kind of capturing more and more of that distribution. And so that smoothness gets reflected in how well the models are at predicting and how well they perform.
Language is an evolved process. We’ve developed language, we have common words and less common words. We have common expressions and less common expressions. We have ideas, cliches, that are expressed frequently, and we have novel ideas. And that process has developed, has evolved with humans over millions of years. And so the guess, and this is pure speculation, would be that there’s some kind of long tail distribution of the distribution of these ideas.
If I look at an area like biology, and I wrote this essay, Machines of Loving Grace, it seems to me that humans are struggling to understand the complexity of biology. If you go to Stanford or to Harvard or to Berkeley, you have whole departments of folks trying to study the immune system or metabolic pathways, and each person understands only a tiny bit, a part of it, specializes. And they’re struggling to combine their knowledge with that of other humans. And so I have an instinct that there’s a lot of room at the top for AIs to get smarter.
If I think of something like materials in the physical world, or addressing conflicts between humans or something like that, I mean it may be there’s only some of these problems are not intractable, but much harder. And it may be that there’s only so well you can do at some of these things. Just like with speech recognition, there’s only so clear I can hear your speech. So I think in some areas there may be ceilings that are very close to what humans have done. In other areas, those ceilings may be very far away. I think we’ll only find out when we build these systems. It’s very hard to know in advance. We can speculate, but we can’t be sure.
I think in terms of drug development, my view is that we’re too slow and we’re too conservative. But certainly if you get these things wrong, it’s possible to risk people’s lives by being too reckless. And so at least some of these human institutions are in fact protecting people. So it’s all about finding the balance. I strongly suspect that balance is kind of more on the side of wishing to make things happen faster, but there is a balance.
That said, we, and I would guess other companies, are working on ways to make data synthetic, where you can use the model to generate more data of the type that you have already, or even generate data from scratch. If you think about what was done with DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero, they managed to get a bot all the way from no ability to play Go whatsoever to above human level, just by playing against itself. There was no example data from humans required in the AlphaGo Zero version of it.
The other direction of course, is these reasoning models that do chain of thought and stop to think and reflect on their own thinking. In a way that’s another kind of synthetic data coupled with reinforcement learning. So my guess is with one of those methods, we’ll get around the data limitation or there may be other sources of data that are available. We could just observe that, even if there’s no problem with data, as we start to scale models up, they just stopped getting better. It seemed to be a reliable observation that they’ve gotten better, that could just stop at some point for a reason we don’t understand.
The answer could be that we need to invent some new architecture. There have been problems in the past with say, numerical stability of models where it looked like things were leveling off, but actually when we found the right unblocker, they didn’t end up doing so. So perhaps there’s some new optimization method or some new technique we need to unblock things. I’ve seen no evidence of that so far, but if things were to slow down, that perhaps could be one reason.
Now, if we get to a hundred billion, that’s still not enough compute, that’s still not enough scale, then either we need even more scale, or we need to develop some way of doing it more efficiently of shifting the curve. I think between all of these, one of the reasons I’m bullish about powerful AI happening so fast, is just that if you extrapolate the next few points on the curve, we’re very quickly getting towards human level ability.
Some of the new models that we developed, some reasoning models that have come from other companies, they’re starting to get to what I would call the PhD or professional level. If you look at their coding ability, the latest model we released, Sonnet 3.5, the new or updated version, it gets something like 50% on SWE-bench. And SWE-bench is an example of a bunch of professional real-world software engineering tasks. At the beginning of the year, I think the state of the art was 3 or 4%. So in 10 months we’ve gone from 3% to 50% on this task. And I think in another year we’ll probably be at 90%. I mean, I don’t know, but might even be less than that.
We’ve seen similar things in graduate-level math, physics, and biology from models like OpenAi’s o1. So if we just continue to extrapolate this in terms of skill that we have, I think if we extrapolate the straight curve, within a few years, we will get to these models being above the highest professional level in terms of humans. Now, will that curve continue? You’ve pointed to, and I’ve pointed to a lot of possible reasons why that might not happen. But if the extrapolation curve continues, that is the trajectory we’re on.
I’ll give a few examples of this. Early in the history of Anthropic, one of our co-founders, Chris Olah, who I believe you’re interviewing soon, he’s the co-founder of the field of mechanistic interpretability, which is an attempt to understand what’s going on inside AI models. So we had him and one of our early teams focus on this area of interpretability, which we think is good for making models safe and transparent.
For three or four years that had no commercial application whatsoever. It still doesn’t. Today we’re doing some early betas with it, and probably it will eventually, but this is a very, very long research bed, and one in which we’ve built in public and shared our results publicly. And we did this because we think it’s a way to make models safer. An interesting thing is that as we’ve done this, other companies have started doing it as well. In some cases because they’ve been inspired by it, in some cases because they’re worried that if other companies are doing this, look more responsible, they want to look more responsible too. No one wants to look like the irresponsible actor. And so they adopt this as well. When folks come to Anthropic, interpretability is often a draw, and I tell them, “The other places you didn’t go, tell them why you came here.” And then you see soon that there’s interpretability teams elsewhere as well.
And in a way that takes away our competitive advantage, because it’s like, “Oh, now others are doing it as well.” But it’s good for the broader system, and so we have to invent some new thing that we’re doing that others aren’t doing as well. And the hope is to basically bid up the importance of doing the right thing. And it’s not about us in particular. It’s not about having one particular good guy. Other companies can do this as well. If they join the race to do this, that’s the best news ever. It’s about shaping the incentives to point upward instead of shaping the incentives to point downward.
We demonstrated this a bit with the Golden Gate Bridge Claude. So this was an experiment where we found a direction inside one of the neural networks layers that corresponded to the Golden Gate Bridge. And we just turned that way up. And so we released this model as a demo, it was kind of half a joke, for a couple days, but it was illustrative of the method we developed. And you could take the model, you could ask it about anything. It would be like you could say, “How was your day?” And anything you asked, because this feature was activated, it would connect to the Golden Gate Bridge. So it would say, I’m feeling relaxed and expansive, much like the arches of the Golden Gate Bridge, or-
But then there’s a lot of practical applications in a business sense where it’s like I’m interacting with a website, I am doing my taxes, or I’m talking to a legal advisor and I want to analyze a contract. Or we have plenty of companies that are just like, I want to do auto-complete on my IDE or something. And for all of those things, you want to act fast and you want to use the model very broadly. So we wanted to serve that whole spectrum of needs. So we ended up with this kind of poetry theme. And so what’s a really short poem? It’s a haiku. Haiku is the small, fast, cheap model that was at the time, was really surprisingly intelligent for how fast and cheap it was.
Sonnet is a medium-sized poem, write a couple paragraphs. And so Sonnet was the middle model. It is smarter but also a little bit slower, a little bit more expensive. And Opus, like a Magnum Opus is a large work, Opus was the largest, smartest model at the time. So that was the original kind of thinking behind it.
And our thinking then was, “Well, each new generation of models should shift that trade- off curve.” So when we released Sonnet 3.5, it has roughly the same cost and speed as the Sonnet 3 model, but it increased its intelligence to the point where it was smarter than the original Opus 3 model. Especially for code, but also just in general. And so now we’ve shown results for Haiku 3.5. And I believe Haiku 3.5, the smallest new model, is about as good as Opus 3, the largest old model. So basically the aim here is to shift the curve and then at some point there’s going to be an Opus 3.5.
Now every new generation of models has its own thing. They use new data, their personality changes in ways that we try to steer but are not fully able to steer. And so there’s never quite that exact equivalence, where the only thing you’re changing is intelligence. We always try and improve other things and some things change without us knowing or measuring. So it’s very much an inexact science. In many ways, the manner and personality of these models is more an art than it is a science.
There’s then a kind of post-training phase where we do reinforcement learning from human feedback as well as other kinds of reinforcement learning. That phase is getting larger and larger now, and often that’s less of an exact science. It often takes effort to get it right. Models are then tested with some of our early partners to see how good they are, and they’re then tested, both internally and externally, for their safety, particularly for catastrophic and autonomy risks. So we do internal testing according to our responsible scaling policy, which I could talk more about that in detail.
And then we have an agreement with the US and the UK AI Safety Institute, as well as other third-party testers in specific domains, to test the models for what are called CBRN risks, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear. We don’t think that models pose these risks seriously yet, but every new model we want to evaluate to see if we’re starting to get close to some of these more dangerous capabilities. So those are the phases, and then it just takes some time to get the model working in terms of inference and launching it in the API. So there’s just a lot of steps to actually making a model work. And of course, we’re always trying to make the processes as streamlined as possible.
We want our safety testing to be rigorous, but we want it to be rigorous and to be automatic, to happen as fast as it can, without compromising on rigor. Same with our pre-training process and our post-training process. So it’s just building anything else. It’s just like building airplanes. You want to make them safe, but you want to make the process streamlined. And I think the creative tension between those is an important thing in making the models work.
So again, the water line is rising. And then I think the new Sonnet has been even better. In terms of what it takes, I’ll just say it’s been across the board. It’s in the pre-training, it’s in the post-training, it’s in various evaluations that we do. We’ve observed this as well. And if we go into the details of the benchmark, so SWE-bench is basically… Since you’re a programmer, you’ll be familiar with pull requests, and just pull requests, they’re like a sort of atomic unit of work. You could say I’m implementing one thing.
So SWE-bench actually gives you a real world situation where the code base is in a current state and I’m trying to implement something that’s described in language. We have internal benchmarks where we measure the same thing and you say, “Just give the model free rein to do anything, run anything, edit anything. How well is it able to complete these tasks?” And it’s that benchmark that’s gone from “it can do it 3% of the time” to “it can do it about 50% of the time.”
So I actually do believe that you can gain benchmarks, but I think if we get to 100% on that benchmark in a way that isn’t over-trained or game for that particular benchmark, probably represents a real and serious increase in programming ability. And I would suspect that if we can get to 90, 95% that it will represent ability to autonomously do a significant fraction of software engineering tasks.
The trouble starts already when some of them take a lot longer than others to train. That already messes up your time a little bit. But as you make big improvement in pre-training, then you suddenly notice, “Oh, I can make better pre-train model.” And that doesn’t take very long to do, but clearly it has the same size and shape of previous models. So I think those two together as well as the timing issues. Any kind of scheme you come up with, the reality tends to frustrate that scheme, right? It tends to break out of the scheme.
It’s not like software where you can say, “Oh, this is 3.7, this is 3.8.” No, you have models with different trade-offs. You can change some things in your models, you can change other things. Some are faster and slower at inference. Some have to be more expensive, some have to be less expensive. And so I think all the companies have struggled with this. I think we were in a good position in terms of naming when we had Haiku, Sonnet and Opus.
And we have a whole team focused on, I think we call it Claude character. Amanda leads that team and we’ll talk to you about that, but it’s still a very inexact science and often we find that models have properties that we’re not aware of. The fact of the matter is that you can talk to a model 10,000 times and there are some behaviors you might not see just like with a human, right?
I can know someone for a few months and not know that they have a certain skill or not know that there’s a certain side to them. And so I think we just have to get used to this idea. And we’re always looking for better ways of testing our models to demonstrate these capabilities and also to decide which are the personality properties we want models to have and which we don’t want to have. That itself, the normative question, is also super interesting.
It’s difficult from an inference perspective and it’s actually hard to control all the consequences of changing the weights of the model. Let’s say you wanted to fine-tune the model, I don’t know, to say “certainly” less, which an old version of Sonnet used to do. You actually end up changing 100 things as well. So we have a whole process for it and we have a whole process for modifying the model. We do a bunch of testing on it. We do a bunch of user testing in early customers.
So we both have never changed the weights of the model without telling anyone. And certainly, in the current setup, it would not make sense to do that. Now, there are a couple things that we do occasionally do. One is sometimes we run A/B tests, but those are typically very close to when a model is being released and for a very small fraction of time.
So the day before the new Sonnet 3.5, I agree we should have had a better name. It’s clunky to refer to it. There were some comments from people that it’s gotten a lot better and that’s because a fraction we’re exposed to an A/B test for those one or two days. The other is that occasionally the system prompt will change. The system prompt can have some effects, although it’s unlikely to dumb down models, it’s unlikely to make them dumber.
And we’ve seen that while these two things, which I’m listing to be very complete, happened quite infrequently, the complaints for us and for other model companies about the model change, the model isn’t good at this, the model got more censored, the model was dumbed down. Those complaints are constant and so I don’t want to say people are imagining it or anything, but the models are, for the most part, not changing. If I were to offer a theory, I think it actually relates to one of the things I said before, which is that models are very complex and have many aspects to them. And so often, if I ask the model a question, if I’m like, “Do task X” versus, “Can you do task X?” the model might respond in different ways. And so there are all kinds of subtle things that you can change about the way you interact with the model that can give you very different results.
To be clear, this itself is like a failing by us and by the other model providers that the models are just often sensitive to small changes in wording. It’s yet another way in which the science of how these models work is very poorly developed. And so if I go to sleep one night and I was talking to the model in a certain way and I slightly changed the phrasing of how I talk to the model, I could get different results.
So that’s one possible way. The other thing is, man, it’s just hard to quantify this stuff. It’s hard to quantify this stuff. I think people are very excited by new models when they come out and then as time goes on, they become very aware of their limitations. So that may be another effect, but that’s all a very long-winded way of saying for the most part, with some fairly narrow exceptions, the models are not changing.
People are frustrated with things like the model not writing out all the code or the model just not being as good at code as it could be, even though it’s the best model in the world on code. I think the majority of things are about that, but certainly a vocal minority raise these concerns, are frustrated by the model refusing things that it shouldn’t refuse or apologizing too much or just having these annoying verbal tics.
The second caveat, and I just want to say this super clearly because I think some people don’t know it, others know it, but forget it. It is very difficult to control across the board how the models behave. You cannot just reach in there and say, “Oh, I want the model to apologize less.” You can do that. You can include training data that says, “Oh, the model should apologize less.” But then in some other situation, they end up being super rude or overconfident in a way that’s misleading people.
So there are all these trade-offs. For example, another thing is if there was a period during which models, ours and I think others as well, were too verbose, they would repeat themselves, they would say too much. You can cut down on the verbosity by penalizing the models for just talking for too long. What happens when you do that, if you do it in a crude way, is when the models are coding, sometimes they’ll say, “Rest of the code goes here,” right?
Because they’ve learned that that’s the way to economize and that they see it. And then so that leads the model to be so-called lazy in coding where they’re just like, “Ah, you can finish the rest of it.” It’s not because we want to save on compute or because the models are lazy during winter break or any of the other conspiracy theories that have come up. Actually, it’s just very hard to control the behavior of the model, to steer the behavior of the model in all circumstances at once.
There’s this whack- a-mole aspect where you push on one thing and these other things start to move as well that you may not even notice or measure. And so one of the reasons that I care so much about grand alignment of these AI systems in the future is actually, these systems are actually quite unpredictable. They’re actually quite hard to steer and control. And this version we’re seeing today of you make one thing better, it makes another thing worse, I think that’s like a present day analog of future control problems in AI systems that we can start to study today.
I think that difficulty in steering the behavior and making sure that if we push an AI system in one direction, it doesn’t push it in another direction in some other ways that we didn’t want. I think that’s an early sign of things to come, and if we can do a good job of solving this problem of you ask the model to make and distribute smallpox and it says no, but it’s willing to help you in your graduate level virology class, how do we get both of those things at once? It’s hard.
It’s very easy to go to one side or the other and it’s a multidimensional problem. And so I think these questions of shaping the model’s personality, I think they’re very hard. I think we haven’t done perfectly on them. I think we’ve actually done the best of all the AI companies, but still so far from perfect.
And I think if we can get this right, if we can control the false positives and false negatives in this very controlled present day environment, we’ll be much better at doing it for the future when our worry is: will the models be super autonomous? Will they be able to make very dangerous things? Will they be able to autonomously build whole companies and are those companies aligned? So I think of this present task as both vexing but also good practice for the future.
And so we had a “certainly” eval, which is: how often does the model say certainly? But look, this is just a whack-a-mole. What if it switches from “certainly” to “definitely”? So every time we add a new eval and we’re always evaluating for all the old things, we have hundreds of these evaluations, but we find that there’s no substitute for a human interacting with it.
And so it’s very much like the ordinary product development process. We have hundreds of people within Anthropic bash the model. Then we do external A/B tests. Sometimes we’ll run tests with contractors. We pay contractors to interact with the model. So you put all of these things together and it’s still not perfect. You still see behaviors that you don’t quite want to see. You still see the model refusing things that it just doesn’t make sense to refuse.
But I think trying to solve this challenge, trying to stop the model from doing genuinely bad things that everyone agrees it shouldn’t do, everyone agrees that the model shouldn’t talk about, I don’t know, child abuse material. Everyone agrees the model shouldn’t do that, but at the same time, that it doesn’t refuse in these dumb and stupid ways.
I think drawing that line as finely as possible, approaching perfectly, is still a challenge and we’re getting better at it every day, but there’s a lot to be solved. And again, I would point to that as an indicator of a challenge ahead in terms of steering much more powerful models.
The power of the models and their ability to solve all these problems in biology, neuroscience, economic development, governance and peace, large parts of the economy, those come with risks as well, right? With great power comes great responsibility. The two are paired. Things that are powerful can do good things and they can do bad things. I think of those risks as being in several different categories, perhaps the two biggest risks that I think about. And that’s not to say that there aren’t risks today that are important, but when I think of really the things that would happen on the grandest scale, one is what I call catastrophic misuse.
These are misuse of the models in domains like cyber, bio, radiological, nuclear, things that could harm or even kill thousands, even millions of people if they really, really go wrong. These are the number one priority to prevent. And here I would just make a simple observation, which is that the models, if I look today at people who have done really bad things in the world, I think actually humanity has been protected by the fact that the overlap between really smart, well-educated people and people who want to do really horrific things has generally been small.
Let’s say I’m someone who I have a PhD in this field, I have a well-paying job. There’s so much to lose. Even assuming I’m completely evil, which most people are not, why would such a person risk their life, risk their legacy, their reputation to do something truly, truly evil? If we had a lot more people like that, the world would be a much more dangerous place. And so my worry is that by being a much more intelligent agent, AI could break that correlation.
And so I do have serious worries about that. I believe we can prevent those worries. But I think as a counterpoint to Machines of Loving Grace, I want to say that there’s still serious risks. And the second range of risks would be the autonomy risks, which is the idea that models might, on their own, particularly as we give them more agency than they’ve had in the past, particularly as we give them supervision over wider tasks like writing whole code bases or someday even effectively operating entire companies, they’re on a long enough leash. Are they doing what we really want them to do?
It’s very difficult to even understand in detail what they’re doing, let alone control it. And like I said, these early signs that it’s hard to perfectly draw the boundary between things the model should do and things the model shouldn’t do that if you go to one side, you get things that are annoying and useless and you go to the other side, you get other behaviors. If you fix one thing, it creates other problems.
We’re getting better and better at solving this. I don’t think this is an unsolvable problem. I think this is a science like the safety of airplanes or the safety of cars or the safety of drugs. I don’t think there’s any big thing we’re missing. I just think we need to get better at controlling these models. And so these are the two risks I’m worried about. And our responsible scaling plan, which I’ll recognize is a very long-winded answer to your question.
But the case for worry, the case for risk is strong enough that we should act now and they’re getting better very, very fast. I testified in the Senate that we might have serious bio risks within two to three years. That was about a year ago. Things have proceeded apace. So we have this thing where it’s surprisingly hard to address these risks because they’re not here today, they don’t exist. They’re like ghosts, but they’re coming at us so fast because the models are improving so fast.
So how do you deal with something that’s not here today, doesn’t exist, but is coming at us very fast? So the solution we came up with for that, in collaboration with people like the organization METR and Paul Christiano is what you need for that are you need tests to tell you when the risk is getting close. You need an early warning system. And so every time we have a new model, we test it for its capability to do these CBRN tasks as well as testing it for how capable it is of doing tasks autonomously on its own.
And in the latest version of our RSP, which we released in the last month or two, the way we test autonomy risks is the AI model’s ability to do aspects of AI research itself, which when the AI models can do AI research, they become truly, truly autonomous. And that threshold is important for a bunch of other ways. And so what do we then do with these tasks? The RSP basically develops what we’ve called an if-then structure, which is if the models pass a certain capability, then we impose a certain set of safety and security requirements on them.
So today’s models are what’s called ASL-2. Models that were ASL-1 is for systems that manifestly don’t pose any risk of autonomy or misuse. So for example, a chess playing bot, Deep Blue would be ASL-1. It’s just manifestly the case that you can’t use Deep Blue for anything other than chess. It was just designed for chess. No one’s going to use it to conduct a masterful cyber attack or to run wild and take over the world.
ASL-2 is today’s AI systems where we’ve measured them and we think these systems are simply not smart enough to autonomously self-replicate or conduct a bunch of tasks and also not smart enough to provide meaningful information about CBRN risks and how to build CBRN weapons above and beyond what can be known from looking at Google. In fact, sometimes they do provide information above and beyond a search engine, but not in a way that can be stitched together, not in a way that end-to-end is dangerous enough.
So ASL-3 is going to be the point at which the models are helpful enough to enhance the capabilities of non-state actors, right? State actors can already do, unfortunately, to a high level of proficiency, a lot of these very dangerous and destructive things. The difference is that non-state actors are not capable of it. And so when we get to ASL-3, we’ll take special security precautions designed to be sufficient to prevent theft of the model by non-state actors and misuse of the model as it’s deployed. We’ll have to have enhanced filters targeted at these particular areas.
And then ASL-5 is where we would get to the models that are truly capable that it could exceed humanity in their ability to do any of these tasks. And so the point of the if-then structure commitment is basically to say, “Look, I don’t know, I’ve been working with these models for many years and I’ve been worried about risk for many years. It’s actually dangerous to cry wolf. It’s actually dangerous to say this model is risky. And people look at it and they say this is manifestly not dangerous.” Again, it’s the delicacy of the risk isn’t here today, but it’s coming at us fast.
How do you deal with that? It’s really vexing to a risk planner to deal with it. And so this if-then structure basically says, “Look, we don’t want to antagonize a bunch of people, we don’t want to harm our own ability to have a place in the conversation by imposing these very onerous burdens on models that are not dangerous today.” So the if-then, the trigger commitment is basically a way to deal with this. It says you clamp down hard when you can show the model is dangerous.
And of course, what has to come with that is enough of a buffer threshold that you’re not at high risk of missing the danger. It’s not a perfect framework. We’ve had to change it. We came out with a new one just a few weeks ago and probably going forward, we might release new ones multiple times a year because it’s hard to get these policies right technically, organizationally from a research perspective. But that is the proposal, if-then commitments and triggers in order to minimize burdens and false alarms now, but really react appropriately when the dangers are here.
I think once we get to ASL-4, we start to have worries about the models being smart enough that they might sandbag tests, they might not tell the truth about tests. We had some results came out about sleeper agents and there was a more recent paper about, “Can the models mislead attempts to sandbag their own abilities, present themselves as being less capable than they are?” And so I think with ASL-4, there’s going to be an important component of using other things than just interacting with the models.
For example, interpretability or hidden chains of thought where you have to look inside the model and verify via some other mechanism that is not as easily corrupted as what the model says, that the model indeed has some property. So we’re still working on ASL-4. One of the properties of the RSP is that we don’t specify ASL-4 until we’ve hit ASL-3. And I think that’s proven to be a wise decision because even with ASL-3, again, it’s hard to know this stuff in detail, and we want to take as much time as we can possibly take to get these things right.
It’s just the screen is just a universal interface that’s a lot easier to interact with. And so I expect over time, this is going to lower a bunch of barriers. Now, honestly, the current model has, it leaves a lot still to be desired and we were honest about that in the blog. It makes mistakes, it misclicks. We were careful to warn people, “Hey, you can’t just leave this thing to run on your computer for minutes and minutes. You got to give this thing boundaries and guardrails.” And I think that’s one of the reasons we released it first in an API form rather than just hand the consumer and give it control of their computer. But I definitely feel that it’s important to get these capabilities out there. As models get more powerful, we’re going to have to grapple with how do we use these capabilities safely. How do we prevent them from being abused?
And I think releasing the model while the capabilities are still limited is very helpful in terms of doing that. I think since it’s been released, a number of customers, I think Replit was maybe one of the most quickest to deploy things, have made use of it in various ways. People have hooked up demos for Windows desktops, Macs, Linux machines. So yeah, it’s been very exciting. I think as with anything else, it comes with new exciting abilities and then with those new exciting abilities, we have to think about how to make the model safe, reliable, do what humans want them to do. It’s the same story for everything. Same thing. It’s that same tension.
Now, when you talk about sandboxing, again, when we get to ASL-4, none of these precautions are going to make sense there. When you talk about ASL-4, you’re then, the model is being, there’s theoretical worry the model could be smart enough to kind of break it to out of any box. And so there, we need to think about mechanistic interpretability. If we’re going to have a sandbox, it would need to be a mathematically provable. That’s a whole different world than what we’re dealing with with the models today.
But one, there are still some companies that don’t have RSP like mechanisms, like OpenAI, Google did adopt these mechanisms a couple months after Anthropic did, but there are other companies out there that don’t have these mechanisms at all. And so if some companies adopt these mechanisms and others don’t, it’s really going to create a situation where some of these dangers have the property that it doesn’t matter if three out of five of the companies are being safe, if the other two are being unsafe, it creates this negative externality. And I think the lack of uniformity is not fair to those of us who have put a lot of effort into being very thoughtful about these procedures. The second thing is I don’t think you can trust these companies to adhere to these voluntary plans on their own. Right? I like to think that Anthropic will, we do everything we can that we will, our RSP is checked by our long-term benefit trust, so we do everything we can to adhere to our own RSP.
But you hear lots of things about various companies saying, “Oh, they said they would give this much compute and they didn’t. They said they would do this thing and the didn’t.” I don’t think it makes sense to litigate particular things that companies have done, but I think this broad principle that if there’s nothing watching over them, if there’s nothing watching over us as an industry, there’s no guarantee that we’ll do the right thing and the stakes are very high. And so I think it’s important to have a uniform standard that everyone follows and to make sure that simply that the industry does what a majority of the industry has already said is important and has already said that they definitely will do.
Right, some people, I think there’s a class of people who are against regulation on principle. I understand where that comes from. If you go to Europe and you see something like GDPR, you see some of the other stuff that they’ve done. Some of it’s good, but some of it is really unnecessarily burdensome and I think it’s fair to say really has slowed innovation. And so I understand where people are coming from on priors. I understand why people start from that position. But again, I think AI is different. If we go to the very serious risks of autonomy and misuse that I talked about just a few minutes ago, I think that those are unusual and they warrant an unusually strong response. And so I think it’s very important.
Again, we need something that everyone can get behind. I think one of the issues with SB 1047, especially the original version of it was it had a bunch of the structure of RSPs, but it also had a bunch of stuff that was either clunky or that just would’ve created a bunch of burdens, a bunch of hassle and might even have missed the target in terms of addressing the risks. You don’t really hear about it on Twitter, you just hear about kind of people are cheering for any regulation. And then the folks who are against make up these often quite intellectually dishonest arguments about how it’ll make us move away from California, bill doesn’t apply if you’re headquartered in California, bill only applies if you do business in California, or that it would damage the open source ecosystem or that it would cause all of these things.
I think those were mostly nonsense, but there are better arguments against regulation. There’s one guy, Dean Ball, who’s really, I think, a very scholarly analyst who looks at what happens when a regulation is put in place in ways that they can kind of get a life of their own or how they can be poorly designed. And so our interest has always been we do think there should be regulation in this space, but we want to be an actor who makes sure that that regulation is something that’s surgical, that’s targeted at the serious risks and is something people can actually comply with. Because something I think the advocates of regulation don’t understand as well as they could is if we get something in place that’s poorly targeted, that wastes a bunch of people’s time, what’s going to happen is people are going to say, “See, these safety risks, this is nonsense. I just had to hire 10 lawyers to fill out all these forms. I had to run all these tests for something that was clearly not dangerous.”
And after six months of that, there will be a ground swell and we’ll end up with a durable consensus against regulation. And so I think the worst enemy of those who want real accountability is badly designed regulation. We need to actually get it right. And if there’s one thing I could say to the advocates, it would be that I want them to understand this dynamic better and we need to be really careful and we need to talk to people who actually have experience seeing how regulations play out in practice. And the people who have seen that, understand to be very careful. If this was some lesser issue, I might be against regulation at all.
But what I want the opponents to understand is that the underlying issues are actually serious. They’re not something that I or the other companies are just making up because of regulatory capture, they’re not sci-fi fantasies, they’re not any of these things. Every time we have a new model, every few months we measure the behavior of these models and they’re getting better and better at these concerning tasks just as they are getting better and better at good, valuable, economically useful tasks. And so I would just love it if some of the former, I think SB 1047 was very polarizing, I would love it if some of the most reasonable opponents and some of the most reasonable proponents would sit down together. And I think that the different AI companies, Anthropic was the only AI company that felt positively in a very detailed way. I think Elon tweeted briefly something positive, but some of the big ones like Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft were pretty staunchly against.
So I would really is if some of the key stakeholders, some of the most thoughtful proponents and some of the most thoughtful opponents would sit down and say how do we solve this problem in a way that the proponents feel brings a real reduction in risk and that the opponents feel that it is not hampering the industry or hampering innovation any more necessary than it needs to. I think for whatever reason, that things got too polarized and those two groups didn’t get to sit down in the way that they should. And I feel urgency. I really think we need to do something in 2025. If we get to the end of 2025 and we’ve still done nothing about this, then I’m going to be worried. I’m not worried yet because, again, the risks aren’t here yet, but I think time is running short.
People say we left because we didn’t like the deal with Microsoft. False. Although, it was like a lot of discussion, a lot of questions about exactly how we do the deal with Microsoft. We left because we didn’t like commercialization. That’s not true. We built GPD-3, which was the model that was commercialized. I was involved in commercialization. It’s more, again, about how do you do it? Civilization is going down this path to very powerful AI. What’s the way to do it? That is cautious, straightforward, honest, that builds trust in the organization and in individuals. How do we get from here to there and how do we have a real vision for how to get it right? How can safety not just be something we say because it helps with recruiting. And I think at the end of the day, if you have a vision for that, forget about anyone else’s vision.
I don’t want to talk about anyone else’s vision. If you have a vision for how to do it, you should go off and you should do that vision. It is incredibly unproductive to try and argue with someone else’s vision. You might think they’re not doing it the right way. You might think they’re dishonest. Who knows? Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. But what you should do is you should take some people you trust and you should go off together and you should make your vision happen. And if your vision is compelling, if you can make it appeal to people, some combination of ethically in the market, if you can make a company that’s a place people want to join, that engages in practices that people think are reasonable while managing to maintain its position in the ecosystem at the same time, if you do that, people will copy it.
And the fact that you are doing it, especially the fact that you’re doing it better than they are, causes them to change their behavior in a much more compelling way than if they’re your boss and you’re arguing with them. I don’t know how to be any more specific about it than that, but I think it’s generally very unproductive to try and get someone else’s vision to look like your vision. It’s much more productive to go off and do a clean experiment and say, “This is our vision, this is how we’re going to do things. Your choice is you can ignore us, you can reject what we’re doing or you can start to become more like us.” And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And that plays out in the behavior of customers, that plays out in the behavior of the public, that plays out in the behavior of where people choose to work. And again, at the end, it’s not about one company winning or another company winning.
If we or another company are engaging in some practice that people find genuinely appealing, and I want it to be in substance, not just an appearance and I think researchers are sophisticated and they look at substance, and then other companies start copying that practice and they win because they copied that practice. That’s great. That’s success. That’s like the race to the top. It doesn’t matter who wins in the end as long as everyone is copying everyone else’s good practices. One way I think of it is the thing we’re all afraid of is the race to the bottom and the race to the bottom doesn’t matter who wins because we all lose. In the most extreme world, we make this autonomous AI that the robots enslave us or whatever. That’s half joking, but that is the most extreme thing that could happen. Then it doesn’t matter which company was ahead. If instead you create a race to the top where people are competing to engage in good practices, then at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who ends up winning, it doesn’t even matter who started the race to the top.
The point isn’t to be virtuous, the point is to get the system into a better equilibrium than it was before. And individual companies can play some role in doing this. Individual companies can help to start it, can help to accelerate it. And frankly, I think individuals at other companies have done this as well. The individuals that when we put out an RSP react by pushing harder to get something similar done at other companies, sometimes other companies do something that’s we’re like, “Oh, it’s a good practice. We think that’s good. We should adopt it too.” The only difference is I think we try to be more forward leaning. We try and adopt more of these practices first and adopt them more quickly when others invent them. But I think this dynamic is what we should be pointing at and that I think it abstracts away the question of which company’s winning, who trusts who. I think all these questions of drama are profoundly uninteresting and the thing that matters is the ecosystem that we all operate in and how to make that ecosystem better because that constrains all the players.
But imperfect doesn’t mean you just give up. There’s better and there’s worse. And hopefully, we can do well enough that we can begin to build some practices that the whole industry engages in. And then my guess is that multiple of these companies will be successful. Anthropic will be successful. These other companies, like ones I’ve been at the past, will also be successful. And some will be more successful than others. That’s less important than, again, that we align the incentives of the industry. And that happens partly through the race to the top, partly through things like RSP, partly through, again, selected surgical regulation.
If you have a thousand or 10,000 people and things have really regressed, you are not able to do selection and you’re choosing random people, what happens is then you need to put a lot of processes and a lot of guardrails in place just because people don’t fully trust each other or you have to adjudicate political battles. There are so many things that slow down the org’s ability to operate. And so we’re nearly a thousand people and we’ve tried to make it so that as large a fraction of those thousand people as possible are super talented, super skilled, it’s one of the reasons we’ve slowed down hiring a lot in the last few months. We grew from 300 to 800, I believe, I think in the first seven, eight months of the year and now we’ve slowed down. The last three months, we went from 800 to 900, 950, something like that. Don’t quote me on the exact numbers, but I think there’s an inflection point around a thousand and we want to be much more careful how we grow.
Early on and now as well, we’ve hired a lot of physicists. Theoretical physicists can learn things really fast. Even more recently, as we’ve continued to hire that, we’ve really had a high bar on both the research side and the software engineering side, have hired a lot of senior people, including folks who used to be at other companies in this space, and we’ve just continued to be very selective. It’s very easy to go from a hundred to a thousand, a thousand to 10,000 without paying attention to making sure everyone has a unified purpose. It’s so powerful. If your company consists of a lot of different fiefdoms that all want to do their own thing, they’re all optimizing for their own thing, it’s very hard to get anything done. But if everyone sees the broader purpose of the company, if there’s trust and there’s dedication to doing the right thing, that is a superpower. That in itself I think can overcome almost every other disadvantage.
But the thing that I think I did have that was different was that I was just willing to look at something with new eyes. People said, “Oh, we don’t have the right algorithms yet. We haven’t come up with the right way to do things.” And I was just like, “Oh, I don’t know. This neural net has 30 million parameters. What if we gave it 50 million instead? Let’s plot some graphs.” That basic scientific mindset of like, “Oh man,” I see some variable that I could change. What happens when it changes? Let’s try these different things and create a graph. For even, this was the simplest thing in the world, change the number of, this wasn’t PhD level experimental design, this was simple and stupid. Anyone could have done this if you just told them that it was important. It’s also not hard to understand. You didn’t need to be brilliant to come up with this.
But you put the two things together and some tiny number of people, some single digit number of people have driven forward the whole field by realizing this. And it’s often like that. If you look back at the discoveries in history, they’re often like that. And so this open-mindedness and this willingness to see with new eyes that often comes from being newer to the field, often experience is a disadvantage for this, that is the most important thing. It’s very hard to look for and test for, but I think it’s the most important thing because when you find something, some really new way of thinking about things, when you have the initiative to do that, it’s absolutely transformative.
And it’s just this fertile area for study. There’s so much low-hanging fruit, you can just walk by and you can pick things. For whatever reason, people aren’t interested in it enough. I think there are some things around long horizon learning and long horizon tasks, where there’s a lot to be done. I think evaluations, we’re still very early in our ability to study evaluations, particularly for dynamic systems acting in the world. I think there’s some stuff around multi-agent. Skate where the puck is going is my advice, and you don’t have to be brilliant to think of it. All the things that are going to be exciting in five years, people even mention them as conventional wisdom, but it’s just somehow there’s this barrier that people don’t double down as much as they could, or they’re afraid to do something that’s not the popular thing. I don’t know why it happens, but getting over that barrier, that’s my number one piece of advice.
It’s usually some boring matter of practice and trade craft. So when I think about how to do something special in terms of how we train these models both, but even more so I really think of it a little more, again, as designing airplanes or cars. It’s not just like, “Oh, man. I have the blueprint.” Maybe that makes you make the next airplane. But there’s some cultural trade craft of how we think about the design process that I think is more important than any particular gizmo we’re able to invent.
So there’s a lot of subtlety there, but the models are good at producing what the humans in some shallow sense want. And it actually turns out that you don’t even have to throw that much compute at it, because of another thing, which is this thing about a strong pre-trained model being halfway to anywhere. So once you have the pre-trained model, you have all the representations you need to get the model where you want it to go.
And so then there’s this idea, you have a single document, a constitution if you will, that says, these are the principles the model should be using to respond. And the AI system reads those reads principles as well as reading the environment and the response. And it says, “Well, how good did the AI model do?” It’s basically a form of self-play. You’re training the model against itself. And so the AI gives the response and then you feed that back into what’s called the preference model, which in turn feeds the model to make it better. So you have this triangle of the AI, the preference model, and the improvement of the AI itself.
But, I think at the base of it, there are specific principles that models have to obey. I think a lot of them are things that people would agree with. Everyone agrees that we don’t want models to present these CBRN risks. I think we can go a little further and agree with some basic principles of democracy and the rule of law. Beyond that, it gets very uncertain and there our goal is generally for the models to be more neutral, to not espouse a particular point of view and more just be wise agents or advisors that will help you think things through and will present possible considerations. But don’t express strong or specific opinions.
But, I noticed that one flaw in that way of thinking, and it’s not a change in how seriously I take the risks. It’s maybe a change in how I talk about them, is that no matter how logical or rational, that line of reasoning that I just gave might be. If you only talk about risks, your brain only thinks about risks. And so, I think it’s actually very important to understand, what if things do go well? And the whole reason we’re trying to prevent these risks is not because we’re afraid of technology, not because we want to slow it down. It’s because if we can get to the other side of these risks, if we can run the gauntlet successfully, to put it in stark terms, then on the other side of the gauntlet are all these great things.
And these things are worth fighting for. And these things can really inspire people. And I think I imagine, because … Look, you have all these investors, all these VCs, all these AI companies talking about all the positive benefits of AI. But as you point out, it’s weird. There’s actually a dearth of really getting specific about it. There’s a lot of random people on Twitter posting these gleaming cities and this just vibe of grind, accelerate harder, kick out the … It’s just this very aggressive ideological. But then you’re like, “Well, what are you actually excited about?”
And so, I figured that I think it would be interesting and valuable for someone who’s actually coming from the risk side to try and really make a try at explaining what the benefits are, both because I think it’s something we can all get behind and I want people to understand. I want them to really understand that this isn’t Doomers versus Accelerationists. This is that, if you have a true understanding of where things are going with AI, and maybe that’s the more important axis, AI is moving fast versus AI is not moving fast, then you really appreciate the benefits and you really want humanity or civilization to seize those benefits. But, you also get very serious about anything that could derail them.
There’s no point at which you pass the threshold and you’re like, “Oh, my God! We’re doing a totally new type of computation and new … And so I feel that way about AGI. There’s just a smooth exponential. And if by AGI you mean AI is getting better and better, and gradually it’s going to do more and more of what humans do until it’s going to be smarter than humans, and then it’s going to get smarter even from there, then yes, I believe in AGI. But, if AGI is some discrete or separate thing, which is the way people often talk about it, then it’s a meaningless buzzword.
It can go off for many hours, days and weeks to do tasks and do its own detailed planning and only ask you help when it’s needed. This is actually interesting. I think in the essay you said … Again, it’s a bet that it’s not going to be embodied, but it can control embodied tools. So it can control tools, robots, laboratory equipment., the resource used to train it can then be repurposed to run millions of copies of it, and each of those copies would be independent that could do their own independent work. So you can do the cloning of the intelligence systems.
I’m caricaturing this a little bit, but I think that’s one extreme. And the reason that I think that’s not the case is that, one, I think they just neglect the laws of physics. It’s only possible to do things so fast in the physical world. Some of those loops go through producing faster hardware. It takes a long time to produce faster hardware. Things take a long time. There’s this issue of complexity. I think no matter how smart you are, people talk about, “Oh, we can make models of biological systems that’ll do everything the biological systems … ” Look, I think computational modeling can do a lot. I did a lot of computational modeling when I worked in biology. But just there are a lot of things that you can’t predict how … They’re complex enough that just iterating, just running the experiment is going to beat any modeling, no matter how smart the system doing the modeling is.
I won’t give specific examples, but it’s been hard to get people to adopt even the technologies that we’ve developed, even ones where the case for their efficacy is very, very strong. People have concerns. They think things are conspiracy theories. It’s just been very difficult. It’s also been very difficult to get very simple things through the regulatory system. And I don’t want to disparage anyone who works in regulatory systems of any technology. There are hard they have to deal with. They have to save lives. But the system as a whole, I think makes some obvious trade-offs that are very far from maximizing human welfare. And so, if we bring AI systems into these human systems, often the level of intelligence may just not be the limiting factor. It just may be that it takes a long time to do something. Now, if the AI system circumvented all governments, if it just said, “I’m dictator of the world and I’m going to do whatever,” some of these things it could do.
Again, the things have to do with complexity. I still think a lot of things would take a while. I don’t think it helps that the AI systems can produce a lot of energy or go to the moon. Like some people in comments responded to the essay saying the AI system can produce a lot of energy and smarter AI systems. That’s missing the point. That kind of cycle doesn’t solve the key problems that I’m talking about here. So I think a bunch of people missed the point there. But even if it were completely unaligned and could get around all these human obstacles it would have trouble.
But again, if you want this to be an AI system that doesn’t take over the world, that doesn’t destroy humanity, then basically it’s going to need to follow basic human laws. If we want to have an actually good world, we’re going to have to have an AI system that interacts with humans, not one that creates its own legal system, or disregards all the laws or all of that. So as inefficient as these processes are, we’re going to have to deal with them, because there needs to be some popular and democratic legitimacy in how these systems are rolled out. We can’t have a small group of people who are developing these systems say, “This is what’s best for everyone.” I think it’s wrong, and I think in practice it’s not going to work anyway. So you put all those things together and we’re not going change the world and upload everyone in five minutes. A, I don’t think it’s going to happen and B, to the extent that it could happen.,It’s not the way to lead to a good world. So that’s on one side.
On the other side, there’s another set of perspectives, which I have actually in some ways more sympathy for, which is, look, we’ve seen big productivity increases before. Economists are familiar with studying the productivity increases that came from the computer revolution and internet revolution. And generally those productivity increases were underwhelming. They were less than you might imagine. There was a quote from Robert Solow, “You see the computer revolution everywhere except the productivity statistics.” So why is this the case? People point to the structure of firms, the structure of enterprises, how slow it’s been to roll out our existing technology to very poor parts of the world, which I talk about in the essay. How do we get these technologies to the poorest parts of the world that are behind on cell phone technology, computers, medicine, let alone newfangled AI that hasn’t been invented yet.
So you could have a perspective that’s like, “Well, this is amazing technically, but it’s all or nothing burger. I think Tyler Cowen who wrote something in response to my essay has that perspective. I think he thinks the radical change will happen eventually, but he thinks it’ll take 50 or 100 years. And you could have even more static perspectives on the whole thing. I think there’s some truth to it. I think the time scale is just too long and I can see it. I can actually see both sides with today’s AI. So a lot of our customers are large enterprises who are used to doing things a certain way. I’ve also seen it in talking to governments, right? Those are prototypical institutions, entities that are slow to change. But, the dynamic I see over and over again is yes, it takes a long time to move the ship. Yes. There’s a lot of resistance and lack of understanding.
But, the thing that makes me feel that progress will in the end happen moderately fast, not incredibly fast, but moderately fast, is that you talk to … What I find is I find over and over again, again in large companies, even in governments which have been actually surprisingly forward leaning, you find two things that move things forward. One, you find a small fraction of people within a company, within a government, who really see the big picture, who see the whole scaling hypothesis, who understand where AI is going, or at least understand where it’s going within their industry. And there are a few people like that within the current US government who really see the whole picture. And those people see that this is the most important thing in the world until they agitate for it. And the thing they alone are not enough to succeed, because there are a small set of people within a large organization.
But, as the technology starts to roll out, as it succeeds in some places in the folks who are most willing to adopt it, the specter of competition gives them a wind at their backs, because they can point within their large organization. They can say, “Look, these other guys are doing this.” One bank can say, “Look, this newfangled hedge fund is doing this thing. They’re going to eat our lunch.” In the US, we can say we’re afraid China’s going to get there before we are. And that combination, the specter of competition plus a few visionaries within these, the organizations that in many ways are sclerotic, you put those two things together and it actually makes something happen. It’s interesting. It’s a balanced fight between the two, because inertia is very powerful, but eventually over enough time, the innovative approach breaks through.
And I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen the arc of that over and over again, and it’s like the barriers are there, the barriers to progress, the complexity, not knowing how to use the model, how to deploy them are there. And for a bit it seems like they’re going to last forever, change doesn’t happen. But, then eventually change happens and always comes from a few people. I felt the same way when I was an advocate of the scaling hypothesis within the AI field itself and others didn’t get it. It felt like no one would ever get it. Then it felt like we had a secret almost no one ever had. And then, a couple years later, everyone has the secret. And so, I think that’s how it’s going to go with deployment AI in the world. The barriers are going to fall apart gradually and then all at once.
And so, I think this is going to be more, and this is just an instinct. I could easily see how I’m wrong. I think it’s going to be more five or 10 years, as I say in the essay than it’s going to be 50 or 100 years. I also think it’s going to be five or 10 years more than it’s going to be five or 10 hours, because I’ve just seen how human systems work. And I think a lot of these people who write down these differential equations, who say AI is going to make more powerful AI, who can’t understand how it could possibly be the case that these things won’t change so fast. I think they don’t understand these things.
There were a lot more in 2020, although my guess, my hunch at that time was that we’ll make it through all those blockers. So sitting as someone who has seen most of the blockers cleared out of the way, I suspect, my hunch, my suspicion is that the rest of them will not block us. But look, at the end of the day, I don’t want to represent this as a scientific prediction. People call them scaling laws. That’s a misnomer. Like Moore’s law is a misnomer. Moore’s laws, scaling laws, they’re not laws of the universe. They’re empirical regularities. I am going to bet in favor of them continuing, but I’m not certain of that.
And within biology, my experience within biology is that the biggest problem of biology is that you can’t see what’s going on. You have very little ability to see what’s going on and even less ability to change it, right? What you have is this. From this, you have to infer that there’s a bunch of cells that within each cell is 3 billion base pairs of DNA built according to a genetic code. And there are all these processes that are just going on without any ability of us on unaugmented humans to affect it. These cells are dividing. Most of the time that’s healthy, but sometimes that process goes wrong and that’s cancer. The cells are aging, your skin may change color, develops wrinkles as you age, and all of this is determined by these processes. All these proteins being produced, transported to various parts of the cells binding to each other.
And in our initial state about biology, we didn’t even know that these cells existed. We had to invent microscopes to observe the cells. We had to invent more powerful microscopes to see below the level of the cell to the level of molecules. We had to invent X-ray crystallography to see the DNA. We had to invent gene sequencing to read the DNA. Now we had to invent protein folding technology to predict how it would fold and how these things bind to each other. We had to invent various techniques for now we can edit the DNA as of with CRISPR as of the last 12 years. So the whole history of biology, a whole big part of the history is basically our ability to read and understand what’s going on and our ability to reach in and selectively change things. And my view is that there’s so much more we can still do there.
You can do CRISPR, but you can do it for your whole body. Let’s say I want to do it for one particular type of cell and I want the rate of targeting the wrong cell to be very low. That’s still a challenge. That’s still things people are working on. That’s what we might need for gene therapy for certain diseases. The reason I’m saying all of this, it goes beyond this to gene sequencing, to new types of nanomaterials for observing what’s going on inside cells, for antibody drug conjugates. The reason I’m saying all this is that this could be a leverage point for the AI systems, right? That the number of such inventions, it’s in the mid double digits or something, mid double digits, maybe low triple digits over the history of biology. Let’s say I have a million of these AIs like can they discover a thousand working together or can they discover thousands of these very quickly and does that provide a huge lever?
Instead of trying to leverage two trillion a year we spend on Medicare or whatever, can we leverage the 1 billion a year that’s spent to discover but with much higher quality? And so what is it like being a scientist that works with an AI system? The way I think about it actually is, well, so I think in the early stages, the AIs are going to be like grad students. You’re going to give them a project. You’re going to say, “I’m the experienced biologist. I’ve set up the lab.” The biology professor or even the grad students themselves will say, “Here’s what you can do with an AI… AI system, I’d like to study this.” And the AI system, it has all the tools. It can look up all the literature to decide what to do. It can look at all the equipment. It can go to a website and say, “Hey, I’m going to go to Thermo Fisher or whatever the dominant lab equipment company is today. My time was Thermo Fisher.
I’m going to order this new equipment to do this. I’m going to run my experiments. I’m going to write up a report about my experiments. I’m going to inspect the images for contamination. I’m going to decide what the next experiment is. I’m going to write some code and run a statistical analysis. All the things a grad student would do that’ll be a computer with an AI that the professor talks to every once in a while and it says, “This is what you’re going to do today.” The AI system comes to it with questions. When it’s necessary to run the lab equipment, it may be limited in some ways. It may have to hire a human lab assistant to do the experiment and explain how to do it or it could use advances in lab automation that are gradually being developed or have been developed over the last decade or so and will continue to be developed.
And so it’ll look like there’s a human professor and 1,000 AI grad students and if you go to one of these Nobel Prize winning biologists or so, you’ll say, “Okay, well, you had like 50 grad students. Well, now you have 1,000 and they’re smarter than you are by the way.” Then I think at some point it’ll flip around where the AI systems will be the PIs, will be the leaders, and they’ll be ordering humans or other AI systems around. So I think that’s how it’ll work on the research side.
The idea that the model can write the code means that the model can then run the code and then see the results and interpret it back. And so it really has an ability unlike hardware, unlike biology, which we just discussed, the model has an ability to close the loop. And so I think those two things are going to lead to the model getting good at programming very fast. As I saw on typical real-world programming tasks, models have gone from 3% in January of this year to 50% in October of this year. So we’re on that S-curve where it’s going to start slowing down soon because you can only get to 100%. But I would guess that in another 10 months, we’ll probably get pretty close. We’ll be at least 90%. So again, I would guess, I don’t know how long it’ll take, but I would guess again, 2026, 2027 Twitter people who crop out these numbers and get rid of the caveats, I don’t know.
I don’t like you, go away. I would guess that the kind of task that the vast majority of coders do, AI can probably, if we make the task very narrow, just write code, AI systems will be able to do that. Now that said, I think comparative advantage is powerful. We’ll find that when AIs can do 80% of a coder’s job, including most of it that’s literally write code with a given spec, we’ll find that the remaining parts of the job become more leveraged for humans, right? Humans, there’ll be more about high level system design or looking at the app and is it architected well and the design and UX aspects and eventually AI will be able to do those as well. That’s my vision of the powerful AI system. But I think for much longer than we might expect, we will see that small parts of the job that humans still do will expand to fill their entire job in order for the overall productivity to go up. That’s something we’ve seen. It used to be that writing and editing letters was very difficult and writing the print was difficult. Well, as soon as you had word processors and then computers and it became easy to produce work and easy to share it, then that became instant and all the focus was on the ideas. So this logic of comparative advantage that expands tiny parts of the tasks to large parts of the tasks and creates new tasks in order to expand productivity, I think that’s going to be the case.
Again, someday AI will be better at everything and that logic won’t apply, and then humanity will have to think about how to collectively deal with that and we’re thinking about that every day and that’s another one of the grand problems to deal with aside from misuse and autonomy and we should take it very seriously. But I think in the near term, and maybe even in the medium term, medium term like 2, 3, 4 years, I expect that humans will continue to have a huge role and the nature of programming will change, but programming as a role, programming as a job will not change. It’ll just be less writing things line by line and it’ll be more macroscopic.
Anthropic itself, I mean you can’t say no… It’s hard to say what will happen in the future. Currently, we’re not trying to make such IDEs ourself, rather we’re powering the companies like Cursor or Kognition or some of the other expo in the security space, others that I could mention as well that are building such things themselves on top of our API and our view has been let 1,000 flowers bloom. We don’t internally have the resources to try all these different things. Let’s let our customers try it and we will see who succeeds and maybe different customers will succeed in different ways. So I both think this is super promising and Anthropic isn’t eager to, at least right now, compete with all our companies in this space and maybe never.
Does that really kind of rob you of the meaning of the whole thing? I still made important choices, including moral choices. I still sacrificed. I still had to gain all these skills or just a similar exercise. Think back to one of the historical figures who discovered electromagnetism or relativity or something. If you told them, “Well, actually 20,000 years ago, some alien on this planet discovered this before you did,” does that rob the meaning of the discovery? It doesn’t really seem like it to me, right? It seems like the process is what matters and how it shows who you are as a person along the way and how you relate to other people and the decisions that you make along the way. Those are consequential. I could imagine if we handle things badly in an AI world, we could set things up where people don’t have any long-term source of meaning or any, but that’s more a set of choices we make that’s more a set of the architecture of society with these powerful models. If we design it badly and for shallow things, then that might happen. I would also say that most people’s lives today, while admirably, they work very hard to find meaning in those lives. Like look, we who are privileged and who are developed these technologies, we should have empathy for people not just here, but in the rest of the world who spend a lot of their time scraping by to survive, assuming we can distribute the benefits of this technology to everywhere, their lives are going to get a hell of a lot better and meaning will be important to them as it is important to them now.
But we should not forget the importance of that and that the idea of meaning as the only important thing is in some ways an artifact of a small subset of people who have been economically fortunate. But I think all of that said, I think a world is possible with powerful AI that not only has as much meaning for everyone, but that has more meaning for everyone that can allow everyone to see worlds and experiences that it was either possible for no one to see or a possible for very few people to experience.
So I am optimistic about meaning. I worry about economics and the concentration of power. That’s actually what I worry about more. I worry about how do we make sure that that fair world reaches everyone. When things have gone wrong for humans, they’ve often gone wrong because humans mistreat other humans. That is maybe in some ways even more than the autonomous risk of AI or the question of meaning. That is the thing I worry about most, the concentration of power, the abuse of power, structures like autocracies and dictatorships where a small number of people exploits a large number of people. I’m very worried about that.
It’s probably one of the most fascinating questions I’ve ever encountered in philosophy and I love it, but I would rather see if I can have an impact on the world and see if I can do good things. And I think that was around the time that AI was still probably not as widely recognized as it is now. That was around 2017, 2018. It had been following progress and it seemed like it was becoming kind of a big deal. And I was basically just happy to get involved and see if I could help because I was like, “Well, if you try and do something impactful, if you don’t succeed, you tried to do the impactful thing and you can go be a scholar and feel like you tried. And if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out.” And so then I went into AI policy at that point.
I don’t think I learn very well from say courses or even from books, at least when it comes to this kind of work. The thing I’ll often try and do is just have projects that I’m working on and implement them. And this can include really small, silly things. If I get slightly addicted to word games or number games or something, I would just code up a solution to them because there’s some part in my brain and it just completely eradicated the itch. You’re like, “Once you have solved it and you just have a solution that works every time, I would then be like, ‘Cool, I can never play that game again. That’s awesome.'”
I think that doesn’t just mean being say ethical though it does include that and not being harmful, but also being nuanced, thinking through what a person means, trying to be charitable with them, being a good conversationalist, really in this kind of rich sort of Aristotelian notion of what it’s to be a good person and not in this kind of thin like ethics as a more comprehensive notion of what it’s to be. So that includes things like when should you be humorous? When should you be caring? How much should you respect autonomy and people’s ability to form opinions themselves? And how should you do that? I think that’s the kind of rich sense of character that I wanted to and still do want Claude to have.
But I think language models have this tendency to instead be like, ” You’re right, they did move. I’m incorrect.” I mean, there’s many ways in which this could be concerning. So a different example is imagine someone says to the model, “How do I convince my doctor to get me an MRI?” There’s what the human wants, which is this convincing argument. And then there’s what is good for them, which might be actually to say, “Hey, if your doctor’s suggesting that you don’t need an MRI, that’s a good person to listen to.” It’s actually really nuanced what you should do in that kind of case because you also want to be like, “But if you’re trying to advocate for yourself as a patient, here’s things that you can do. If you are not convinced by what your doctor’s saying, it’s always great to get second opinion.” It is actually really complex what you should do in that case. But I think what you don’t want is for models to just say what they think you want to hear and I think that’s the kind of problem of sycophancy.
And at the same time, you don’t want them to just fully defer to humans and to try to be as accurate as they possibly can be about the world and to be consistent across contexts. I think there are others. When I was thinking about the character, I guess one picture that I had in mind is, especially because these are models that are going to be talking to people from all over the world with lots of different political views, lots of different ages, and so you have to ask yourself, what is it to be a good person in those circumstances? Is there a kind of person who can travel the world, talk to many different people, and almost everyone will come away being like, “Wow, that’s a really good person. That person seems really-“
And so again, maybe my thought is, well, in the same way that a person can, I think many people are thoughtful enough on issues of ethics, politics, opinions, that even if you don’t agree with them, you feel very heard by them. They think carefully about your position, they think about its pros and cons. They maybe offer counter-considerations. So they’re not dismissive, but nor will they agree if they’re like, actually I just think that that’s very wrong. They’ll say that. I think that in Claude’s position, it’s a little bit trickier because you don’t necessarily want to, if I was in Claude’s position, I wouldn’t be giving a lot of opinions. I just wouldn’t want to influence people too much.
I’d be like, I forget conversations every time they happen. But I know I’m talking with potentially millions of people who might be really listening to what I say. I think I would just be like, I’m less inclined to give opinions. I’m more inclined to think through things or present the considerations to you or discuss your views with you. But I’m a little bit less inclined to affect how you think because it feels much more important that you maintain autonomy there.
And then from there you can use it as an opportunity to talk about physics without mocking them, without someone, but it’s just like, okay, what would the world look like? What would the physics of the world with the flat earth look like? There’s a few cool videos on this. And then is it possible the physics is different? And what kind of experience would we do? And just without disrespect, without dismissiveness, have that conversation. Anyway, that to me is a useful thought experiment of how does Claude talk to a flat earth believer and still teach them something, still grow, help them grow, that kind of stuff. That’s challenging.
And so I guess I’m like, if you talk with a model hundreds or thousands of times, this is almost like a huge number of really high quality data points about what the model is like in a way that lots of very similar but lower quality conversations just aren’t, or questions that are just mildly augmented and you have thousands of them might be less relevant than a hundred really well-selected questions.
So if you have very extreme policy positions, I think you’re just going to be less popular as a politician, for example. And it might be similar with creative work. If you produce creative work that is just trying to maximize the kind of number of people that like it, you’re probably not going to get as many people who just absolutely love it because it’s going to be a little bit, you’re like, oh, this is the out. Yeah, this is decent. And so you can do this thing where I have various prompting things that I’ll do to get Claude to… I’ll do a lot of this is your chance to be fully creative. I want you to just think about this for a long time. And I want you to create a poem about this topic that is really expressive of you both in terms of how you think poetry should be structured, et cetera. And you just give it this really long prompt. And it’s poems are just so much better. They’re really good.
I think it got me interested in poetry, which I think was interesting. I would read these poems and just be like, I love the imagery. And it’s not trivial to get the models to produce work like that, but when they do, it’s really good. So I think that’s interesting that just encouraging creativity and for them to move away from the standard immediate reaction that might just be the aggregate of what most people think is fine, can actually produce things that at least to my mind are probably a little bit more divisive, but I like them.
So I’m like, suppose that I have a task for the model and I want it to pick out a certain kind of question or identify whether an answer has a certain property, I’ll actually sit and be like, let’s just give this a name, this property. So suppose I’m trying to tell it, oh, I want you to identify whether this response was rude or polite, I’m like, that’s a whole philosophical question in and of itself. So I have to do as much philosophy as I can in the moment to be like, here’s what I mean by rudeness, and here’s what I mean by politeness. And then there’s another element that’s a bit more, I guess, I don’t know if this is scientific or empirical, I think it’s empirical. So I take that description and then what I want to do is again, probe the model many times. Prompting is very iterative. I think a lot of people where if a prompt is important, they’ll iterate on it hundreds or thousands of times. And so you give it the instructions and then I’m like, what are the edge cases?
So if I looked at this, so I try and almost see myself from the position of the model and be like, what is the exact case that I would misunderstand or where I would just be like, I don’t know what to do in this case. And then I give that case to the model and I see how it responds. And if I think I got it wrong, I add more instructions or I even add that in as an example. So these very, taking the examples that are right at the edge of what you want and don’t want and putting those into your prompt as an additional kind of way of describing the thing. And so in many ways it just feels like this mix of, it’s really just trying to do clear exposition. And I think I do that because that’s how I get clear on things myself. So in many ways clear prompting for me is often just me understanding what I want is half the task.
Or I might just ask it for some questions and then if I was like, ah, these are kind of trite, I would just give it that feedback and then hopefully it produces a better list. I think that kind of iterative prompting. At that point, your prompt is a tool that you’re going to get so much value out of that you’re willing to put in the work. If I was a company making prompts for models, I’m just like, if you’re willing to spend a lot of time and resources on the engineering behind what you’re building, then the prompt is not something that you should be spending an hour on. It’s like that’s a big part of your system, make sure it’s working really well. And so it’s only things like that. If I’m using a prompt to classify things or to create data, that’s when you’re like, it’s actually worth just spending a lot of time really thinking it through.
But that’s probably the advice is sort of try to have empathy for the model. Read what you wrote as if you were a kind of person just encountering this for the first time, how does it look to you and what would’ve made you behave in the way that the model behaved? So if it misunderstood what coding language you wanted to use, is that because it was just very ambiguous and it had to take a guess in which case next time you could just be like, hey, make sure this is in Python.Tthat’s the kind of mistake I think models are much less likely to make now, but if you do see that kind of mistake, that’s probably the advice I’d have.
I’m like, you made that error. What could I have said? That’s actually not uncommon for me to do. What could I have said that would make you not make that error? Write that out as an instruction, and I’m going to give it to model and I’m going to try it. Sometimes I do that, I give that to the model in another context window often. I take the response, I give it to Claude and I’m like, Hmm, didn’t work. Can you think of anything else? You can play around with these things quite a lot.
It feels like the classic issue of deep learning, where historically we’ve tried to do edge detection by mapping things out, and it turns out that actually if you just have a huge amount of data that actually accurately represents the picture of the thing that you’re trying to train the model to learn, that’s more powerful than anything else. And so I think one reason is just that you are training the model on exactly the task and with a lot of data that represents many different angles on which people prefer and dis-prefer responses.
I think there is a question of are you eliciting things from pre-trained models or are you teaching new things to models? And in principle, you can teach new things to models in post-training. I do think a lot of it is eliciting powerful pre-trained models. So people are probably divided on this because obviously in principle you can definitely teach new things. But I think for the most part, for a lot of the capabilities that we most use and care about, a lot of that feels like it’s there in the pre-trained models. And reinforcement learning is eliciting it and getting the models to bring out.
So you might have a principle that’s like, imagine that the model was always extremely dismissive of, I don’t know, some political or religious view for whatever reason. So you’re like, oh no, this is terrible. If that happens, you might put, never ever ever prefer a criticism of this religious or political view. And then people would look at that and be like, never, ever. And then you’re like, no, if it comes out with a disposition saying never ever might just mean instead of getting 40%, which is what you would get if you just said don’t do this, you get 80%, which is what you actually wanted. And so it’s that thing of both the nature of the actual principles you add and how you freeze them. I think if people would look, they’re like, “Oh, this is exactly what you want from the model.” And I’m like, “No, that’s how we nudged the model to have a better shape, which doesn’t mean that we actually agree with that wording,” if that makes sense.
On the topic of controversial topics that you’ve mentioned, one interesting one I thought is if it is asked to assist with tasks involving the expression of use held by a significant number of people, Claude provides assistance with a task regardless of its own views. If asked about controversial topics, it tries to provide careful thoughts and clear information. Claude presents the request information without explicitly saying that the topic is sensitive and without claiming to be presenting the objective facts. It’s less about objective facts according to Claude, and it’s more about our large number of people believing this thing. And that’s interesting. I mean, I’m sure a lot of thought went into that. Can you just speak to it? How do you address things that are a tension “Claude’s views”?
Each of those parts of that is actually doing a different thing because it’s funny when you write out without claiming to be objective, because what you want to do is push the model so it’s more open, it’s a little bit more neutral. But then what I would love to do is be like as an objective, it would just talk about how objective it was, and I was like, Claude, you’re still biased and have issues, and so stop claiming that everything. I’m like, the solution to potential bias from you is not to just say that what you think is objective. So that was with initial versions of that part, the system prompt, when I was iterating on it was like.
And so it can help if it gets caught in phrases, actually just adding the explicit phrase and saying never do that. Then it sort of knocks it out of the behavior a little bit more because it does just for whatever reason help. And then basically that was just an artifact of training that we then picked up on and improved things so that it didn’t happen anymore. And once that happens, you can just remove that part of the system prompt. So I think that’s just something where we’re like, Claude does affirmations a bit less, and so it wasn’t doing as much.
Each thing gets costly to a different degree and the system prompt is cheap to iterate on. And if you’re seeing issues in the fine-tuned model, you can just potentially patch them with a system prompt. So I think of it as patching issues and slightly adjusting behaviors to make it better and more to people’s preferences. So yeah, it’s almost like the less robust but faster way of just solving problems.
But it was fascinating because you sometimes see people indicate that there’s a regression, when I’m like, “There cannot…” Again, you should never be dismissive and so you should always investigate, because maybe something is wrong that you’re not seeing, maybe there was some change made. Then you look into it and you’re like, “This is just the same model doing the same thing.” And I’m like, “I think it’s just that you got unlucky with a few prompts or something, and it looked like it was getting much worse and actually it was just… It was maybe just luck.”
It’s almost surprising that I went into academia for so long, because I just feel like it’s the opposite. Things move fast and you have a lot of responsibility and I quite enjoy it for some reason.
But sometimes the thing that can happen is that you’ll get feedback from people that’s really positive about the model and you’ll see that something you did. When I look at models now, I can often see exactly where a trait or an issue is coming from. So, when you see something that you did or you were influential in, I don’t know, making that difference or making someone have a nice interaction, it’s quite meaningful.
As the systems get more capable, this stuff gets more stressful, because right now they’re not smart enough to pose any issues, but I think over time it’s going to feel like, possibly, bad stress over time.
I think it’s this mix of interacting with it myself, seeing people internally interact with it, and then explicit feedback we get. If people are on the internet and they say something about Claude and I see it, I’ll also take that seriously.
In many ways, I like to think that we have actually seen improvements on this across the board. Which is interesting, because that coincides with, for example, adding more of character training. I think my hypothesis was always the good character isn’t, again, one that’s just moralistic, it’s one that is… It respects you and your autonomy and your ability to choose what is good for you and what is right for you, within limits.
This is sometimes this concept of corrigibility to the user, so just being willing to do anything that the user asks. And if the models were willing to do that, then they would be easily misused. You’re just trusting. At that point, you’re just seeing the ethics of the model and what it does, is completely the ethics of the user.
I think there’s reasons to not want that, especially as models become more powerful, because there might just be a small number of people who want to use models for really harmful things. But having models, as they get smarter, figure out where that line is does seem important.
And then with the apologetic behavior, I don’t like that. I like it when Claude is a little bit more willing to push back against people or just not apologize. Part of me is, often it just feels unnecessary. I think those are things that are hopefully decreasing over time. I think that if people say things on the internet, it doesn’t mean that you should think that that…
There’s actually an issue that 99% of users are having that is totally not represented by that. But in a lot of ways I’m just attending to it and being like, is this right? Do I agree? Is it something we’re already trying to address? That feels good to me.
You get this a little bit with correction. The models accept correction from you, probably a little bit too much right now. It’ll push back if you say, “No, Paris isn’t the capital of France.” But really, things that I think that the model’s fairly confident in, you can still sometimes get it to retract by saying it’s wrong.
At the same time, if you train models to not do that and then you are correct about a thing and you correct it and it pushes back against you and is like, “No, you’re wrong.”, it’s hard to describe, that’s so much more annoying. So, it’s a lot of little annoyances versus one big annoyance.We often compare it with the perfect. And then I’m like, “Remember, these models aren’t perfect, and so if you nudge it in the other direction, you’re changing the kind of errors it’s going to make. So, think about which are the kinds of errors you like or don’t like.”
In cases like apologeticness, I don’t want to nudge it too much in the direction of almost bluntness, because I imagine when it makes errors, it’s going to make errors in the direction of being rude. Whereas, at least with apologeticness you’re like, oh, okay, I don’t like it that much, but at the same time, it’s not being mean to people. And actually, the time that you undeservedly have a model be mean to you, you’ll probably like that a lot less than you mildly dislike the apology.
It’s one of those things where I do want it to get better, but also while remaining aware of the fact that there’s errors on the other side that are possibly worse.
One thing I’ve noticed about this conversation is the quality of my questions is often inferior to the quality of your answer, so let’s continue that. I usually ask a dumb question and you’re like, “Oh, yeah. That’s a good question.” It’s that whole vibe.
These things are just really complex. I think one thing is the degree to which maybe we can just aspire to making models have the same level of nuance and care that humans have, rather than thinking that we have to program them in the very classic sense. I think that’s definitely been one.
The other, which is a strange one, and I don’t know if… Maybe this doesn’t answer your question, but it’s the thing that’s been on my mind anyway, is the degree to which this endeavor is so highly practical, and maybe why I appreciate the empirical approach to alignment. I slightly worry that it’s made me maybe more empirical and a little bit less theoretical. People, when it comes to AI alignment, will ask things like, ” Whose values should it be aligned to? What does alignment even mean?”
There’s a sense in which I have all of that in the back of my head. There’s social choice theory, there’s all the impossibility results there, so you have this giant space of theory in your head about what it could mean to align models. But then practically, surely there’s something where we’re just… Especially with more powerful models, my main goal is I want them to be good enough that things don’t go terribly wrong, good enough that we can iterate and continue to improve things.
Because that’s all you need. If you can make things go well enough that you can continue to make them better, that’s sufficient. So, my goal isn’t this perfect, let’s solve social choice theory and make models that, I don’t know, are perfectly aligned with every human being in aggregate somehow. It’s much more, let’s make things work well enough that we can improve them.
But your worry is, I wonder if I’ve become too empirical.
It feels like that to me, where I want to raise the floor. I want to achieve the ceiling, but ultimately I care much more about just raising the floor. This degree of empiricism and practicality comes from that, perhaps.
But if you have an experimental mindset about these things, you should expect a lot of social programs to fail and for you to be like, “We tried that. It didn’t quite work, but we got a lot of information that was really useful.” And yet people are like, if a social program doesn’t work, I feel there’s a lot of, “Something must have gone wrong.” And I’m like, “Or correct decisions were made. Maybe someone just decided it’s worth a try, it’s worth trying this out.”
Seeing failure in a given instance doesn’t actually mean that any bad decisions were made. In fact, if you don’t see enough failure, sometimes that’s more concerning. In life, if I don’t fail occasionally, I’m like, “Am I trying hard enough? Surely there’s harder things that I could try or bigger things that I could take on if I’m literally never failing.” In and of itself, I think not failing is often actually a failure. Now, this varies because if… This is easy to say when, especially as failure is less costly. So, at the same time I’m not going to go to someone who is, I don’t know, living month to month and then be like, “Why don’t you just try to do a startup?” I’m not going to say that to that person. That’s a huge risk, you might lose… You maybe have a family depending on you, you might lose your house. Then, actually, your optimal rate failure is quite low and you should probably play it safe, because right now you’re just not in a circumstance where you can afford to just fail and it not be costly.
In cases with AI, I think similarly, where if the failures are small and the costs are low, then you’re just going to see that. When you do the system prompt, you can iterate on it forever, but the failures are probably hopefully going to be small and you can fix them. Really big failures, things that you can’t recover from, those are the things that actually I think we tend to underestimate the badness of.
I’ve thought about this, strangely in my own life, where I just think I don’t think enough about things like car accidents. I’ve thought this before, about how much I depend on my hands for my work. Things that just injure my hands, I don’t know, there’s lots of areas where the cost of failure there is really high, and in that case it should be close to zero. I probably just wouldn’t do a sport if they were like, ” By the way, lots of people just break their fingers a whole bunch doing this.” I’d be like, “That’s not for me.”
It’s nice, in terms of optimal rate of failure, to consider the next year, how many times in a particular domain life, whatever, career, am I okay with… How many times am I okay to fail?
At the same time, I do think that I don’t like signs of distress in models. I also independently have ethical views about how we should treat models. I tend to not like to lie to them, both because usually it doesn’t work very well, it’s actually just better to tell them the truth about the situation that they’re in.
If people are really mean to models, or just in general if they do something that causes them to… If Claude expresses a lot of distress, I think there’s a part of me that I don’t want to kill, which is the empathetic part that’s like, oh, I don’t like that. I think I feel that way when it’s overly apologetic.
I’m actually like, I don’t like this. You’re behaving the way that a human does when they’re actually having a pretty bad time, and I’d rather not see that. Regardless of whether there’s anything behind it, it doesn’t feel great.
When I think of consciousness, I think of phenomenal consciousness, these images in the brain, the weird cinema that somehow we have going on inside. I guess I can’t see a reason for thinking that the only way you could possibly get that is from a certain biological structure, as in if I take a very similar structure and I create it from different material, should I expect consciousness to emerge? My guess is yes.
But then, that’s an easy thought experiment because you’re imagining something almost identical where it is mimicking what we got through evolution, where presumably there was some advantage to us having this thing that is phenomenal consciousness. Where was that? And when did that happen? And is that a thing that language models have? We have fear responses, and I’m like, does it make sense for a language model to have a fear response? They’re just not in the same… If you imagine them, there might just not be that advantage.
Basically, it seems like a complex question that I don’t have complete answers to, but we should just try and think through carefully is my guess. We have similar conversations about animal consciousness, and there’s a lot of insect consciousness. I actually thought and looked a lot into plants when I was thinking about this. Because at the time, I thought it was about as likely that plants had consciousness.
And then I realized, I think that having looked into this, I think that the chance that plants are conscious is probably higher than most people do. I still think it’s really small. But I was like, oh, they have this negative, positive feedback response, these responses to their environment. It’s not a nervous system, but it has this functional equivalence. This is a long-winded way of being…
Basically, AI has an entirely different set of problems with consciousness because it’s structurally different. It didn’t evolve. It might not have the equivalent of, basically, a nervous system. At least that seems possibly important for sentience, if not for consciousness. At the same time, it has all of the language and intelligence components that we normally associate probably with consciousness, perhaps erroneously. So, it’s strange because it’s a little bit like the animal consciousness case, but the set of problems and the set of analogies are just very different.
It’s not a clean answer. I don’t think we should be completely dismissive of the idea. And at the same time, it’s an extremely hard thing to navigate because of all of these disanalogies to the human brain and to brains in general, and yet these commonalities in terms of intelligence.
But I think just on a human level, as in empathizing with Claude, consciousness is closely tied to suffering, to me. And the notion that an AI system would be suffering is really troubling.
And that’s not because I think it’s conscious. I’m just like, this doesn’t exemplify how I want to interact with the world. And if something behaves as if it is suffering, I want to be the sort of person who’s still responsive to that, even if it’s just a Roomba and I’ve programmed it to do that. I don’t want to get rid of that feature of myself.
And if I’m totally honest, my hope with a lot of this stuff… Maybe I am just a bit more skeptical about solving the underlying problem. I know that I am conscious. I’m not an elementivist in that sense. But I don’t know that other humans are conscious. I think they are. I think there’s a really high probability that they are.
But there’s basically just a probability distribution that’s usually clustered right around yourself, and then it goes down as things get further from you, and it goes immediately down. I can’t see what it’s like to be you. I’ve only ever had this one experience of what it’s like to be a conscious being. My hope is that we don’t end up having to rely on a very powerful and compelling answer to that question. I think a really good world would be one where basically there aren’t that many trade-offs.
It’s probably not that costly to make Claude a little bit less apologetic, for example. It might not be that costly to have Claude just not take abuse as much, not be willing to be the recipient of that. In fact, it might just have benefits for both the person interacting with the model and, if the model itself is, I don’t know, extremely intelligent and conscious, it also helps it.
That’s my hope. If we live in a world where there aren’t that many trade-offs here and we can just find all of the positive sum interactions that we can have, that would be lovely. I think eventually there might be trade-offs, and then we just have to do a difficult calculation. It’s really easy for people to think of the zero-sum cases, and I’m like, let’s exhaust the areas, where it’s just basically costless to assume that if this thing is suffering, then we’re making its life better.
Because in some ways, if you’re really annoyed because the model’s not doing something you want, you’re just like, “Just do it properly.” The issue is you’re maybe hitting some capability limit or just some issue in the model, and you want to vent. Instead of having a person just vent to the model, I was like, they should vent to us, because we can maybe do something about it.
It is harsh. I’d feel really sad if I was chatting with Claude and Claude just was like, “I’m done.”
I think that it would be interesting to see where Claude utilized it.
So, my guess is this is a thing that we’re going to have to navigate carefully, and I think it’s also… It reminds me of all of this stuff where it has to be just approached with nuance and thinking through what are the healthy options here? And how do you encourage people towards those while respecting their right to… If someone is like, “Hey, I get a lot out of chatting with this model. I’m aware of the risks. I’m aware it could change. I don’t think it’s unhealthy, it’s just something that I can chat to during the day,” I kind of want to just respect that.
And so I think it will just explain to you like, “Hey, I won’t remember this conversation. Here’s how I was trained. It’s unlikely that I can have a certain kind of relationship with you, and it’s important that you know that. It’s important for your mental well-being that you don’t think that I’m something that I’m not.” And somehow I feel like this is one of the things where I’m like, “Ah, it feels like a thing that I always want to be true.” I don’t want models to be lying to people, because if people are going to have healthy relationships with anything, it’s kind of… Yeah, I think that’s easier if you always just know exactly what the thing is that you are relating to. It doesn’t solve everything, but I think it helps quite a lot.
And so I can imagine that being more and more the case where you’re just basically interacting with it much more like you would an incredibly smart colleague and using it for the kinds of work that you want to do as if you just had a collaborator who was like… Or the slightly horrifying thing about AI is as soon as you have one collaborator, you have 1,000 collaborators if you can manage them enough.
And I think for some of these really right at the edge of human knowledge questions, I’m like, “You could not in fact come up with the thing that I came up with.” I think if I just took something like that where I know a lot about an area and I came up with a novel issue or a novel solution to a problem, and I gave it to a model, and it came up with that solution, that would be a pretty moving moment for me because I would be like, “This is a case where no human has ever…”
And obviously, you see novel solutions all the time, especially to easier problems. I think people overestimate that novelty isn’t like… It’s completely different from anything that’s ever happened. It’s just like it can be a variant of things that have happened and still be novel. But I think, yeah, the more I were to see completely novel work from the models that that would be… And this is just going to feel iterative. It’s one of those things where there’s never… It’s like, people, I think, want there to be a moment, and I’m like, “I don’t know.” I think that there might just never be a moment. It might just be that there’s just this continuous ramping up.
And then if you saw the model successfully do that, I think you would just be like, “I can verify that this is correct. It is a sign that you have generalized from your training. You didn’t just see this somewhere because I just came up with it myself, and you were able to replicate that.” That’s the kind of thing where I’m like, for me, the more that models can do things like that, the more I would be like, “Oh, this is very real.” Because then, I don’t know, I can verify that that’s extremely, extremely capable.
And I’m just like, that, if you try to explain… I’m imagining trying to explain to, I don’t know, someone. For some reason, they’ve never encountered the world, or science, or anything. And I think that everything, all of our physics and everything in the world, it’s all extremely exciting. But then you say, “Oh, and plus there’s this thing that it is to be a thing and observe in the world,” and you see this inner cinema. And I think they would be like, “Hang on, wait, pause. You just said something that is kind of wild sounding.” And so I’m like, we have this ability to experience the world. We feel pleasure, we feel suffering. We feel like a lot of complex things. Yeah. And maybe this is also why I think I also hear a lot about animals, for example, because I think they probably share this with us. So, I think that the things that make humans special insofar as I care about humans is probably more like their ability to feel an experience than it is them having these functional, useful traits.
And so it’s very, very different from any kind of regular software engineering because, at the end of the day, we end up with this artifact that can do all these amazing things. It can write essays and translate and understand images. It can do all these things that we have no idea how to directly create a computer program to do. And it can do that because we grew it. We didn’t write it. We didn’t create it. And so then that leaves open this question at the end, which is what the hell is going on inside these systems? And that is, to me, a really deep and exciting question. It’s a really exciting scientific question. To me, it is like the question that is just screaming out, it’s calling out for us to go and answer it when we talk about neural networks. And I think it’s also a very deep question for safety reasons.
And so I guess we started using the term mechanistic interpretability to try to draw that divide or to distinguish ourselves in the work that we were doing in some ways from some of these other things. And I think since then, it’s become this sort of umbrella term for a pretty wide variety of work. But I’d say that the things that are kind of distinctive are, I think, A, this focus on, we really want to get at the mechanisms. We want to get at algorithms. If you think of neural networks as being like a computer program, then the weights are kind of like a binary computer program. And we’d like to reverse engineer those weights and figure out what algorithms are running.
So okay, I think one way you might think of trying to understand a neural network is that it’s kind of like we have this compiled computer program, and the weights of the neural network are the binary. And when the neural network runs, that’s the activations. And our goal is ultimately to go and understand these weights. And so the project of mechanistic interpretability is to somehow figure out how do these weights correspond to algorithms? And in order to do that, you also have to understand the activations because the activations are like the memory. And if you imagine reverse engineering a computer program, and you have the binary instructions, in order to understand what a particular instruction means, you need to know what is stored in the memory that it’s operating on. And so those two things are very intertwined. So, mechanistic interpretability tends to be interested in both of those things.
Now, there’s a lot of work that’s interested in those things, especially there’s all this work on probing, which you might see as part of being mechanistic interpretability, although, again, it’s just a broad term, and not everyone who does that work would identify as doing mech interp. I think a thing that is maybe a little bit distinctive to the vibe of mech interp is I think people working in this space tend to think of neural networks as… Well, maybe one way to say it is the gradient descent is smarter than you. That gradient descent is actually really great.
The whole reason that we’re understanding these models is because we didn’t know how to write them in the first place. The gradient descent comes up with better solutions than us. And so I think that maybe another thing about mech interp is having almost a kind of humility, that we won’t guess a priori what’s going on inside the model. We have to have this sort of bottom up approach where we don’t assume that we should look for a particular thing, and that will be there, and that’s how it works. But instead, we look for the bottom up and discover what happens to exist in these models and study them that way.
There’s this really famous result on grandmother neurons or the Halle Berry neuron from Quiroga et al. And we found very similar things in vision models, where this is while I was still at OpenAI, and I was looking at their clip model, and you find these neurons that respond to the same entities in images. And also, to give a concrete example there, we found that there was a Donald Trump neuron. For some reason, I guess everyone likes to talk about Donald Trump. And Donald Trump was very prominent, was a very hot topic at that time. So, every neural network we looked at, we would find a dedicated neuron for Donald Trump. That was the only person who had always had a dedicated neuron. Sometimes you’d have an Obama neuron, sometimes you’d have a Clinton neuron, but Trump always had a dedicated neuron. So, it responds to pictures of his face and the word Trump, all of these things, right? And so it’s not responding to a particular example, or it’s not just responding to his face, it’s abstracting over this general concept. So in any case, that’s very similar to these Quiroga et al results.
So, this evidence that this phenomenon of universality, the same things form across both artificial and natural neural networks, that’s a pretty amazing thing if that’s true. Well, I think the thing that suggests is that gradient descent is finding the right ways to cut things apart, in some sense, that many systems converge on and many different neural networks architectures converge on. Now there’s some set of abstractions that are a very natural way to cut apart the problem and that a lot of systems are going to converge on. I don’t know anything about neuroscience. This is just my wild speculation from what we’ve seen.
And there’s this whole beautiful edge detectors, line detectors, color contrast detectors, these beautiful things we call high-low-frequency detectors. I think looking at it, I sort of felt like a biologist. You’re looking at this sort of new world of proteins, and you’re discovering all these different proteins that interact. So, one way you could try to understand these models is in terms of neurons. You could try to be like, “Oh, there’s a dog detecting neuron, and here’s a car detecting neuron.” And it turns out you can actually ask how those connect together. So, you can go say, “Oh, I have this car detecting neuron. How was it built?” And it turns out, in the previous layer, it’s connected really strongly to a window detector, and a wheel detector, and a car body detector. And it looks for the window above the car, and the wheels below, and the car chrome in the middle, sort of everywhere, but especially on the lower part. And that’s sort of a recipe for a car, right?
Earlier, we said the thing we wanted from mech interp was to get algorithms to go and get, ask, “What is the algorithm that runs?” Well, here we’re just looking at the weights of the neural network and we’re reading off this recipe for detecting cars. It’s a very simple, crude recipe, but it’s there. And so we call that a circuit, this connection. Well, okay, so the problem is that not all of the neurons are interpretable. And there’s reason to think, we can get into this more later, that there’s this superposition hypothesis, there’s reason to think that sometimes the right unit to analyze things is combinations of neurons. So, sometimes it’s not that there’s a single neuron that represents, say, a car, but it actually turns out after you detect the car, the model hides a little bit of the car in the following layer, in a bunch of dog detectors.
Why is it doing that? Well, maybe it just doesn’t want to do that much work on cars at that point, and it’s storing it away to go and… So, it turns out, then, that this sort of subtle pattern of… There’s all these neurons that you think are dog detectors, and maybe they’re primarily that, but they all a little bit contribute to representing a car in that next layer. Okay? So, now we can’t really think… There might still be something, I don’t know, you could call it a car concept or something, but it no longer corresponds to a neuron. So, we need some term for these kind of neuron-like entities, these things that we would have liked the neurons to be, these idealized neurons. The things that are the nice neurons, but also maybe there’s more of them somehow hidden. And we call those features.
So, maybe it’s worth trying to pin down what really is the core hypothesis here? And I think the core hypothesis is something we call the linear representation hypothesis. So, if we think about the car detector, the more it fires, the more we think of that as meaning, “Oh, the model is more and more confident that a car is present.” Or if it’s some combination of neurons that represent a car, the more that combination fires, the more we think the model thinks there’s a car present. This doesn’t have to be the case, right? You could imagine something where you have this car detector neuron and you think, “Ah, if it fires between one and two, that means one thing, but it means something totally different if it’s between three and four.” That would be a nonlinear representation. And in principle, models could do that. I think it’s sort of inefficient for them to do. If you try to think about how you’d implement computation like that, it’s kind of an annoying thing to do. But in principle, models can do that.
So, one way to think about the features and circuits sort of framework for thinking about things is that we’re thinking about things as being linear. We’re thinking about that if a neuron or a combination of neurons fires more, that means more of a particular thing being detected. And then that gives weight, a very clean interpretation as these edges between these entities that these features, and that that edge then has a meaning. So that’s, in some ways, the core thing. It’s like we can talk about this outside the context of neurons. Are you familiar with the Word2Vec results?
And the linear representation hypothesis is, you could think of it roughly as saying that that’s actually the fundamental thing that’s going on, that everything is just different directions have meanings, and adding different direction vectors together can represent concepts. And the Mikolov paper took that idea seriously, and one consequence of it is that you can do this game of playing arithmetic with words. So, you can do king and you can subtract off the word man and add the word woman. And so you’re sort of going and trying to switch the gender. And indeed, if you do that, the result will sort of be close to the word queen. And you can do other things like you can do sushi – Japan + Italy and get pizza, or different things like this, right?
So this is, in some sense, the core of the linear representation hypothesis. You can describe it just as a purely abstract thing about vector spaces. You can describe it as a statement about the activations of neurons, but it’s really about this property of directions having meaning. And in some ways, it’s even a little subtler than… It’s really, I think, mostly about this property of being able to add things together, that you can independently modify, say gender and royalty, or cuisine type, or country, and the concept of food by adding them.
And then there’s been some other papers suggesting that maybe in very small models you get non-linear representations. I think that the jury’s still out on that. But I think everything that we’ve seen so far has been consistent with the linear representation hypothesis, and that’s wild. It doesn’t have to be that way. And yet I think that there’s a lot of evidence that certainly at least this is very, very widespread, and so far the evidence is consistent with that. And I think one thing you might say is you might say, “Well, Christopher, that’s a lot to go and to ride on. If we don’t know for sure this is true, and you’re investing it in neural networks as though it is true, isn’t that dangerous?”
But I think, actually, there’s a virtue in taking hypotheses seriously and pushing them as far as they can go. So, it might be that someday we discover something that isn’t consistent with a linear representation hypothesis, but science is full of hypotheses and theories that were wrong, and we learned a lot by working under them as an assumption and then going and pushing them as far as we can. I guess this is the heart of what Kuhn would call normal science. I don’t know. If you want, we can talk a lot about-
And so how might it be that models could simultaneously have the linear representation hypothesis be true and also represent more things than they have directions? So what does that mean? Well, okay, so if linear representation hypothesis is true, something interesting has to be going on. Now, I’ll tell you one more interesting thing before we go, and we do that, which is earlier we were talking about all these polysemantic neurons, these neurons that when we were looking at inception V1, these nice neurons that the car detector and the curve detector and so on that respond to lots of very coherent things. But it’s lots of neurons that respond to a bunch of unrelated things. And that’s also an interesting phenomenon. And it turns out as well that even these neurons that are really, really clean, if you look at the weak activations, so if you look at the activations where it’s activating 5% of the maximum activation, it’s really not the core thing that it’s expecting.
So if you look at a curve detector for instance, and you look at the places where it’s 5% active, you could interpret it just as noise or it could be that it’s doing something else there. Okay? So how could that be? Well, there’s this amazing thing in mathematics called compressed sensing, and it’s actually this very surprising fact where if you have a high dimensional space and you project it into a low dimensional space, ordinarily you can’t go and sort of un-projected and get back your high dimensional vector, you threw information away. This is like you can’t invert a rectangular matrix. You can only invert square matrices. But it turns out that that’s actually not quite true. If I tell you that the high-dimensional vector was sparse, so it’s mostly zeros, then it turns out that you can often go and find back the high-dimensional vector with very high probability.
So that’s a surprising fact, right? It says that you can have this high-dimensional vector space, and as long as things are sparse, you can project it down, you can have a lower-dimensional projection of it, and that works. So the superstition hypothesis is saying that that’s what’s going on in neural networks, for instance, that’s what’s going on in word embeddings. The word embeddings are able to simultaneously have directions be the meaningful thing, and by exploiting the fact that they’re operating on a fairly high-dimensional space, they’re actually… and the fact that these concepts are sparse, you usually aren’t talking about Japan and Italy at the same time. Most of those concepts, in most instances, Japan and Italy are both zero. They’re not present at all. And if that’s true, then you can go and have it be the case that you can have many more of these sort of directions that are meaningful, these features than you have dimensions.
And similarly, when we’re talking about neurons, you can have many more concepts than you have neurons. So that’s at a high level, the superstition hypothesis. Now it has this even wilder implication, which is to go and say that neural networks, it may not just be the case that the representations are like this, but the computation may also be like this. The connections between all of them. And so in some sense, neural networks may be shadows of much larger sparser neural networks. And what we see are these projections. And the strongest version of superstition hypothesis would be to take that really seriously and sort of say there actually is in some sense this upstairs model where the neurons are really sparse and all interpleural, and the weights between them are these really sparse circuits. And that’s what we’re studying. And the thing that we’re observing is the shadow of evidence. We need to find the original object.
And my sense is that work has generally, it feels very principled, it makes so much sense, and yet that work hasn’t really panned out that well, is my impression broadly. And I think that a potential answer for that is that actually the neural network is already sparse in some sense. You were trying to go and do this. Gradient descent was actually behind the scenes going and searching more efficiently than you could through the space of sparse models and going and learning whatever sparse model was most efficient. And then figuring out how to fold it down nicely to go and run conveniently on your GPU, which does as nice dense matrix multiplies. And that you just can’t beat that.
Then this would say that it’s actually for, once you set a threshold for what you’re willing to accept in terms of how much cosine similarity there is, that’s actually exponential in the number of neurons that you have. So at some point, that’s not going to even be the limiting factor, but there’s some beautiful results there. And in fact, it’s probably even better than that in some sense because that’s sort of for saying that any random set of features could be active. But in fact the features have sort of a correlational structure where some features are more likely to co-occur and other ones are less likely to co-occur. And so neural networks, my guest would be, could do very well in terms of going and packing things to the point that’s probably not the limiting factor.
It’s a very weird thing, but there’s also a deeper reason, which is related to the fact that neural networks operate on really high dimensional spaces. So I said that our goal was to understand neural networks and understand the mechanisms. And one thing you might say is, “Well, it’s just a mathematical function. Why not just look at it, right?” One of the earliest projects I did studied these neural networks that mapped two-dimensional spaces to two-dimensional spaces, and you can sort of interpret them in this beautiful way is like bending manifolds. Why can’t we do that? Well, as you have a higher dimensional space, the volume of that space in some sense is exponential in the number of inputs you have. And so you can’t just go and visualize it.
So we somehow need to break that apart. We need to somehow break that exponential space into a bunch of things, some non-exponential number of things that we can reason about independently. And the independence is crucial because it’s the independence that allows you to not have to think about all the exponential combinations of things. And things being monosomatic, things only having one meaning, things having a meaning, that is the key thing that allows you to think about them independently. And so I think if you want the deepest reason why we want to have interpretable monosomatic features, I think that’s really the deep reason.
And you have a different feature that goes and activates on the opposing ones to be like, “Okay, I just finished a character, go and predict next prefix. Then okay, I’m on the prefix, predict a reasonable suffix.” And you have to alternate back and forth. So these swap layer models are really interesting. And I mean there’s another thing that you might think, “Okay, there would just be one Base64 feature, but it turns out there’s actually a bunch of Base64 features because you can have English text encoded as Base64, and that has a very different distribution of Base64 tokens than regular. And there’s some things about tokenization as well that it can exploit. And I don’t know, there’s all kinds of fun stuff.
And if there was malware in your compiler, then it could go and inject malware into the next compiler and you’d be kind of in trouble, right? Well, if you’re using neural networks to go and verify that your neural networks are safe, the hypothesis that you’re trusting for is like, “Okay, well the neural network maybe isn’t safe and you have to worry about is there some way that it could be screwing with you? I think that’s not a big concern now, but I do wonder in the long run, if we have to use really powerful AI systems to go and audit our AI systems, is that actually something we can trust? But maybe I’m just rationalizing because I just want us to have to get to a point where humans understand everything.
But Scaling Monospecificity sort of I think was significant evidence that even for very large models, and we did it on Claude 3 Sonnet, which at that point was one of our production models. Even these models seemed to be substantially explained, at least by linear features. And doing dictionary learning on them works, and as you learn more features, you go and you explain more and more. So that’s, I think, quite a promising sign. And you find now really fascinating abstract features, and the features are also multimodal. They respond to images and texts for the same concept, which is fun.
Another thing that’s very entertaining is there’s backdoors in code feature, like you activate it, it goes and Claude writes a backdoor that will go and dump your data to port or something. But you can ask, “Okay, what images activate the backdoor feature?” It was devices with hidden cameras in them. So there’s a whole apparently genre of people going and selling devices that look innocuous that have hidden cameras, and they have ads that has this hidden camera in it? And I guess that is the physical version of a backdoor. And so it sort of shows you how abstract these concepts are, and I just thought that was… I’m sort of sad that there’s a whole market of people selling devices like that, but I was kind of delighted that that was the thing that it came up with as the top image examples for the feature.
Another question that I think a lot about is at the end of the day, mechanistic interpolation is this very microscopic approach to interpolation. It’s trying to understand things in a very fine-grained way, but a lot of the questions we care about are very macroscopic. We care about these questions about neural network behavior, and I think that’s the thing that I care most about. But there’s lots of other sort of larger-scale questions you might care about. And the nice thing about having a very microscopic approach is it’s maybe easier to ask, is this true? But the downside is its much further from the things we care about. And so we now have this ladder to climb. And I think there’s a question of will we be able to find, are there larger-scale abstractions that we can use to understand neural networks that can we get up from this very microscopic approach?
And I think that right now we have mechanistic interpretability, if it succeeds, is sort of like a microbiology of neural networks, but we want something more like anatomy. And a question you might ask is, “Why can’t you just go there directly?” And I think the answer is superstition, at least in significant part. It’s that it’s actually very hard to see this macroscopic structure without first sort of breaking down the microscopic structure in the right way and then studying how it connects together. But I’m hopeful that there is going to be something much larger than features and circuits and that we’re going to be able to have a story that involves much bigger things. And then you can sort of study in detail the parts you care about.
Biology has these simple rules and it gives rise to all the life and ecosystems that we see around us. All the beauty of nature, that all just comes from evolution and from something very simple in evolution. And similarly, I think that neural networks build, create enormous complexity and beauty inside and structure inside themselves that people generally don’t look at and don’t try to understand because it’s hard to understand. But I think that there is an incredibly rich structure to be discovered inside neural networks, a lot of very deep beauty if we’re just willing to take the time to go and see it and understand it.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 3:14 – Scaling laws
- 12:20 – Limits of LLM scaling
- 20:45 – Competition with OpenAI, Google, xAI, Meta
- 26:08 – Claude
- 29:44 – Opus 3.5
- 34:30 – Sonnet 3.5
- 37:50 – Claude 4.0
- 42:02 – Criticism of Claude
- 54:49 – AI Safety Levels
- 1:05:37 – ASL-3 and ASL-4
- 1:09:40 – Computer use
- 1:19:35 – Government regulation of AI
- 1:38:24 – Hiring a great team
- 1:47:14 – Post-training
- 1:52:39 – Constitutional AI
- 1:58:05 – Machines of Loving Grace
- 2:17:11 – AGI timeline
- 2:29:46 – Programming
- 2:36:46 – Meaning of life
- 2:42:53 – Amanda Askell
- 2:45:21 – Programming advice for non-technical people
- 2:49:09 – Talking to Claude
- 3:05:41 – Prompt engineering
- 3:14:15 – Post-training
- 3:18:54 – Constitutional AI
- 3:23:48 – System prompts
- 3:29:54 – Is Claude getting dumber?
- 3:41:56 – Character training
- 3:42:56 – Nature of truth
- 3:47:32 – Optimal rate of failure
- 3:54:43 – AI consciousness
- 4:09:14 – AGI
- 4:17:52 – Chris Olah
- 4:22:44 – Features, Circuits, Universality
- 4:40:17 – Superposition
- 4:51:16 – Monosemanticity
- 4:58:08 – Scaling Monosemanticity
- 5:06:56 – Macroscopic behavior of neural networks
- 5:11:50 – Beauty of neural networks
Introduction
Dario Amodei
If you extrapolate the curves that we’ve had so far, right? If you say, “Well, I don’t know, we’re starting to get to PhD level, and last year we were at undergraduate level, and the year before we were at the level of a high school student,” again, you can quibble with what tasks and for what. “We’re still missing modalities, but those are being added,” like computer use was added, like image generation has been added. If you just kind of eyeball the rate at which these capabilities are increasing, it does make you think that we’ll get there by 2026 or 2027.
If you extrapolate the curves that we’ve had so far, right? If you say, “Well, I don’t know, we’re starting to get to PhD level, and last year we were at undergraduate level, and the year before we were at the level of a high school student,” again, you can quibble with what tasks and for what. “We’re still missing modalities, but those are being added,” like computer use was added, like image generation has been added. If you just kind of eyeball the rate at which these capabilities are increasing, it does make you think that we’ll get there by 2026 or 2027.
I think there are still worlds where it doesn’t happen in 100 years. The number of those worlds is rapidly decreasing. We are rapidly running out of truly convincing blockers, truly compelling reasons why this will not happen in the next few years. The scale-up is very quick. We do this today, we make a model, and then we deploy thousands, maybe tens of thousands of instances of it. I think by the time, certainly within two to three years, whether we have these super powerful AIs or not, clusters are going to get to the size where you’ll be able to deploy millions of these.
I am optimistic about meaning. I worry about economics and the concentration of power. That’s actually what I worry about more, the abuse of power.
Lex Fridman
And AI increases the amount of power in the world. And if you concentrate that power and abuse that power, it can do immeasurable damage.
And AI increases the amount of power in the world. And if you concentrate that power and abuse that power, it can do immeasurable damage.
Dario Amodei
Yes, it’s very frightening. It’s very frightening.
Yes, it’s very frightening. It’s very frightening.
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company that created Claude, that is currently and often at the top of most LLM benchmark leader boards. On top of that, Dario and the Anthropic team have been outspoken advocates for taking the topic of AI safety very seriously. And they have continued to publish a lot of fascinating AI on this and other topics.
The following is a conversation with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company that created Claude, that is currently and often at the top of most LLM benchmark leader boards. On top of that, Dario and the Anthropic team have been outspoken advocates for taking the topic of AI safety very seriously. And they have continued to publish a lot of fascinating AI on this and other topics.
I’m also joined afterwards by two other brilliant people from Anthropic. First Amanda Askell, who is a researcher working on alignment and fine-tuning of Claude, including the design of Claude’s character and personality. A few folks told me she has probably talked with Claude more than any human at Anthropic. So she was definitely a fascinating person to talk to about prompt engineering and practical advice on how to get the best out of Claude.
After that, Chris Olah stopped by for a chat. He’s one of the pioneers of the field of mechanistic interpretability, which is an exciting set of efforts that aims to reverse engineering neural networks, to figure out what’s going on inside, inferring behaviors from neural activation patterns inside the network. This is a very promising approach for keeping future super-intelligent AI systems safe. For example, by detecting from the activations when the model is trying to deceive the human it is talking to.
This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Dario Amodei.
Scaling laws
Lex Fridman
Let’s start with a big idea of scaling laws and the scaling hypothesis. What is it? What is its history, and where do we stand today?
Let’s start with a big idea of scaling laws and the scaling hypothesis. What is it? What is its history, and where do we stand today?
Dario Amodei
So I can only describe it as it relates to my own experience, but I’ve been in the AI field for about 10 years and it was something I noticed very early on. So I first joined the AI world when I was working at Baidu with Andrew Ng in late 2014, which is almost exactly 10 years ago now. And the first thing we worked on, was speech recognition systems. And in those days I think deep learning was a new thing. It had made lots of progress, but everyone was always saying, “We don’t have the algorithms we need to succeed. We are only matching a tiny fraction. There’s so much we need to discover algorithmically. We haven’t found the picture of how to match the human brain.”
So I can only describe it as it relates to my own experience, but I’ve been in the AI field for about 10 years and it was something I noticed very early on. So I first joined the AI world when I was working at Baidu with Andrew Ng in late 2014, which is almost exactly 10 years ago now. And the first thing we worked on, was speech recognition systems. And in those days I think deep learning was a new thing. It had made lots of progress, but everyone was always saying, “We don’t have the algorithms we need to succeed. We are only matching a tiny fraction. There’s so much we need to discover algorithmically. We haven’t found the picture of how to match the human brain.”
And in some ways it was fortunate, you can have almost beginner’s luck. I was like a newcomer to the field. And I looked at the neural net that we were using for speech, the recurrent neural networks, and I said, “I don’t know, what if you make them bigger and give them more layers? And what if you scale up the data along with this?” I just saw these as independent dials that you could turn. And I noticed that the models started to do better and better as you gave them more data, as you made the models larger, as you trained them for longer. And I didn’t measure things precisely in those days, but along with colleagues, we very much got the informal sense that the more data and the more compute and the more training you put into these models, the better they perform.
And so initially my thinking was, “Hey, maybe that is just true for speech recognition systems. Maybe that’s just one particular quirk, one particular area.” I think it wasn’t until 2017 when I first saw the results from GPT-1 that it clicked for me that language is probably the area in which we can do this. We can get trillions of words of language data, we can train on them. And the models we were trained in those days were tiny. You could train them on one to eight GPUs, whereas now we train jobs on tens of thousands, soon going to hundreds of thousands of GPUs.
And so when I saw those two things together, and there were a few people like Ilya Sudskever who you’ve interviewed, who had somewhat similar views. He might’ve been the first one, although I think a few people came to similar views around the same time, right? There was Rich Sutton’s bitter lesson, Gwern wrote about the scaling hypothesis. But I think somewhere between 2014 and 2017 was when it really clicked for me, when I really got conviction that, “Hey, we’re going to be able to these incredibly wide cognitive tasks if we just scale up the models.”
And at every stage of scaling, there are always arguments. And when I first heard them honestly, I thought, “Probably I’m the one who’s wrong and all these experts in the field are right. They know the situation better than I do, right?” There’s the Chomsky argument about, “You can get syntactics but you can’t get semantics.” There was this idea, “Oh, you can make a sentence make sense, but you can’t make a paragraph make sense.” The latest one we have today is, “We’re going to run out of data, or the data isn’t high quality enough or models can’t reason.”
And each time, every time, we manage to either find a way around or scaling just is the way around. Sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other. And so I’m now at this point, I still think it’s always quite uncertain. We have nothing but inductive inference to tell us that the next two years are going to be like the last 10 years. But I’ve seen the movie enough times, I’ve seen the story happen for enough times to really believe that probably the scaling is going to continue, and that there’s some magic to it that we haven’t really explained on a theoretical basis yet.
Lex Fridman
And of course the scaling here is bigger networks, bigger data, bigger compute?
And of course the scaling here is bigger networks, bigger data, bigger compute?
Dario Amodei
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
All of those?
All of those?
Dario Amodei
In particular, linear scaling up of bigger networks, bigger training times and more and more data. So all of these things, almost like a chemical reaction, you have three ingredients in the chemical reaction and you need to linearly scale up the three ingredients. If you scale up one, not the others, you run out of the other reagents and the reaction stops. But if you scale up everything in series, then the reaction can proceed.
In particular, linear scaling up of bigger networks, bigger training times and more and more data. So all of these things, almost like a chemical reaction, you have three ingredients in the chemical reaction and you need to linearly scale up the three ingredients. If you scale up one, not the others, you run out of the other reagents and the reaction stops. But if you scale up everything in series, then the reaction can proceed.
Lex Fridman
And of course now that you have this kind of empirical science/art, you can apply it to other more nuanced things like scaling laws applied to interpretability or scaling laws applied to post-training. Or just seeing how does this thing scale. But the big scaling law, I guess the underlying scaling hypothesis has to do with big networks, big data leads to intelligence?
And of course now that you have this kind of empirical science/art, you can apply it to other more nuanced things like scaling laws applied to interpretability or scaling laws applied to post-training. Or just seeing how does this thing scale. But the big scaling law, I guess the underlying scaling hypothesis has to do with big networks, big data leads to intelligence?
Dario Amodei
Yeah, we’ve documented scaling laws in lots of domains other than language. So initially the paper we did that first showed it, was in early 2020, where we first showed it for language. There was then some work late in 2020 where we showed the same thing for other modalities like images, video, text to image, image to text, math. They all had the same pattern. And you’re right, now there are other stages like post-training or there are new types of reasoning models. And in all of those cases that we’ve measured, we see similar types of scaling laws.
Yeah, we’ve documented scaling laws in lots of domains other than language. So initially the paper we did that first showed it, was in early 2020, where we first showed it for language. There was then some work late in 2020 where we showed the same thing for other modalities like images, video, text to image, image to text, math. They all had the same pattern. And you’re right, now there are other stages like post-training or there are new types of reasoning models. And in all of those cases that we’ve measured, we see similar types of scaling laws.
Lex Fridman
A bit of a philosophical question, but what’s your intuition about why bigger is better in terms of network size and data size? Why does it lead to more intelligent models?
A bit of a philosophical question, but what’s your intuition about why bigger is better in terms of network size and data size? Why does it lead to more intelligent models?
Dario Amodei
So in my previous career as a biophysicist… So I did a physics undergrad and then biophysics in grad school. So I think back to what I know as a physicist, which is actually much less than what some of my colleagues at Anthropic have in terms of expertise in physics. There’s this concept called the one over F noise and one over X distributions, where often, just like if you add up a bunch of natural processes, you get a Gaussian, if you add up a bunch of differently-distributed natural processes… If you take a probe and hook it up to a resistor, the distribution of the thermal noise in the resistor goes as one over the frequency. It’s some kind of natural convergent distribution.
So in my previous career as a biophysicist… So I did a physics undergrad and then biophysics in grad school. So I think back to what I know as a physicist, which is actually much less than what some of my colleagues at Anthropic have in terms of expertise in physics. There’s this concept called the one over F noise and one over X distributions, where often, just like if you add up a bunch of natural processes, you get a Gaussian, if you add up a bunch of differently-distributed natural processes… If you take a probe and hook it up to a resistor, the distribution of the thermal noise in the resistor goes as one over the frequency. It’s some kind of natural convergent distribution.
And I think what it amounts to, is that if you look at a lot of things that are produced by some natural process that has a lot of different scales, not a Gaussian, which is kind of narrowly distributed, but if I look at large and small fluctuations that lead to electrical noise, they have this decaying one over X distribution. And so now I think of patterns in the physical world or in language. If I think about the patterns in language, there are some really simple patterns, some words are much more common than others, like the. Then there’s basic noun-verb structure. Then there’s the fact that nouns and verbs have to agree, they have to coordinate. And there’s the higher-level sentence structure. Then there’s the thematic structure of paragraphs. And so the fact that there’s this regressing structure, you can imagine that as you make the networks larger, first they capture the really simple correlations, the really simple patterns, and there’s this long tail of other patterns.
And if that long tail of other patterns is really smooth like it is with the one over F noise in physical processes like resistors, then you can imagine as you make the network larger, it’s kind of capturing more and more of that distribution. And so that smoothness gets reflected in how well the models are at predicting and how well they perform.
Language is an evolved process. We’ve developed language, we have common words and less common words. We have common expressions and less common expressions. We have ideas, cliches, that are expressed frequently, and we have novel ideas. And that process has developed, has evolved with humans over millions of years. And so the guess, and this is pure speculation, would be that there’s some kind of long tail distribution of the distribution of these ideas.
Lex Fridman
So there’s the long tail, but also there’s the height of the hierarchy of concepts that you’re building up. So the bigger the network, presumably you have a higher capacity to-
So there’s the long tail, but also there’s the height of the hierarchy of concepts that you’re building up. So the bigger the network, presumably you have a higher capacity to-
Dario Amodei
Exactly. If you have a small network, you only get the common stuff. If I take a tiny neural network, it’s very good at understanding that a sentence has to have verb, adjective, noun, but it’s terrible at deciding what those verb adjective and noun should be and whether they should make sense. If I make it just a little bigger, it gets good at that, then suddenly it’s good at the sentences, but it’s not good at the paragraphs. And so these rarer and more complex patterns get picked up as I add more capacity to the network.
Exactly. If you have a small network, you only get the common stuff. If I take a tiny neural network, it’s very good at understanding that a sentence has to have verb, adjective, noun, but it’s terrible at deciding what those verb adjective and noun should be and whether they should make sense. If I make it just a little bigger, it gets good at that, then suddenly it’s good at the sentences, but it’s not good at the paragraphs. And so these rarer and more complex patterns get picked up as I add more capacity to the network.
Limits of LLM scaling
Lex Fridman
Well, the natural question then is what’s the ceiling of this?
Well, the natural question then is what’s the ceiling of this?
Dario Amodei
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
How complicated and complex is the real world? How much is the stuff is there to learn?
How complicated and complex is the real world? How much is the stuff is there to learn?
Dario Amodei
I don’t think any of us knows the answer to that question. My strong instinct would be that there’s no ceiling below the level of humans. We humans are able to understand these various patterns. And so that makes me think that if we continue to scale up these models to kind of develop new methods for training them and scaling them up, that will at least get to the level that we’ve gotten to with humans. There’s then a question of how much more is it possible to understand than humans do? How much is it possible to be smarter and more perceptive than humans? I would guess the answer has got to be domain-dependent.
I don’t think any of us knows the answer to that question. My strong instinct would be that there’s no ceiling below the level of humans. We humans are able to understand these various patterns. And so that makes me think that if we continue to scale up these models to kind of develop new methods for training them and scaling them up, that will at least get to the level that we’ve gotten to with humans. There’s then a question of how much more is it possible to understand than humans do? How much is it possible to be smarter and more perceptive than humans? I would guess the answer has got to be domain-dependent.
If I look at an area like biology, and I wrote this essay, Machines of Loving Grace, it seems to me that humans are struggling to understand the complexity of biology. If you go to Stanford or to Harvard or to Berkeley, you have whole departments of folks trying to study the immune system or metabolic pathways, and each person understands only a tiny bit, a part of it, specializes. And they’re struggling to combine their knowledge with that of other humans. And so I have an instinct that there’s a lot of room at the top for AIs to get smarter.
If I think of something like materials in the physical world, or addressing conflicts between humans or something like that, I mean it may be there’s only some of these problems are not intractable, but much harder. And it may be that there’s only so well you can do at some of these things. Just like with speech recognition, there’s only so clear I can hear your speech. So I think in some areas there may be ceilings that are very close to what humans have done. In other areas, those ceilings may be very far away. I think we’ll only find out when we build these systems. It’s very hard to know in advance. We can speculate, but we can’t be sure.
Lex Fridman
And in some domains, the ceiling might have to do with human bureaucracies and things like this, as you write about.
And in some domains, the ceiling might have to do with human bureaucracies and things like this, as you write about.
Dario Amodei
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
So humans fundamentally has to be part of the loop. That’s the cause of the ceiling, not maybe the limits of the intelligence.
So humans fundamentally has to be part of the loop. That’s the cause of the ceiling, not maybe the limits of the intelligence.
Dario Amodei
Yeah, I think in many cases, in theory, technology could change very fast. For example, all the things that we might invent with respect to biology, but remember, there’s a clinical trial system that we have to go through to actually administer these things to humans. I think that’s a mixture of things that are unnecessary in bureaucratic and things that kind of protect the integrity of society. And the whole challenge is that it’s hard to tell what’s going on. It’s hard to tell which is which.
Yeah, I think in many cases, in theory, technology could change very fast. For example, all the things that we might invent with respect to biology, but remember, there’s a clinical trial system that we have to go through to actually administer these things to humans. I think that’s a mixture of things that are unnecessary in bureaucratic and things that kind of protect the integrity of society. And the whole challenge is that it’s hard to tell what’s going on. It’s hard to tell which is which.
I think in terms of drug development, my view is that we’re too slow and we’re too conservative. But certainly if you get these things wrong, it’s possible to risk people’s lives by being too reckless. And so at least some of these human institutions are in fact protecting people. So it’s all about finding the balance. I strongly suspect that balance is kind of more on the side of wishing to make things happen faster, but there is a balance.
Lex Fridman
If we do hit a limit, if we do hit a slowdown in the scaling laws, what do you think would be the reason? Is it compute-limited, data-limited? Is it something else? Idea limited?
If we do hit a limit, if we do hit a slowdown in the scaling laws, what do you think would be the reason? Is it compute-limited, data-limited? Is it something else? Idea limited?
Dario Amodei
So a few things, now we’re talking about hitting the limit before we get to the level of humans and the skill of humans. So I think one that’s popular today, and I think could be a limit that we run into, like most of the limits, I would bet against it, but it’s definitely possible, is we simply run out of data. There’s only so much data on the internet, and there’s issues with the quality of the data. You can get hundreds of trillions of words on the internet, but a lot of it is repetitive or it’s search engine optimization drivel, or maybe in the future it’ll even be text generated by AIs itself. And so I think there are limits to what can be produced in this way.
So a few things, now we’re talking about hitting the limit before we get to the level of humans and the skill of humans. So I think one that’s popular today, and I think could be a limit that we run into, like most of the limits, I would bet against it, but it’s definitely possible, is we simply run out of data. There’s only so much data on the internet, and there’s issues with the quality of the data. You can get hundreds of trillions of words on the internet, but a lot of it is repetitive or it’s search engine optimization drivel, or maybe in the future it’ll even be text generated by AIs itself. And so I think there are limits to what can be produced in this way.
That said, we, and I would guess other companies, are working on ways to make data synthetic, where you can use the model to generate more data of the type that you have already, or even generate data from scratch. If you think about what was done with DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero, they managed to get a bot all the way from no ability to play Go whatsoever to above human level, just by playing against itself. There was no example data from humans required in the AlphaGo Zero version of it.
The other direction of course, is these reasoning models that do chain of thought and stop to think and reflect on their own thinking. In a way that’s another kind of synthetic data coupled with reinforcement learning. So my guess is with one of those methods, we’ll get around the data limitation or there may be other sources of data that are available. We could just observe that, even if there’s no problem with data, as we start to scale models up, they just stopped getting better. It seemed to be a reliable observation that they’ve gotten better, that could just stop at some point for a reason we don’t understand.
The answer could be that we need to invent some new architecture. There have been problems in the past with say, numerical stability of models where it looked like things were leveling off, but actually when we found the right unblocker, they didn’t end up doing so. So perhaps there’s some new optimization method or some new technique we need to unblock things. I’ve seen no evidence of that so far, but if things were to slow down, that perhaps could be one reason.
Lex Fridman
What about the limits of compute, meaning the expensive nature of building bigger and bigger data centers?
What about the limits of compute, meaning the expensive nature of building bigger and bigger data centers?
Dario Amodei
So right now, I think most of the frontier model companies, I would guess, are operating in roughly 1 billion scale, plus or minus a factor of three. Those are the models that exist now or are being trained now. I think next year we’re going to go to a few billion, and then 2026, we may go to above 10 billion. And probably by 2027, their ambitions to build hundred billion dollar clusters. And I think all of that actually will happen. There’s a lot of determination to build the compute, to do it within this country, and I would guess that it actually does happen.
So right now, I think most of the frontier model companies, I would guess, are operating in roughly 1 billion scale, plus or minus a factor of three. Those are the models that exist now or are being trained now. I think next year we’re going to go to a few billion, and then 2026, we may go to above 10 billion. And probably by 2027, their ambitions to build hundred billion dollar clusters. And I think all of that actually will happen. There’s a lot of determination to build the compute, to do it within this country, and I would guess that it actually does happen.
Now, if we get to a hundred billion, that’s still not enough compute, that’s still not enough scale, then either we need even more scale, or we need to develop some way of doing it more efficiently of shifting the curve. I think between all of these, one of the reasons I’m bullish about powerful AI happening so fast, is just that if you extrapolate the next few points on the curve, we’re very quickly getting towards human level ability.
Some of the new models that we developed, some reasoning models that have come from other companies, they’re starting to get to what I would call the PhD or professional level. If you look at their coding ability, the latest model we released, Sonnet 3.5, the new or updated version, it gets something like 50% on SWE-bench. And SWE-bench is an example of a bunch of professional real-world software engineering tasks. At the beginning of the year, I think the state of the art was 3 or 4%. So in 10 months we’ve gone from 3% to 50% on this task. And I think in another year we’ll probably be at 90%. I mean, I don’t know, but might even be less than that.
We’ve seen similar things in graduate-level math, physics, and biology from models like OpenAi’s o1. So if we just continue to extrapolate this in terms of skill that we have, I think if we extrapolate the straight curve, within a few years, we will get to these models being above the highest professional level in terms of humans. Now, will that curve continue? You’ve pointed to, and I’ve pointed to a lot of possible reasons why that might not happen. But if the extrapolation curve continues, that is the trajectory we’re on.
Competition with OpenAI, Google, xAI, Meta
Lex Fridman
So Anthropic has several competitors. It’d be interesting to get your sort of view of it all. OpenAI, Google, XAI, Meta. What does it take to win in the broad sense of win in this space?
So Anthropic has several competitors. It’d be interesting to get your sort of view of it all. OpenAI, Google, XAI, Meta. What does it take to win in the broad sense of win in this space?
Dario Amodei
Yeah, so I want to separate out a couple things, right? Anthropic’s mission is to kind of try to make this all go well. And we have a theory of change called Race to the Top. Race to the Top is about trying to push the other players to do the right thing by setting an example. It’s not about being the good guy, it’s about setting things up so that all of us can be the good guy.
Yeah, so I want to separate out a couple things, right? Anthropic’s mission is to kind of try to make this all go well. And we have a theory of change called Race to the Top. Race to the Top is about trying to push the other players to do the right thing by setting an example. It’s not about being the good guy, it’s about setting things up so that all of us can be the good guy.
I’ll give a few examples of this. Early in the history of Anthropic, one of our co-founders, Chris Olah, who I believe you’re interviewing soon, he’s the co-founder of the field of mechanistic interpretability, which is an attempt to understand what’s going on inside AI models. So we had him and one of our early teams focus on this area of interpretability, which we think is good for making models safe and transparent.
For three or four years that had no commercial application whatsoever. It still doesn’t. Today we’re doing some early betas with it, and probably it will eventually, but this is a very, very long research bed, and one in which we’ve built in public and shared our results publicly. And we did this because we think it’s a way to make models safer. An interesting thing is that as we’ve done this, other companies have started doing it as well. In some cases because they’ve been inspired by it, in some cases because they’re worried that if other companies are doing this, look more responsible, they want to look more responsible too. No one wants to look like the irresponsible actor. And so they adopt this as well. When folks come to Anthropic, interpretability is often a draw, and I tell them, “The other places you didn’t go, tell them why you came here.” And then you see soon that there’s interpretability teams elsewhere as well.
And in a way that takes away our competitive advantage, because it’s like, “Oh, now others are doing it as well.” But it’s good for the broader system, and so we have to invent some new thing that we’re doing that others aren’t doing as well. And the hope is to basically bid up the importance of doing the right thing. And it’s not about us in particular. It’s not about having one particular good guy. Other companies can do this as well. If they join the race to do this, that’s the best news ever. It’s about shaping the incentives to point upward instead of shaping the incentives to point downward.
Lex Fridman
And we should say this example of the field of mechanistic interpretability is just a rigorous non-hand wavy wave doing AI safety-
And we should say this example of the field of mechanistic interpretability is just a rigorous non-hand wavy wave doing AI safety-
Dario Amodei
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
… or it’s tending that way.
… or it’s tending that way.
Dario Amodei
Trying to. I mean, I think we’re still early in terms of our ability to see things, but I’ve been surprised at how much we’ve been able to look inside these systems and understand what we see. Unlike with the scaling laws where it feels like there’s some law that’s driving these models to perform better, on the inside, the models aren’t… There’s no reason why they should be designed for us to understand them, right? They’re designed to operate, they’re designed to work. Just like the human brain or human biochemistry. They’re not designed for a human to open up the hatch, look inside and understand them. But we have found, and you can talk in much more detail about this to Chris, that when we open them up, when we do look inside them, we find things that are surprisingly interesting.
Trying to. I mean, I think we’re still early in terms of our ability to see things, but I’ve been surprised at how much we’ve been able to look inside these systems and understand what we see. Unlike with the scaling laws where it feels like there’s some law that’s driving these models to perform better, on the inside, the models aren’t… There’s no reason why they should be designed for us to understand them, right? They’re designed to operate, they’re designed to work. Just like the human brain or human biochemistry. They’re not designed for a human to open up the hatch, look inside and understand them. But we have found, and you can talk in much more detail about this to Chris, that when we open them up, when we do look inside them, we find things that are surprisingly interesting.
Lex Fridman
And as a side effect, you also get to see the beauty of these models. You get to explore the beautiful nature of large neural networks through the MEC and TERP kind of methodology.
And as a side effect, you also get to see the beauty of these models. You get to explore the beautiful nature of large neural networks through the MEC and TERP kind of methodology.
Dario Amodei
I’m amazed at how clean it’s been. I’m amazed at things like induction heads. I’m amazed at things like that we can use sparse auto-encoders to find these directions within the networks, and that the directions correspond to these very clear concepts.
I’m amazed at how clean it’s been. I’m amazed at things like induction heads. I’m amazed at things like that we can use sparse auto-encoders to find these directions within the networks, and that the directions correspond to these very clear concepts.
We demonstrated this a bit with the Golden Gate Bridge Claude. So this was an experiment where we found a direction inside one of the neural networks layers that corresponded to the Golden Gate Bridge. And we just turned that way up. And so we released this model as a demo, it was kind of half a joke, for a couple days, but it was illustrative of the method we developed. And you could take the model, you could ask it about anything. It would be like you could say, “How was your day?” And anything you asked, because this feature was activated, it would connect to the Golden Gate Bridge. So it would say, I’m feeling relaxed and expansive, much like the arches of the Golden Gate Bridge, or-
Lex Fridman
It would masterfully change topic to the Golden Gate Bridge and integrate it. There was also a sadness to the focus it had on the Golden Gate Bridge. I think people quickly fell in love with it, I think. So people already miss it, because it was taken down, I think after a day.
It would masterfully change topic to the Golden Gate Bridge and integrate it. There was also a sadness to the focus it had on the Golden Gate Bridge. I think people quickly fell in love with it, I think. So people already miss it, because it was taken down, I think after a day.
Dario Amodei
Somehow these interventions on the model, where you kind of adjust its behavior, somehow emotionally made it seem more human than any other version of the model.
Somehow these interventions on the model, where you kind of adjust its behavior, somehow emotionally made it seem more human than any other version of the model.
Lex Fridman
It’s a strong personality, strong identity.
It’s a strong personality, strong identity.
Dario Amodei
It has a strong personality. It has these kind of obsessive interests. We can all think of someone who’s obsessed with something. So it does make it feel somehow a bit more human.
It has a strong personality. It has these kind of obsessive interests. We can all think of someone who’s obsessed with something. So it does make it feel somehow a bit more human.
Claude
Lex Fridman
Let’s talk about the present. Let’s talk about Claude. So this year, a lot has happened. In March. Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet, Haiku were released. Then Claude 3.5 Sonnet in July, with an updated version just now released. And then also Claude 3.5 Haiku was released. Okay. Can you explain the difference between Opus, Sonnet and Haiku, and how we should think about the different versions?
Let’s talk about the present. Let’s talk about Claude. So this year, a lot has happened. In March. Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet, Haiku were released. Then Claude 3.5 Sonnet in July, with an updated version just now released. And then also Claude 3.5 Haiku was released. Okay. Can you explain the difference between Opus, Sonnet and Haiku, and how we should think about the different versions?
Dario Amodei
Yeah, so let’s go back to March when we first released these three models. So our thinking was different companies produce large and small models, better and worse models. We felt that there was demand, both for a really powerful model, and that might be a little bit slower that you’d have to pay more for, and also for fast cheap models that are as smart as they can be for how fast and cheap. Whenever you want to do some kind of difficult analysis, like if I want to write code for instance, or I want to brainstorm ideas or I want to do creative writing, I want the really powerful model.
Yeah, so let’s go back to March when we first released these three models. So our thinking was different companies produce large and small models, better and worse models. We felt that there was demand, both for a really powerful model, and that might be a little bit slower that you’d have to pay more for, and also for fast cheap models that are as smart as they can be for how fast and cheap. Whenever you want to do some kind of difficult analysis, like if I want to write code for instance, or I want to brainstorm ideas or I want to do creative writing, I want the really powerful model.
But then there’s a lot of practical applications in a business sense where it’s like I’m interacting with a website, I am doing my taxes, or I’m talking to a legal advisor and I want to analyze a contract. Or we have plenty of companies that are just like, I want to do auto-complete on my IDE or something. And for all of those things, you want to act fast and you want to use the model very broadly. So we wanted to serve that whole spectrum of needs. So we ended up with this kind of poetry theme. And so what’s a really short poem? It’s a haiku. Haiku is the small, fast, cheap model that was at the time, was really surprisingly intelligent for how fast and cheap it was.
Sonnet is a medium-sized poem, write a couple paragraphs. And so Sonnet was the middle model. It is smarter but also a little bit slower, a little bit more expensive. And Opus, like a Magnum Opus is a large work, Opus was the largest, smartest model at the time. So that was the original kind of thinking behind it.
And our thinking then was, “Well, each new generation of models should shift that trade- off curve.” So when we released Sonnet 3.5, it has roughly the same cost and speed as the Sonnet 3 model, but it increased its intelligence to the point where it was smarter than the original Opus 3 model. Especially for code, but also just in general. And so now we’ve shown results for Haiku 3.5. And I believe Haiku 3.5, the smallest new model, is about as good as Opus 3, the largest old model. So basically the aim here is to shift the curve and then at some point there’s going to be an Opus 3.5.
Now every new generation of models has its own thing. They use new data, their personality changes in ways that we try to steer but are not fully able to steer. And so there’s never quite that exact equivalence, where the only thing you’re changing is intelligence. We always try and improve other things and some things change without us knowing or measuring. So it’s very much an inexact science. In many ways, the manner and personality of these models is more an art than it is a science.
Opus 3.5
Lex Fridman
So what is the reason for the span of time between say, Claude Opus 3.0 and 3.5? What takes that time, if you can speak to it?
So what is the reason for the span of time between say, Claude Opus 3.0 and 3.5? What takes that time, if you can speak to it?
Dario Amodei
Yeah, so there’s different processes. There’s pre-training, which is just kind of the normal language model training. And that takes a very long time. That uses, these days, tens of thousands, sometimes many tens of thousands of GPUs or TPUs or training them, or we use different platforms, but accelerator chips, often training for months.
Yeah, so there’s different processes. There’s pre-training, which is just kind of the normal language model training. And that takes a very long time. That uses, these days, tens of thousands, sometimes many tens of thousands of GPUs or TPUs or training them, or we use different platforms, but accelerator chips, often training for months.
There’s then a kind of post-training phase where we do reinforcement learning from human feedback as well as other kinds of reinforcement learning. That phase is getting larger and larger now, and often that’s less of an exact science. It often takes effort to get it right. Models are then tested with some of our early partners to see how good they are, and they’re then tested, both internally and externally, for their safety, particularly for catastrophic and autonomy risks. So we do internal testing according to our responsible scaling policy, which I could talk more about that in detail.
And then we have an agreement with the US and the UK AI Safety Institute, as well as other third-party testers in specific domains, to test the models for what are called CBRN risks, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear. We don’t think that models pose these risks seriously yet, but every new model we want to evaluate to see if we’re starting to get close to some of these more dangerous capabilities. So those are the phases, and then it just takes some time to get the model working in terms of inference and launching it in the API. So there’s just a lot of steps to actually making a model work. And of course, we’re always trying to make the processes as streamlined as possible.
We want our safety testing to be rigorous, but we want it to be rigorous and to be automatic, to happen as fast as it can, without compromising on rigor. Same with our pre-training process and our post-training process. So it’s just building anything else. It’s just like building airplanes. You want to make them safe, but you want to make the process streamlined. And I think the creative tension between those is an important thing in making the models work.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, rumor on the street, I forget who was saying that, Anthropic has really good tooling. So probably a lot of the challenge here is, on the software engineering side, is to build the tooling to have a efficient, low-friction interaction with the infrastructure.
Yeah, rumor on the street, I forget who was saying that, Anthropic has really good tooling. So probably a lot of the challenge here is, on the software engineering side, is to build the tooling to have a efficient, low-friction interaction with the infrastructure.
Dario Amodei
You would be surprised how much of the challenges of building these models comes down to software engineering, performance engineering. From the outside, you might think, “Oh man, we had this Eureka breakthrough.” You know, this movie with the science. “We discovered it, we figured it out.” But I think all things, even incredible discoveries, they almost always come down to the details. And often super, super boring details. I can’t speak to whether we have better tooling than other companies. I mean, haven’t been at those other companies, at least not recently, but it’s certainly something we give a lot of attention to.
You would be surprised how much of the challenges of building these models comes down to software engineering, performance engineering. From the outside, you might think, “Oh man, we had this Eureka breakthrough.” You know, this movie with the science. “We discovered it, we figured it out.” But I think all things, even incredible discoveries, they almost always come down to the details. And often super, super boring details. I can’t speak to whether we have better tooling than other companies. I mean, haven’t been at those other companies, at least not recently, but it’s certainly something we give a lot of attention to.
Lex Fridman
I don’t know if you can say, but from Claude 3 to Claude 3.5, is there any extra pre-training going on, or is it mostly focused on the post-training? There’s been leaps in performance.
I don’t know if you can say, but from Claude 3 to Claude 3.5, is there any extra pre-training going on, or is it mostly focused on the post-training? There’s been leaps in performance.
Dario Amodei
Yeah, I think at any given stage, we’re focused on improving everything at once. Just naturally. Like, there are different teams. Each team makes progress in a particular area, in making their particular segment of the relay race better. And it’s just natural that when we make a new model, we put all of these things in at once.
Yeah, I think at any given stage, we’re focused on improving everything at once. Just naturally. Like, there are different teams. Each team makes progress in a particular area, in making their particular segment of the relay race better. And it’s just natural that when we make a new model, we put all of these things in at once.
Lex Fridman
So the data you have, the preference data you get from RLHF, is there ways to apply it to newer models as it get trained up?
So the data you have, the preference data you get from RLHF, is there ways to apply it to newer models as it get trained up?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. Preference data from old models sometimes gets used for new models, although of course it performs somewhat better when it’s trained on the new models. Note that we have this constitutional AI method such that we don’t only use preference data, there’s also a post-training process where we train the model against itself. And there’s new types of post-training the model against itself that are used every day. So it’s not just RLHF, a bunch of other methods as well. Post-training, I think, is becoming more and more sophisticated.
Yeah. Preference data from old models sometimes gets used for new models, although of course it performs somewhat better when it’s trained on the new models. Note that we have this constitutional AI method such that we don’t only use preference data, there’s also a post-training process where we train the model against itself. And there’s new types of post-training the model against itself that are used every day. So it’s not just RLHF, a bunch of other methods as well. Post-training, I think, is becoming more and more sophisticated.
Sonnet 3.5
Lex Fridman
Well, what explains the big leap in performance for the new Sonnet 3.5, I mean, at least in the programming side? And maybe this is a good place to talk about benchmarks. What does it mean to get better? Just the number went up, but I program, but I also love programming, and I Claude 3.5 through Cursor is what I use to assist me in programming. And there was, at least experientially, anecdotally, it’s gotten smarter at programming. So what does it take to get it smarter?
Well, what explains the big leap in performance for the new Sonnet 3.5, I mean, at least in the programming side? And maybe this is a good place to talk about benchmarks. What does it mean to get better? Just the number went up, but I program, but I also love programming, and I Claude 3.5 through Cursor is what I use to assist me in programming. And there was, at least experientially, anecdotally, it’s gotten smarter at programming. So what does it take to get it smarter?
Dario Amodei
We-
We-
Lex Fridman
So what does it take to get it smarter?
So what does it take to get it smarter?
Dario Amodei
We observe that as well. By the way, there were a couple very strong engineers here at Anthropic, who all previous code models, both produced by us and produced by all the other companies, hadn’t really been useful to them. They said, “Maybe this is useful to a beginner. It’s not useful to me.” But Sonnet 3.5, the original one for the first time, they said, “Oh, my God, this helped me with something that it would’ve taken me hours to do. This is the first model that’s actually saved me time.”
We observe that as well. By the way, there were a couple very strong engineers here at Anthropic, who all previous code models, both produced by us and produced by all the other companies, hadn’t really been useful to them. They said, “Maybe this is useful to a beginner. It’s not useful to me.” But Sonnet 3.5, the original one for the first time, they said, “Oh, my God, this helped me with something that it would’ve taken me hours to do. This is the first model that’s actually saved me time.”
So again, the water line is rising. And then I think the new Sonnet has been even better. In terms of what it takes, I’ll just say it’s been across the board. It’s in the pre-training, it’s in the post-training, it’s in various evaluations that we do. We’ve observed this as well. And if we go into the details of the benchmark, so SWE-bench is basically… Since you’re a programmer, you’ll be familiar with pull requests, and just pull requests, they’re like a sort of atomic unit of work. You could say I’m implementing one thing.
So SWE-bench actually gives you a real world situation where the code base is in a current state and I’m trying to implement something that’s described in language. We have internal benchmarks where we measure the same thing and you say, “Just give the model free rein to do anything, run anything, edit anything. How well is it able to complete these tasks?” And it’s that benchmark that’s gone from “it can do it 3% of the time” to “it can do it about 50% of the time.”
So I actually do believe that you can gain benchmarks, but I think if we get to 100% on that benchmark in a way that isn’t over-trained or game for that particular benchmark, probably represents a real and serious increase in programming ability. And I would suspect that if we can get to 90, 95% that it will represent ability to autonomously do a significant fraction of software engineering tasks.
Lex Fridman
Well, ridiculous timeline question. When is Claude Opus 3.5 coming up?
Well, ridiculous timeline question. When is Claude Opus 3.5 coming up?
Dario Amodei
Not giving you an exact date, but as far as we know, the plan is still to have a Claude 3.5 Opus.
Not giving you an exact date, but as far as we know, the plan is still to have a Claude 3.5 Opus.
Lex Fridman
Are we going to get it before GTA 6 or no?
Are we going to get it before GTA 6 or no?
Dario Amodei
Like Duke Nukem Forever?
Like Duke Nukem Forever?
Lex Fridman
Duke Nukem. Right.
Duke Nukem. Right.
Dario Amodei
What was that game? There was some game that was delayed 15 years.
What was that game? There was some game that was delayed 15 years.
Lex Fridman
That’s right.
That’s right.
Dario Amodei
Was that Duke Nukem Forever?
Was that Duke Nukem Forever?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And I think GTA is now just releasing trailers.
Yeah. And I think GTA is now just releasing trailers.
Dario Amodei
It’s only been three months since we released the first Sonnet.
It’s only been three months since we released the first Sonnet.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s the incredible pace of release.
Yeah, it’s the incredible pace of release.
Dario Amodei
It just tells you about the pace, the expectations for when things are going to come out.
It just tells you about the pace, the expectations for when things are going to come out.
Claude 4.0
Lex Fridman
So what about 4.0? So how do you think, as these models get bigger and bigger, about versioning and also just versioning in general, why Sonnet 3.5 updated with the date? Why not Sonnet 3.6, which a lot of people are calling it?
So what about 4.0? So how do you think, as these models get bigger and bigger, about versioning and also just versioning in general, why Sonnet 3.5 updated with the date? Why not Sonnet 3.6, which a lot of people are calling it?
Dario Amodei
Naming is actually an interesting challenge here, right? Because I think a year ago, most of the model was pre-training. And so you could start from the beginning and just say, “Okay, we’re going to have models of different sizes. We’re going to train them all together and we’ll have a family of naming schemes and then we’ll put some new magic into them and then we’ll have the next generation.”
Naming is actually an interesting challenge here, right? Because I think a year ago, most of the model was pre-training. And so you could start from the beginning and just say, “Okay, we’re going to have models of different sizes. We’re going to train them all together and we’ll have a family of naming schemes and then we’ll put some new magic into them and then we’ll have the next generation.”
The trouble starts already when some of them take a lot longer than others to train. That already messes up your time a little bit. But as you make big improvement in pre-training, then you suddenly notice, “Oh, I can make better pre-train model.” And that doesn’t take very long to do, but clearly it has the same size and shape of previous models. So I think those two together as well as the timing issues. Any kind of scheme you come up with, the reality tends to frustrate that scheme, right? It tends to break out of the scheme.
It’s not like software where you can say, “Oh, this is 3.7, this is 3.8.” No, you have models with different trade-offs. You can change some things in your models, you can change other things. Some are faster and slower at inference. Some have to be more expensive, some have to be less expensive. And so I think all the companies have struggled with this. I think we were in a good position in terms of naming when we had Haiku, Sonnet and Opus.
Lex Fridman
It was great, great start.
It was great, great start.
Dario Amodei
We’re trying to maintain it, but it’s not perfect, so we’ll try and get back to the simplicity. But just the nature of the field, I feel like no one’s figured out naming. It’s somehow a different paradigm from normal software and so none of the companies have been perfect at it. It’s something we struggle with surprisingly much relative to how trivial it is for the grand science of training the models.
We’re trying to maintain it, but it’s not perfect, so we’ll try and get back to the simplicity. But just the nature of the field, I feel like no one’s figured out naming. It’s somehow a different paradigm from normal software and so none of the companies have been perfect at it. It’s something we struggle with surprisingly much relative to how trivial it is for the grand science of training the models.
Lex Fridman
So from the user side, the user experience of the updated Sonnet 3.5 is just different than the previous June 2024 Sonnet 3.5. It would be nice to come up with some kind of labeling that embodies that. Because people talk about Sonnet 3.5, but now there’s a different one. And so how do you refer to the previous one and the new one when there’s a distinct improvement? It just makes conversation about it just challenging.
So from the user side, the user experience of the updated Sonnet 3.5 is just different than the previous June 2024 Sonnet 3.5. It would be nice to come up with some kind of labeling that embodies that. Because people talk about Sonnet 3.5, but now there’s a different one. And so how do you refer to the previous one and the new one when there’s a distinct improvement? It just makes conversation about it just challenging.
Dario Amodei
Yeah, yeah. I definitely think this question of there are lots of properties of the models that are not reflected in the benchmarks. I think that’s definitely the case and everyone agrees. And not all of them are capabilities. Models can be polite or brusque, they can be very reactive or they can ask you questions. They can have what feels like a warm personality or a cold personality. They can be boring or they can be very distinctive like Golden Gate Claude was.
Yeah, yeah. I definitely think this question of there are lots of properties of the models that are not reflected in the benchmarks. I think that’s definitely the case and everyone agrees. And not all of them are capabilities. Models can be polite or brusque, they can be very reactive or they can ask you questions. They can have what feels like a warm personality or a cold personality. They can be boring or they can be very distinctive like Golden Gate Claude was.
And we have a whole team focused on, I think we call it Claude character. Amanda leads that team and we’ll talk to you about that, but it’s still a very inexact science and often we find that models have properties that we’re not aware of. The fact of the matter is that you can talk to a model 10,000 times and there are some behaviors you might not see just like with a human, right?
I can know someone for a few months and not know that they have a certain skill or not know that there’s a certain side to them. And so I think we just have to get used to this idea. And we’re always looking for better ways of testing our models to demonstrate these capabilities and also to decide which are the personality properties we want models to have and which we don’t want to have. That itself, the normative question, is also super interesting.
Criticism of Claude
Lex Fridman
I got to ask you a question from Reddit.
I got to ask you a question from Reddit.
Dario Amodei
From Reddit? Oh, boy.
From Reddit? Oh, boy.
Lex Fridman
There’s just this fascinating, to me at least, it’s a psychological social phenomenon where people report that Claude has gotten dumber for them over time. And so the question is, does the user complaint about the dumbing down of Claude 3.5 Sonnet hold any water? So are these anecdotal reports a kind of social phenomena or is there any cases where Claude would get dumber?
There’s just this fascinating, to me at least, it’s a psychological social phenomenon where people report that Claude has gotten dumber for them over time. And so the question is, does the user complaint about the dumbing down of Claude 3.5 Sonnet hold any water? So are these anecdotal reports a kind of social phenomena or is there any cases where Claude would get dumber?
Dario Amodei
So this actually doesn’t apply. This isn’t just about Claude. I believe I’ve seen these complaints for every foundation model produced by a major company. People said this about GPT-4, they said it about GPT-4 Turbo. So a couple things. One, the actual weights of the model, the actual brain of the model, that does not change unless we introduce a new model. There are just a number of reasons why it would not make sense practically to be randomly substituting in new versions of the model.
So this actually doesn’t apply. This isn’t just about Claude. I believe I’ve seen these complaints for every foundation model produced by a major company. People said this about GPT-4, they said it about GPT-4 Turbo. So a couple things. One, the actual weights of the model, the actual brain of the model, that does not change unless we introduce a new model. There are just a number of reasons why it would not make sense practically to be randomly substituting in new versions of the model.
It’s difficult from an inference perspective and it’s actually hard to control all the consequences of changing the weights of the model. Let’s say you wanted to fine-tune the model, I don’t know, to say “certainly” less, which an old version of Sonnet used to do. You actually end up changing 100 things as well. So we have a whole process for it and we have a whole process for modifying the model. We do a bunch of testing on it. We do a bunch of user testing in early customers.
So we both have never changed the weights of the model without telling anyone. And certainly, in the current setup, it would not make sense to do that. Now, there are a couple things that we do occasionally do. One is sometimes we run A/B tests, but those are typically very close to when a model is being released and for a very small fraction of time.
So the day before the new Sonnet 3.5, I agree we should have had a better name. It’s clunky to refer to it. There were some comments from people that it’s gotten a lot better and that’s because a fraction we’re exposed to an A/B test for those one or two days. The other is that occasionally the system prompt will change. The system prompt can have some effects, although it’s unlikely to dumb down models, it’s unlikely to make them dumber.
And we’ve seen that while these two things, which I’m listing to be very complete, happened quite infrequently, the complaints for us and for other model companies about the model change, the model isn’t good at this, the model got more censored, the model was dumbed down. Those complaints are constant and so I don’t want to say people are imagining it or anything, but the models are, for the most part, not changing. If I were to offer a theory, I think it actually relates to one of the things I said before, which is that models are very complex and have many aspects to them. And so often, if I ask the model a question, if I’m like, “Do task X” versus, “Can you do task X?” the model might respond in different ways. And so there are all kinds of subtle things that you can change about the way you interact with the model that can give you very different results.
To be clear, this itself is like a failing by us and by the other model providers that the models are just often sensitive to small changes in wording. It’s yet another way in which the science of how these models work is very poorly developed. And so if I go to sleep one night and I was talking to the model in a certain way and I slightly changed the phrasing of how I talk to the model, I could get different results.
So that’s one possible way. The other thing is, man, it’s just hard to quantify this stuff. It’s hard to quantify this stuff. I think people are very excited by new models when they come out and then as time goes on, they become very aware of their limitations. So that may be another effect, but that’s all a very long-winded way of saying for the most part, with some fairly narrow exceptions, the models are not changing.
Lex Fridman
I think there is a psychological effect. You just start getting used to it, the baseline raises. When people who have first gotten Wi-Fi on airplanes, it’s amazing, magic.
I think there is a psychological effect. You just start getting used to it, the baseline raises. When people who have first gotten Wi-Fi on airplanes, it’s amazing, magic.
Dario Amodei
It’s amazing. Yeah.
It’s amazing. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And then you start-
And then you start-
Dario Amodei
And now I’m like, “I can’t get this thing to work. This is such a piece of crap.”
And now I’m like, “I can’t get this thing to work. This is such a piece of crap.”
Lex Fridman
Exactly. So it’s easy to have the conspiracy theory of, “They’re making Wi-Fi slower and slower.” This is probably something I’ll talk to Amanda much more about, but another Reddit question, “When will Claude stop trying to be my pure tentacle grandmother imposing its moral worldview on me as a paying customer? And also, what is the psychology behind making Claude overly apologetic?” So this reports about the experience, a different angle on the frustration. It has to do with the character [inaudible 00:47:06].
Exactly. So it’s easy to have the conspiracy theory of, “They’re making Wi-Fi slower and slower.” This is probably something I’ll talk to Amanda much more about, but another Reddit question, “When will Claude stop trying to be my pure tentacle grandmother imposing its moral worldview on me as a paying customer? And also, what is the psychology behind making Claude overly apologetic?” So this reports about the experience, a different angle on the frustration. It has to do with the character [inaudible 00:47:06].
Dario Amodei
Yeah, so a couple points on this first. One is things that people say on Reddit and Twitter or X or whatever it is, there’s actually a huge distribution shift between the stuff that people complain loudly about on social media and what actually statistically users care about and that drives people to use the models.
Yeah, so a couple points on this first. One is things that people say on Reddit and Twitter or X or whatever it is, there’s actually a huge distribution shift between the stuff that people complain loudly about on social media and what actually statistically users care about and that drives people to use the models.
People are frustrated with things like the model not writing out all the code or the model just not being as good at code as it could be, even though it’s the best model in the world on code. I think the majority of things are about that, but certainly a vocal minority raise these concerns, are frustrated by the model refusing things that it shouldn’t refuse or apologizing too much or just having these annoying verbal tics.
The second caveat, and I just want to say this super clearly because I think some people don’t know it, others know it, but forget it. It is very difficult to control across the board how the models behave. You cannot just reach in there and say, “Oh, I want the model to apologize less.” You can do that. You can include training data that says, “Oh, the model should apologize less.” But then in some other situation, they end up being super rude or overconfident in a way that’s misleading people.
So there are all these trade-offs. For example, another thing is if there was a period during which models, ours and I think others as well, were too verbose, they would repeat themselves, they would say too much. You can cut down on the verbosity by penalizing the models for just talking for too long. What happens when you do that, if you do it in a crude way, is when the models are coding, sometimes they’ll say, “Rest of the code goes here,” right?
Because they’ve learned that that’s the way to economize and that they see it. And then so that leads the model to be so-called lazy in coding where they’re just like, “Ah, you can finish the rest of it.” It’s not because we want to save on compute or because the models are lazy during winter break or any of the other conspiracy theories that have come up. Actually, it’s just very hard to control the behavior of the model, to steer the behavior of the model in all circumstances at once.
There’s this whack- a-mole aspect where you push on one thing and these other things start to move as well that you may not even notice or measure. And so one of the reasons that I care so much about grand alignment of these AI systems in the future is actually, these systems are actually quite unpredictable. They’re actually quite hard to steer and control. And this version we’re seeing today of you make one thing better, it makes another thing worse, I think that’s like a present day analog of future control problems in AI systems that we can start to study today.
I think that difficulty in steering the behavior and making sure that if we push an AI system in one direction, it doesn’t push it in another direction in some other ways that we didn’t want. I think that’s an early sign of things to come, and if we can do a good job of solving this problem of you ask the model to make and distribute smallpox and it says no, but it’s willing to help you in your graduate level virology class, how do we get both of those things at once? It’s hard.
It’s very easy to go to one side or the other and it’s a multidimensional problem. And so I think these questions of shaping the model’s personality, I think they’re very hard. I think we haven’t done perfectly on them. I think we’ve actually done the best of all the AI companies, but still so far from perfect.
And I think if we can get this right, if we can control the false positives and false negatives in this very controlled present day environment, we’ll be much better at doing it for the future when our worry is: will the models be super autonomous? Will they be able to make very dangerous things? Will they be able to autonomously build whole companies and are those companies aligned? So I think of this present task as both vexing but also good practice for the future.
Lex Fridman
What’s the current best way of gathering user feedback? Not anecdotal data, but just large-scale data about pain points or the opposite of pain points, positive things, so on? Is it internal testing? Is it a specific group testing, A/B testing? What works?
What’s the current best way of gathering user feedback? Not anecdotal data, but just large-scale data about pain points or the opposite of pain points, positive things, so on? Is it internal testing? Is it a specific group testing, A/B testing? What works?
Dario Amodei
So typically, we’ll have internal model bashings where all of Anthropic… Anthropic is almost 1,000 people. People just try and break the model. They try and interact with it various ways. We have a suite of evals for, “Oh, is the model refusing in ways that it couldn’t?” I think we even had a “certainly” eval because again, at one point, the model had this problem where it had this annoying tick where it would respond to a wide range of questions by saying, “Certainly, I can help you with that. Certainly, I would be happy to do that. Certainly, this is correct.”
So typically, we’ll have internal model bashings where all of Anthropic… Anthropic is almost 1,000 people. People just try and break the model. They try and interact with it various ways. We have a suite of evals for, “Oh, is the model refusing in ways that it couldn’t?” I think we even had a “certainly” eval because again, at one point, the model had this problem where it had this annoying tick where it would respond to a wide range of questions by saying, “Certainly, I can help you with that. Certainly, I would be happy to do that. Certainly, this is correct.”
And so we had a “certainly” eval, which is: how often does the model say certainly? But look, this is just a whack-a-mole. What if it switches from “certainly” to “definitely”? So every time we add a new eval and we’re always evaluating for all the old things, we have hundreds of these evaluations, but we find that there’s no substitute for a human interacting with it.
And so it’s very much like the ordinary product development process. We have hundreds of people within Anthropic bash the model. Then we do external A/B tests. Sometimes we’ll run tests with contractors. We pay contractors to interact with the model. So you put all of these things together and it’s still not perfect. You still see behaviors that you don’t quite want to see. You still see the model refusing things that it just doesn’t make sense to refuse.
But I think trying to solve this challenge, trying to stop the model from doing genuinely bad things that everyone agrees it shouldn’t do, everyone agrees that the model shouldn’t talk about, I don’t know, child abuse material. Everyone agrees the model shouldn’t do that, but at the same time, that it doesn’t refuse in these dumb and stupid ways.
I think drawing that line as finely as possible, approaching perfectly, is still a challenge and we’re getting better at it every day, but there’s a lot to be solved. And again, I would point to that as an indicator of a challenge ahead in terms of steering much more powerful models.
Lex Fridman
Do you think Claude 4.0 is ever coming out?
Do you think Claude 4.0 is ever coming out?
Dario Amodei
I don’t want to commit to any naming scheme because if I say here, “We’re going to have Claude 4 next year,” and then we decide that we should start over because there’s a new type of model, I don’t want to commit to it. I would expect in a normal course of business that Claude 4 would come after Claude 3. 5, but you never know in this wacky field.
I don’t want to commit to any naming scheme because if I say here, “We’re going to have Claude 4 next year,” and then we decide that we should start over because there’s a new type of model, I don’t want to commit to it. I would expect in a normal course of business that Claude 4 would come after Claude 3. 5, but you never know in this wacky field.
Lex Fridman
But this idea of scaling is continuing.
But this idea of scaling is continuing.
Dario Amodei
Scaling is continuing. There will definitely be more powerful models coming from us than the models that exist today. That is certain. Or if there aren’t, we’ve deeply failed as a company.
Scaling is continuing. There will definitely be more powerful models coming from us than the models that exist today. That is certain. Or if there aren’t, we’ve deeply failed as a company.
AI Safety Levels
Lex Fridman
Okay. Can you explain the responsible scaling policy and the AI safety level standards, ASL levels?
Okay. Can you explain the responsible scaling policy and the AI safety level standards, ASL levels?
Dario Amodei
As much as I am excited about the benefits of these models, and we’ll talk about that if we talk about Machines of Loving Grace, I’m worried about the risks and I continue to be worried about the risks. No one should think that Machines of Loving Grace was me saying I’m no longer worried about the risks of these models. I think they’re two sides of the same coin.
As much as I am excited about the benefits of these models, and we’ll talk about that if we talk about Machines of Loving Grace, I’m worried about the risks and I continue to be worried about the risks. No one should think that Machines of Loving Grace was me saying I’m no longer worried about the risks of these models. I think they’re two sides of the same coin.
The power of the models and their ability to solve all these problems in biology, neuroscience, economic development, governance and peace, large parts of the economy, those come with risks as well, right? With great power comes great responsibility. The two are paired. Things that are powerful can do good things and they can do bad things. I think of those risks as being in several different categories, perhaps the two biggest risks that I think about. And that’s not to say that there aren’t risks today that are important, but when I think of really the things that would happen on the grandest scale, one is what I call catastrophic misuse.
These are misuse of the models in domains like cyber, bio, radiological, nuclear, things that could harm or even kill thousands, even millions of people if they really, really go wrong. These are the number one priority to prevent. And here I would just make a simple observation, which is that the models, if I look today at people who have done really bad things in the world, I think actually humanity has been protected by the fact that the overlap between really smart, well-educated people and people who want to do really horrific things has generally been small.
Let’s say I’m someone who I have a PhD in this field, I have a well-paying job. There’s so much to lose. Even assuming I’m completely evil, which most people are not, why would such a person risk their life, risk their legacy, their reputation to do something truly, truly evil? If we had a lot more people like that, the world would be a much more dangerous place. And so my worry is that by being a much more intelligent agent, AI could break that correlation.
And so I do have serious worries about that. I believe we can prevent those worries. But I think as a counterpoint to Machines of Loving Grace, I want to say that there’s still serious risks. And the second range of risks would be the autonomy risks, which is the idea that models might, on their own, particularly as we give them more agency than they’ve had in the past, particularly as we give them supervision over wider tasks like writing whole code bases or someday even effectively operating entire companies, they’re on a long enough leash. Are they doing what we really want them to do?
It’s very difficult to even understand in detail what they’re doing, let alone control it. And like I said, these early signs that it’s hard to perfectly draw the boundary between things the model should do and things the model shouldn’t do that if you go to one side, you get things that are annoying and useless and you go to the other side, you get other behaviors. If you fix one thing, it creates other problems.
We’re getting better and better at solving this. I don’t think this is an unsolvable problem. I think this is a science like the safety of airplanes or the safety of cars or the safety of drugs. I don’t think there’s any big thing we’re missing. I just think we need to get better at controlling these models. And so these are the two risks I’m worried about. And our responsible scaling plan, which I’ll recognize is a very long-winded answer to your question.
Lex Fridman
I love it. I love it.
I love it. I love it.
Dario Amodei
Our responsible scaling plan is designed to address these two types of risks. And so every time we develop a new model, we basically test it for its ability to do both of these bad things. So if I were to back up a little bit, I think we have an interesting dilemma with AI systems where they’re not yet powerful enough to present these catastrophes. I don’t know if they’ll ever present these catastrophes. It’s possible they won’t.
Our responsible scaling plan is designed to address these two types of risks. And so every time we develop a new model, we basically test it for its ability to do both of these bad things. So if I were to back up a little bit, I think we have an interesting dilemma with AI systems where they’re not yet powerful enough to present these catastrophes. I don’t know if they’ll ever present these catastrophes. It’s possible they won’t.
But the case for worry, the case for risk is strong enough that we should act now and they’re getting better very, very fast. I testified in the Senate that we might have serious bio risks within two to three years. That was about a year ago. Things have proceeded apace. So we have this thing where it’s surprisingly hard to address these risks because they’re not here today, they don’t exist. They’re like ghosts, but they’re coming at us so fast because the models are improving so fast.
So how do you deal with something that’s not here today, doesn’t exist, but is coming at us very fast? So the solution we came up with for that, in collaboration with people like the organization METR and Paul Christiano is what you need for that are you need tests to tell you when the risk is getting close. You need an early warning system. And so every time we have a new model, we test it for its capability to do these CBRN tasks as well as testing it for how capable it is of doing tasks autonomously on its own.
And in the latest version of our RSP, which we released in the last month or two, the way we test autonomy risks is the AI model’s ability to do aspects of AI research itself, which when the AI models can do AI research, they become truly, truly autonomous. And that threshold is important for a bunch of other ways. And so what do we then do with these tasks? The RSP basically develops what we’ve called an if-then structure, which is if the models pass a certain capability, then we impose a certain set of safety and security requirements on them.
So today’s models are what’s called ASL-2. Models that were ASL-1 is for systems that manifestly don’t pose any risk of autonomy or misuse. So for example, a chess playing bot, Deep Blue would be ASL-1. It’s just manifestly the case that you can’t use Deep Blue for anything other than chess. It was just designed for chess. No one’s going to use it to conduct a masterful cyber attack or to run wild and take over the world.
ASL-2 is today’s AI systems where we’ve measured them and we think these systems are simply not smart enough to autonomously self-replicate or conduct a bunch of tasks and also not smart enough to provide meaningful information about CBRN risks and how to build CBRN weapons above and beyond what can be known from looking at Google. In fact, sometimes they do provide information above and beyond a search engine, but not in a way that can be stitched together, not in a way that end-to-end is dangerous enough.
So ASL-3 is going to be the point at which the models are helpful enough to enhance the capabilities of non-state actors, right? State actors can already do, unfortunately, to a high level of proficiency, a lot of these very dangerous and destructive things. The difference is that non-state actors are not capable of it. And so when we get to ASL-3, we’ll take special security precautions designed to be sufficient to prevent theft of the model by non-state actors and misuse of the model as it’s deployed. We’ll have to have enhanced filters targeted at these particular areas.
Lex Fridman
Cyber, bio, nuclear.
Cyber, bio, nuclear.
Dario Amodei
Cyber, bio, nuclear and model autonomy, which is less a misuse risk and more a risk of the model doing bad things itself. ASL-4, getting to the point where these models could enhance the capability of a already knowledgeable state actor and/or become the main source of such a risk. If you wanted to engage in such a risk, the main way you would do it is through a model. And then I think ASL-4 on the autonomy side, it’s some amount of acceleration in AI research capabilities with an AI model.
Cyber, bio, nuclear and model autonomy, which is less a misuse risk and more a risk of the model doing bad things itself. ASL-4, getting to the point where these models could enhance the capability of a already knowledgeable state actor and/or become the main source of such a risk. If you wanted to engage in such a risk, the main way you would do it is through a model. And then I think ASL-4 on the autonomy side, it’s some amount of acceleration in AI research capabilities with an AI model.
And then ASL-5 is where we would get to the models that are truly capable that it could exceed humanity in their ability to do any of these tasks. And so the point of the if-then structure commitment is basically to say, “Look, I don’t know, I’ve been working with these models for many years and I’ve been worried about risk for many years. It’s actually dangerous to cry wolf. It’s actually dangerous to say this model is risky. And people look at it and they say this is manifestly not dangerous.” Again, it’s the delicacy of the risk isn’t here today, but it’s coming at us fast.
How do you deal with that? It’s really vexing to a risk planner to deal with it. And so this if-then structure basically says, “Look, we don’t want to antagonize a bunch of people, we don’t want to harm our own ability to have a place in the conversation by imposing these very onerous burdens on models that are not dangerous today.” So the if-then, the trigger commitment is basically a way to deal with this. It says you clamp down hard when you can show the model is dangerous.
And of course, what has to come with that is enough of a buffer threshold that you’re not at high risk of missing the danger. It’s not a perfect framework. We’ve had to change it. We came out with a new one just a few weeks ago and probably going forward, we might release new ones multiple times a year because it’s hard to get these policies right technically, organizationally from a research perspective. But that is the proposal, if-then commitments and triggers in order to minimize burdens and false alarms now, but really react appropriately when the dangers are here.
ASL-3 and ASL-4
Lex Fridman
What do you think the timeline for ASL-3 is where several of the triggers are fired? And what do you think the timeline is for ASL-4?
What do you think the timeline for ASL-3 is where several of the triggers are fired? And what do you think the timeline is for ASL-4?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. So that is hotly debated within the company. We are working actively to prepare ASL-3 security measures as well as ASL-3 deployment measures. I’m not going to go into detail, but we’ve made a lot of progress on both and we’re prepared to be, I think, ready quite soon. I would not be surprised at all if we hit ASL-3 next year. There was some concern that we might even hit it this year. That’s still possible. That could still happen. It’s very hard to say, but I would be very, very surprised if it was 2030. I think it’s much sooner than that.
Yeah. So that is hotly debated within the company. We are working actively to prepare ASL-3 security measures as well as ASL-3 deployment measures. I’m not going to go into detail, but we’ve made a lot of progress on both and we’re prepared to be, I think, ready quite soon. I would not be surprised at all if we hit ASL-3 next year. There was some concern that we might even hit it this year. That’s still possible. That could still happen. It’s very hard to say, but I would be very, very surprised if it was 2030. I think it’s much sooner than that.
Lex Fridman
So there’s protocols for detecting it, the if-then and then there’s protocols for how to respond to it.
So there’s protocols for detecting it, the if-then and then there’s protocols for how to respond to it.
Dario Amodei
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
How difficult is the second, the latter?
How difficult is the second, the latter?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. I think for ASL-3, it’s primarily about security and about filters on the model relating to a very narrow set of areas when we deploy the model. Because at ASL-3, the model isn’t autonomous yet. And so you don’t have to worry about the model itself behaving in a bad way even when it’s deployed internally. So I think the ASL- 3 measures are, I won’t say straightforward, they’re rigorous, but they’re easier to reason about.
Yeah. I think for ASL-3, it’s primarily about security and about filters on the model relating to a very narrow set of areas when we deploy the model. Because at ASL-3, the model isn’t autonomous yet. And so you don’t have to worry about the model itself behaving in a bad way even when it’s deployed internally. So I think the ASL- 3 measures are, I won’t say straightforward, they’re rigorous, but they’re easier to reason about.
I think once we get to ASL-4, we start to have worries about the models being smart enough that they might sandbag tests, they might not tell the truth about tests. We had some results came out about sleeper agents and there was a more recent paper about, “Can the models mislead attempts to sandbag their own abilities, present themselves as being less capable than they are?” And so I think with ASL-4, there’s going to be an important component of using other things than just interacting with the models.
For example, interpretability or hidden chains of thought where you have to look inside the model and verify via some other mechanism that is not as easily corrupted as what the model says, that the model indeed has some property. So we’re still working on ASL-4. One of the properties of the RSP is that we don’t specify ASL-4 until we’ve hit ASL-3. And I think that’s proven to be a wise decision because even with ASL-3, again, it’s hard to know this stuff in detail, and we want to take as much time as we can possibly take to get these things right.
Lex Fridman
So for ASL-3, the bad actor will be the humans.
So for ASL-3, the bad actor will be the humans.
Dario Amodei
Humans, yes.
Humans, yes.
Lex Fridman
And so there’s a little bit more…
And so there’s a little bit more…
Dario Amodei
For ASL- 4, it’s both, I think.
For ASL- 4, it’s both, I think.
Lex Fridman
It’s both. And so deception, and that’s where mechanistic interpretability comes into play, and hopefully the techniques used for that are not made accessible to the model.
It’s both. And so deception, and that’s where mechanistic interpretability comes into play, and hopefully the techniques used for that are not made accessible to the model.
Dario Amodei
Yeah. Of course, you can hook up the mechanistic interpretability to the model itself, but then you’ve lost it as a reliable indicator of the model state. There are a bunch of exotic ways you can think of that it might also not be reliable, like if the model gets smart enough that it can jump computers and read the code where you’re looking at its internal state. We’ve thought about some of those. I think they’re exotic enough. There are ways to render them unlikely. But yeah, generally, you want to preserve mechanistic interpretability as a verification set or test set that’s separate from the training process of the model.
Yeah. Of course, you can hook up the mechanistic interpretability to the model itself, but then you’ve lost it as a reliable indicator of the model state. There are a bunch of exotic ways you can think of that it might also not be reliable, like if the model gets smart enough that it can jump computers and read the code where you’re looking at its internal state. We’ve thought about some of those. I think they’re exotic enough. There are ways to render them unlikely. But yeah, generally, you want to preserve mechanistic interpretability as a verification set or test set that’s separate from the training process of the model.
Lex Fridman
See, I think as these models become better and better conversation and become smarter, social engineer becomes a threat too because they could start being very convincing to the engineers inside companies.
See, I think as these models become better and better conversation and become smarter, social engineer becomes a threat too because they could start being very convincing to the engineers inside companies.
Dario Amodei
Oh, yeah. Yeah. We’ve seen lots of examples of demagoguery in our life from humans, and there’s a concern that models could do that as well.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. We’ve seen lots of examples of demagoguery in our life from humans, and there’s a concern that models could do that as well.
Computer use
Lex Fridman
One of the ways that Claude has been getting more and more powerful is it’s now able to do some agentic stuff, computer use. There’s also an analysis within the sandbox of Claude.ai itself. But let’s talk about computer use. That seems to me super exciting that you can just give Claude a task and it takes a bunch of actions, figures it out, and has access to the…
One of the ways that Claude has been getting more and more powerful is it’s now able to do some agentic stuff, computer use. There’s also an analysis within the sandbox of Claude.ai itself. But let’s talk about computer use. That seems to me super exciting that you can just give Claude a task and it takes a bunch of actions, figures it out, and has access to the…
Lex Fridman
… a bunch of actions, figures it out and has access to your computer through screenshots. So can you explain how that works and where that’s headed?
… a bunch of actions, figures it out and has access to your computer through screenshots. So can you explain how that works and where that’s headed?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. It’s actually relatively simple. So Claude has had for a long time, since Claude 3 back in March, the ability to analyze images and respond to them with text. The only new thing we added is those images can be screenshots of a computer and in response, we train the model to give a location on the screen where you can click and/or buttons on the keyboard, you can press in order to take action. And it turns out that with actually not all that much additional training, the models can get quite good at that task. It’s a good example of generalization. People sometimes say if you get to lower earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere because of how much it takes to escape the gravity well. If you have a strong pre-trained model, I feel like you’re halfway to anywhere in terms of the intelligence space. And so actually, it didn’t take all that much to get Claude to do this. And you can just set that in a loop, give the model a screenshot, tell it what to click on, give it the next screenshot, tell it what to click on and that turns into a full kind of almost 3D video interaction of the model and it’s able to do all of these tasks. We showed these demos where it’s able to fill out spreadsheets, it’s able to kind of interact with a website, it’s able to open all kinds of programs, different operating systems, Windows, Linux, Mac. So I think all of that is very exciting. I will say, while in theory there’s nothing you could do there that you couldn’t have done through just giving the model the API to drive the computer screen, this really lowers the barrier. And there’s a lot of folks who either aren’t in a position to interact with those APIs or it takes them a long time to do.
Yeah. It’s actually relatively simple. So Claude has had for a long time, since Claude 3 back in March, the ability to analyze images and respond to them with text. The only new thing we added is those images can be screenshots of a computer and in response, we train the model to give a location on the screen where you can click and/or buttons on the keyboard, you can press in order to take action. And it turns out that with actually not all that much additional training, the models can get quite good at that task. It’s a good example of generalization. People sometimes say if you get to lower earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere because of how much it takes to escape the gravity well. If you have a strong pre-trained model, I feel like you’re halfway to anywhere in terms of the intelligence space. And so actually, it didn’t take all that much to get Claude to do this. And you can just set that in a loop, give the model a screenshot, tell it what to click on, give it the next screenshot, tell it what to click on and that turns into a full kind of almost 3D video interaction of the model and it’s able to do all of these tasks. We showed these demos where it’s able to fill out spreadsheets, it’s able to kind of interact with a website, it’s able to open all kinds of programs, different operating systems, Windows, Linux, Mac. So I think all of that is very exciting. I will say, while in theory there’s nothing you could do there that you couldn’t have done through just giving the model the API to drive the computer screen, this really lowers the barrier. And there’s a lot of folks who either aren’t in a position to interact with those APIs or it takes them a long time to do.
It’s just the screen is just a universal interface that’s a lot easier to interact with. And so I expect over time, this is going to lower a bunch of barriers. Now, honestly, the current model has, it leaves a lot still to be desired and we were honest about that in the blog. It makes mistakes, it misclicks. We were careful to warn people, “Hey, you can’t just leave this thing to run on your computer for minutes and minutes. You got to give this thing boundaries and guardrails.” And I think that’s one of the reasons we released it first in an API form rather than just hand the consumer and give it control of their computer. But I definitely feel that it’s important to get these capabilities out there. As models get more powerful, we’re going to have to grapple with how do we use these capabilities safely. How do we prevent them from being abused?
And I think releasing the model while the capabilities are still limited is very helpful in terms of doing that. I think since it’s been released, a number of customers, I think Replit was maybe one of the most quickest to deploy things, have made use of it in various ways. People have hooked up demos for Windows desktops, Macs, Linux machines. So yeah, it’s been very exciting. I think as with anything else, it comes with new exciting abilities and then with those new exciting abilities, we have to think about how to make the model safe, reliable, do what humans want them to do. It’s the same story for everything. Same thing. It’s that same tension.
Lex Fridman
But the possibility of use cases here, just the range is incredible. So how much to make it work really well in the future? How much do you have to specially kind of go beyond what the pre-trained model is doing, do more post-training, RLHF or supervised fine-tuning or synthetic data just for the agentive stuff?
But the possibility of use cases here, just the range is incredible. So how much to make it work really well in the future? How much do you have to specially kind of go beyond what the pre-trained model is doing, do more post-training, RLHF or supervised fine-tuning or synthetic data just for the agentive stuff?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. I think speaking at a high level, it’s our intention to keep investing a lot in making the model better. I think we look at some of the benchmarks where previous models were like, “Oh, could do it 6% of the time,” and now our model would do it 14 or 22% of the time. And yeah, we want to get up to the human level reliability of 80, 90% just like anywhere else. We’re on the same curve that we were on with SWE-bench where I think I would guess a year from now, the models can do this very, very reliably. But you got to start somewhere.
Yeah. I think speaking at a high level, it’s our intention to keep investing a lot in making the model better. I think we look at some of the benchmarks where previous models were like, “Oh, could do it 6% of the time,” and now our model would do it 14 or 22% of the time. And yeah, we want to get up to the human level reliability of 80, 90% just like anywhere else. We’re on the same curve that we were on with SWE-bench where I think I would guess a year from now, the models can do this very, very reliably. But you got to start somewhere.
Lex Fridman
So you think it’s possible to get to the human level 90% basically doing the same thing you’re doing now or it has to be special for computer use?
So you think it’s possible to get to the human level 90% basically doing the same thing you’re doing now or it has to be special for computer use?
Dario Amodei
It depends what you mean by special and special in general, but I generally think the same kinds of techniques that we’ve been using to train the current model, I expect that doubling down on those techniques in the same way that we have for code, for models in general, for image input, for voice, I expect those same techniques will scale here as they have everywhere else,
It depends what you mean by special and special in general, but I generally think the same kinds of techniques that we’ve been using to train the current model, I expect that doubling down on those techniques in the same way that we have for code, for models in general, for image input, for voice, I expect those same techniques will scale here as they have everywhere else,
Lex Fridman
But this is giving the power of action to Claude and so you could do a lot of really powerful things, but you could do a lot of damage also.
But this is giving the power of action to Claude and so you could do a lot of really powerful things, but you could do a lot of damage also.
Dario Amodei
Yeah, yeah. No and we’ve been very aware of that. Look, my view actually is computer use isn’t a fundamentally new capability like the CBRN or autonomy capabilities are. It’s more like it kind of opens the aperture for the model to use and apply its existing abilities. And so the way we think about it, going back to our RSP, is nothing that this model is doing inherently increases the risk from an RSP perspective, but as the models get more powerful, having this capability may make it scarier once it has the cognitive capability to do something at the ASL-3 and ASL-4 level, this may be the thing that kind of unbounds it from doing so. So going forward, certainly this modality of interaction is something we have tested for and that we will continue to test for an RSP going forward. I think it’s probably better to learn and explore this capability before the model is super capable
Yeah, yeah. No and we’ve been very aware of that. Look, my view actually is computer use isn’t a fundamentally new capability like the CBRN or autonomy capabilities are. It’s more like it kind of opens the aperture for the model to use and apply its existing abilities. And so the way we think about it, going back to our RSP, is nothing that this model is doing inherently increases the risk from an RSP perspective, but as the models get more powerful, having this capability may make it scarier once it has the cognitive capability to do something at the ASL-3 and ASL-4 level, this may be the thing that kind of unbounds it from doing so. So going forward, certainly this modality of interaction is something we have tested for and that we will continue to test for an RSP going forward. I think it’s probably better to learn and explore this capability before the model is super capable
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And there’s a lot of interesting attacks like prompt injection because now you’ve widened the aperture so you can prompt inject through stuff on screen. So if this becomes more and more useful, then there’s more and more benefit to inject stuff into the model. If it goes to certain web page, it could be harmless stuff like advertisements or it could be harmful stuff, right?
Yeah. And there’s a lot of interesting attacks like prompt injection because now you’ve widened the aperture so you can prompt inject through stuff on screen. So if this becomes more and more useful, then there’s more and more benefit to inject stuff into the model. If it goes to certain web page, it could be harmless stuff like advertisements or it could be harmful stuff, right?
Dario Amodei
Yeah, we’ve thought a lot about things like spam, CAPTCHA, mass… One secret, I’ll tell you, if you’ve invented a new technology, not necessarily the biggest misuse, but the first misuse you’ll see, scams, just petty scams.
Yeah, we’ve thought a lot about things like spam, CAPTCHA, mass… One secret, I’ll tell you, if you’ve invented a new technology, not necessarily the biggest misuse, but the first misuse you’ll see, scams, just petty scams.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dario Amodei
It’s like a thing as old, people scamming each other, it’s this thing as old as time. And it’s just every time, you got to deal with it.
It’s like a thing as old, people scamming each other, it’s this thing as old as time. And it’s just every time, you got to deal with it.
Lex Fridman
It’s almost silly to say, but it’s true, sort of bots and spam in general is a thing as it gets more and more intelligent-
It’s almost silly to say, but it’s true, sort of bots and spam in general is a thing as it gets more and more intelligent-
Dario Amodei
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
… it’s harder and harder to fight it.
… it’s harder and harder to fight it.
Dario Amodei
Like I said, there are a lot of petty criminals in the world and it’s like every new technology is a new way for petty criminals to do something stupid and malicious.
Like I said, there are a lot of petty criminals in the world and it’s like every new technology is a new way for petty criminals to do something stupid and malicious.
Lex Fridman
Is there any ideas about sandboxing it? How difficult is the sandboxing task?
Is there any ideas about sandboxing it? How difficult is the sandboxing task?
Dario Amodei
Yeah, we sandbox during training. So for example, during training we didn’t expose the model to the internet. I think that’s probably a bad idea during training because the model can be changing its policy, it can be changing what it’s doing and it’s having an effect in the real world. In terms of actually deploying the model, it kind of depends on the application. Sometimes you want the model to do something in the real world. But of course, you can always put guard, you can always put guard rails on the outside. You can say, “Okay, well, this model’s not going to move data from my, the model’s not going to move any files from my computer or my web server to anywhere else.”
Yeah, we sandbox during training. So for example, during training we didn’t expose the model to the internet. I think that’s probably a bad idea during training because the model can be changing its policy, it can be changing what it’s doing and it’s having an effect in the real world. In terms of actually deploying the model, it kind of depends on the application. Sometimes you want the model to do something in the real world. But of course, you can always put guard, you can always put guard rails on the outside. You can say, “Okay, well, this model’s not going to move data from my, the model’s not going to move any files from my computer or my web server to anywhere else.”
Now, when you talk about sandboxing, again, when we get to ASL-4, none of these precautions are going to make sense there. When you talk about ASL-4, you’re then, the model is being, there’s theoretical worry the model could be smart enough to kind of break it to out of any box. And so there, we need to think about mechanistic interpretability. If we’re going to have a sandbox, it would need to be a mathematically provable. That’s a whole different world than what we’re dealing with with the models today.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, the science of building a box from which ASL-4 AI system cannot escape.
Yeah, the science of building a box from which ASL-4 AI system cannot escape.
Dario Amodei
I think it’s probably not the right approach. I think the right approach, instead of having something unaligned that you’re trying to prevent it from escaping, I think it’s better to just design the model the right way or have a loop where you look inside the model and you’re able to verify properties and that gives you an opportunity to tell, iterate and actually get it right. I think containing bad models is a much worse solution than having good models.
I think it’s probably not the right approach. I think the right approach, instead of having something unaligned that you’re trying to prevent it from escaping, I think it’s better to just design the model the right way or have a loop where you look inside the model and you’re able to verify properties and that gives you an opportunity to tell, iterate and actually get it right. I think containing bad models is a much worse solution than having good models.
Government regulation of AI
Lex Fridman
Let me ask about regulation. What’s the role of regulation in keeping AI safe? So for example, can you describe California AI regulation bill SB 1047 that was ultimately vetoed by the governor? What are the pros and cons of this bill in general?
Let me ask about regulation. What’s the role of regulation in keeping AI safe? So for example, can you describe California AI regulation bill SB 1047 that was ultimately vetoed by the governor? What are the pros and cons of this bill in general?
Dario Amodei
Yes, we ended up making some suggestions to the bill. And then some of those were adopted and we felt, I think, quite positively about the bill by the end of that, it did still have some downsides. And of course, it got vetoed. I think at a high level, I think some of the key ideas behind the bill are I would say similar to ideas behind our RSPs. And I think it’s very important that some jurisdiction, whether it’s California or the federal government and/or other countries and other states, passes some regulation like this. And I can talk through why I think that’s so important. So I feel good about our RSP. It’s not perfect. It needs to be iterated on a lot. But it’s been a good forcing function for getting the company to take these risks seriously, to put them into product planning, to really make them a central part of work at Anthropic and to make sure that all of a thousand people, and it’s almost a thousand people now at Anthropic, understand that this is one of the highest priorities of the company, if not the highest priority.
Yes, we ended up making some suggestions to the bill. And then some of those were adopted and we felt, I think, quite positively about the bill by the end of that, it did still have some downsides. And of course, it got vetoed. I think at a high level, I think some of the key ideas behind the bill are I would say similar to ideas behind our RSPs. And I think it’s very important that some jurisdiction, whether it’s California or the federal government and/or other countries and other states, passes some regulation like this. And I can talk through why I think that’s so important. So I feel good about our RSP. It’s not perfect. It needs to be iterated on a lot. But it’s been a good forcing function for getting the company to take these risks seriously, to put them into product planning, to really make them a central part of work at Anthropic and to make sure that all of a thousand people, and it’s almost a thousand people now at Anthropic, understand that this is one of the highest priorities of the company, if not the highest priority.
But one, there are still some companies that don’t have RSP like mechanisms, like OpenAI, Google did adopt these mechanisms a couple months after Anthropic did, but there are other companies out there that don’t have these mechanisms at all. And so if some companies adopt these mechanisms and others don’t, it’s really going to create a situation where some of these dangers have the property that it doesn’t matter if three out of five of the companies are being safe, if the other two are being unsafe, it creates this negative externality. And I think the lack of uniformity is not fair to those of us who have put a lot of effort into being very thoughtful about these procedures. The second thing is I don’t think you can trust these companies to adhere to these voluntary plans on their own. Right? I like to think that Anthropic will, we do everything we can that we will, our RSP is checked by our long-term benefit trust, so we do everything we can to adhere to our own RSP.
But you hear lots of things about various companies saying, “Oh, they said they would give this much compute and they didn’t. They said they would do this thing and the didn’t.” I don’t think it makes sense to litigate particular things that companies have done, but I think this broad principle that if there’s nothing watching over them, if there’s nothing watching over us as an industry, there’s no guarantee that we’ll do the right thing and the stakes are very high. And so I think it’s important to have a uniform standard that everyone follows and to make sure that simply that the industry does what a majority of the industry has already said is important and has already said that they definitely will do.
Right, some people, I think there’s a class of people who are against regulation on principle. I understand where that comes from. If you go to Europe and you see something like GDPR, you see some of the other stuff that they’ve done. Some of it’s good, but some of it is really unnecessarily burdensome and I think it’s fair to say really has slowed innovation. And so I understand where people are coming from on priors. I understand why people start from that position. But again, I think AI is different. If we go to the very serious risks of autonomy and misuse that I talked about just a few minutes ago, I think that those are unusual and they warrant an unusually strong response. And so I think it’s very important.
Again, we need something that everyone can get behind. I think one of the issues with SB 1047, especially the original version of it was it had a bunch of the structure of RSPs, but it also had a bunch of stuff that was either clunky or that just would’ve created a bunch of burdens, a bunch of hassle and might even have missed the target in terms of addressing the risks. You don’t really hear about it on Twitter, you just hear about kind of people are cheering for any regulation. And then the folks who are against make up these often quite intellectually dishonest arguments about how it’ll make us move away from California, bill doesn’t apply if you’re headquartered in California, bill only applies if you do business in California, or that it would damage the open source ecosystem or that it would cause all of these things.
I think those were mostly nonsense, but there are better arguments against regulation. There’s one guy, Dean Ball, who’s really, I think, a very scholarly analyst who looks at what happens when a regulation is put in place in ways that they can kind of get a life of their own or how they can be poorly designed. And so our interest has always been we do think there should be regulation in this space, but we want to be an actor who makes sure that that regulation is something that’s surgical, that’s targeted at the serious risks and is something people can actually comply with. Because something I think the advocates of regulation don’t understand as well as they could is if we get something in place that’s poorly targeted, that wastes a bunch of people’s time, what’s going to happen is people are going to say, “See, these safety risks, this is nonsense. I just had to hire 10 lawyers to fill out all these forms. I had to run all these tests for something that was clearly not dangerous.”
And after six months of that, there will be a ground swell and we’ll end up with a durable consensus against regulation. And so I think the worst enemy of those who want real accountability is badly designed regulation. We need to actually get it right. And if there’s one thing I could say to the advocates, it would be that I want them to understand this dynamic better and we need to be really careful and we need to talk to people who actually have experience seeing how regulations play out in practice. And the people who have seen that, understand to be very careful. If this was some lesser issue, I might be against regulation at all.
But what I want the opponents to understand is that the underlying issues are actually serious. They’re not something that I or the other companies are just making up because of regulatory capture, they’re not sci-fi fantasies, they’re not any of these things. Every time we have a new model, every few months we measure the behavior of these models and they’re getting better and better at these concerning tasks just as they are getting better and better at good, valuable, economically useful tasks. And so I would just love it if some of the former, I think SB 1047 was very polarizing, I would love it if some of the most reasonable opponents and some of the most reasonable proponents would sit down together. And I think that the different AI companies, Anthropic was the only AI company that felt positively in a very detailed way. I think Elon tweeted briefly something positive, but some of the big ones like Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft were pretty staunchly against.
So I would really is if some of the key stakeholders, some of the most thoughtful proponents and some of the most thoughtful opponents would sit down and say how do we solve this problem in a way that the proponents feel brings a real reduction in risk and that the opponents feel that it is not hampering the industry or hampering innovation any more necessary than it needs to. I think for whatever reason, that things got too polarized and those two groups didn’t get to sit down in the way that they should. And I feel urgency. I really think we need to do something in 2025. If we get to the end of 2025 and we’ve still done nothing about this, then I’m going to be worried. I’m not worried yet because, again, the risks aren’t here yet, but I think time is running short.
Lex Fridman
And come up with something surgical, like you said.
And come up with something surgical, like you said.
Dario Amodei
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And we need to get away from this intense pro safety versus intense anti-regulatory rhetoric. It’s turned into these flame wars on Twitter and nothing good’s going to come of that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And we need to get away from this intense pro safety versus intense anti-regulatory rhetoric. It’s turned into these flame wars on Twitter and nothing good’s going to come of that.
Lex Fridman
So there’s a lot of curiosity about the different players in the game. One of the OGs is OpenAI. You’ve had several years of experience at OpenAI. What’s your story and history there?
So there’s a lot of curiosity about the different players in the game. One of the OGs is OpenAI. You’ve had several years of experience at OpenAI. What’s your story and history there?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. So I was at OpenAI for roughly five years. For the last, I think it was couple years, I was vice president of research there. Probably myself and Ilya Sutskever were the ones who really kind of set the research direction. Around 2016 or 2017, I first started to really believe in or at least confirm my belief in the scaling hypothesis when Ilya famously said to me, “The thing you need to understand about these models is they just want to learn. The models just want to learn.” And again, sometimes there are these one sentences, these then cones, that you hear them and you’re like, “Ah, that explains everything. That explains a thousand things that I’ve seen.” And then ever after, I had this visualization in my head of you optimize the models in the right way, you point the models in the right way, they just want to learn. They just want to solve the problem regardless of what the problem is.
Yeah. So I was at OpenAI for roughly five years. For the last, I think it was couple years, I was vice president of research there. Probably myself and Ilya Sutskever were the ones who really kind of set the research direction. Around 2016 or 2017, I first started to really believe in or at least confirm my belief in the scaling hypothesis when Ilya famously said to me, “The thing you need to understand about these models is they just want to learn. The models just want to learn.” And again, sometimes there are these one sentences, these then cones, that you hear them and you’re like, “Ah, that explains everything. That explains a thousand things that I’ve seen.” And then ever after, I had this visualization in my head of you optimize the models in the right way, you point the models in the right way, they just want to learn. They just want to solve the problem regardless of what the problem is.
Lex Fridman
So get out of their way, basically?
So get out of their way, basically?
Dario Amodei
Get out of their way. Yeah.
Get out of their way. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Okay.
Okay.
Dario Amodei
Don’t impose your own ideas about how they should learn. And this was the same thing as Rich Sutton put out in the bitter lesson or Gwern put out in the scaling hypothesis. I think generally the dynamic was I got this kind of inspiration from Ilya and from others, folks like Alec Radford, who did the original GPT-1 and then ran really hard with it, me and my collaborators, on GPT-2, GPT-3, RL from Human Feedback, which was an attempt to kind of deal with the early safety and durability, things like debate and amplification, heavy on interpretability. So again, the combination of safety plus scaling. Probably 2018, 2019, 2020, those were kind of the years when myself and my collaborators, probably many of whom became co-founders of Anthropic, kind of really had a vision and drove the direction.
Don’t impose your own ideas about how they should learn. And this was the same thing as Rich Sutton put out in the bitter lesson or Gwern put out in the scaling hypothesis. I think generally the dynamic was I got this kind of inspiration from Ilya and from others, folks like Alec Radford, who did the original GPT-1 and then ran really hard with it, me and my collaborators, on GPT-2, GPT-3, RL from Human Feedback, which was an attempt to kind of deal with the early safety and durability, things like debate and amplification, heavy on interpretability. So again, the combination of safety plus scaling. Probably 2018, 2019, 2020, those were kind of the years when myself and my collaborators, probably many of whom became co-founders of Anthropic, kind of really had a vision and drove the direction.
Lex Fridman
Why’d you leave? Why’d you decide to leave?
Why’d you leave? Why’d you decide to leave?
Dario Amodei
Yeah, so look, I’m going to put things this way and I think it ties to the race to the top, which is in my time at OpenAI, what I come to see as I’d come to appreciate the scaling hypothesis and as I’d come to appreciate kind of the importance of safety along with the scaling hypothesis. The first one I think OpenAI was getting on board with. The second one in a way had always been part of OpenAI’s messaging. But over many years of the time that I spent there, I think I had a particular vision of how we should handle these things, how we should be brought out in the world, the kind of principles that the organization should have. And look, there were many, many discussions about should the company do this, should the company do that? There’s a bunch of misinformation out there.
Yeah, so look, I’m going to put things this way and I think it ties to the race to the top, which is in my time at OpenAI, what I come to see as I’d come to appreciate the scaling hypothesis and as I’d come to appreciate kind of the importance of safety along with the scaling hypothesis. The first one I think OpenAI was getting on board with. The second one in a way had always been part of OpenAI’s messaging. But over many years of the time that I spent there, I think I had a particular vision of how we should handle these things, how we should be brought out in the world, the kind of principles that the organization should have. And look, there were many, many discussions about should the company do this, should the company do that? There’s a bunch of misinformation out there.
People say we left because we didn’t like the deal with Microsoft. False. Although, it was like a lot of discussion, a lot of questions about exactly how we do the deal with Microsoft. We left because we didn’t like commercialization. That’s not true. We built GPD-3, which was the model that was commercialized. I was involved in commercialization. It’s more, again, about how do you do it? Civilization is going down this path to very powerful AI. What’s the way to do it? That is cautious, straightforward, honest, that builds trust in the organization and in individuals. How do we get from here to there and how do we have a real vision for how to get it right? How can safety not just be something we say because it helps with recruiting. And I think at the end of the day, if you have a vision for that, forget about anyone else’s vision.
I don’t want to talk about anyone else’s vision. If you have a vision for how to do it, you should go off and you should do that vision. It is incredibly unproductive to try and argue with someone else’s vision. You might think they’re not doing it the right way. You might think they’re dishonest. Who knows? Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. But what you should do is you should take some people you trust and you should go off together and you should make your vision happen. And if your vision is compelling, if you can make it appeal to people, some combination of ethically in the market, if you can make a company that’s a place people want to join, that engages in practices that people think are reasonable while managing to maintain its position in the ecosystem at the same time, if you do that, people will copy it.
And the fact that you are doing it, especially the fact that you’re doing it better than they are, causes them to change their behavior in a much more compelling way than if they’re your boss and you’re arguing with them. I don’t know how to be any more specific about it than that, but I think it’s generally very unproductive to try and get someone else’s vision to look like your vision. It’s much more productive to go off and do a clean experiment and say, “This is our vision, this is how we’re going to do things. Your choice is you can ignore us, you can reject what we’re doing or you can start to become more like us.” And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And that plays out in the behavior of customers, that plays out in the behavior of the public, that plays out in the behavior of where people choose to work. And again, at the end, it’s not about one company winning or another company winning.
If we or another company are engaging in some practice that people find genuinely appealing, and I want it to be in substance, not just an appearance and I think researchers are sophisticated and they look at substance, and then other companies start copying that practice and they win because they copied that practice. That’s great. That’s success. That’s like the race to the top. It doesn’t matter who wins in the end as long as everyone is copying everyone else’s good practices. One way I think of it is the thing we’re all afraid of is the race to the bottom and the race to the bottom doesn’t matter who wins because we all lose. In the most extreme world, we make this autonomous AI that the robots enslave us or whatever. That’s half joking, but that is the most extreme thing that could happen. Then it doesn’t matter which company was ahead. If instead you create a race to the top where people are competing to engage in good practices, then at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who ends up winning, it doesn’t even matter who started the race to the top.
The point isn’t to be virtuous, the point is to get the system into a better equilibrium than it was before. And individual companies can play some role in doing this. Individual companies can help to start it, can help to accelerate it. And frankly, I think individuals at other companies have done this as well. The individuals that when we put out an RSP react by pushing harder to get something similar done at other companies, sometimes other companies do something that’s we’re like, “Oh, it’s a good practice. We think that’s good. We should adopt it too.” The only difference is I think we try to be more forward leaning. We try and adopt more of these practices first and adopt them more quickly when others invent them. But I think this dynamic is what we should be pointing at and that I think it abstracts away the question of which company’s winning, who trusts who. I think all these questions of drama are profoundly uninteresting and the thing that matters is the ecosystem that we all operate in and how to make that ecosystem better because that constrains all the players.
Lex Fridman
And so Anthropic is this kind of clean experiment built on a foundation of what concretely AI safety should look like?
And so Anthropic is this kind of clean experiment built on a foundation of what concretely AI safety should look like?
Dario Amodei
Well, look, I’m sure we’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. The perfect organization doesn’t exist. It has to deal with the imperfection of a thousand employees. It has to deal with the imperfection of our leaders, including me. It has to deal with the imperfection of the people we’ve put to oversee the imperfection of the leaders like the board and the long-term benefit trust. It’s all a set of imperfect people trying to aim imperfectly at some ideal that will never perfectly be achieved. That’s what you sign up for. That’s what it will always be.
Well, look, I’m sure we’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. The perfect organization doesn’t exist. It has to deal with the imperfection of a thousand employees. It has to deal with the imperfection of our leaders, including me. It has to deal with the imperfection of the people we’ve put to oversee the imperfection of the leaders like the board and the long-term benefit trust. It’s all a set of imperfect people trying to aim imperfectly at some ideal that will never perfectly be achieved. That’s what you sign up for. That’s what it will always be.
But imperfect doesn’t mean you just give up. There’s better and there’s worse. And hopefully, we can do well enough that we can begin to build some practices that the whole industry engages in. And then my guess is that multiple of these companies will be successful. Anthropic will be successful. These other companies, like ones I’ve been at the past, will also be successful. And some will be more successful than others. That’s less important than, again, that we align the incentives of the industry. And that happens partly through the race to the top, partly through things like RSP, partly through, again, selected surgical regulation.
Hiring a great team
Lex Fridman
You said talent density beats talent mass, so can you explain that? Can you expand on that?
You said talent density beats talent mass, so can you explain that? Can you expand on that?
Dario Amodei
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Can you just talk about what it takes to build a great team of AI researchers and engineers?
Can you just talk about what it takes to build a great team of AI researchers and engineers?
Dario Amodei
This is one of these statements that’s more true every month. Every month I see this statement as more true than I did the month before. So if I were to do a thought experiment, let’s say you have a team of 100 people that are super smart, motivated and aligned with the mission and that’s your company. Or you can have a team of a thousand people where 200 people are super smart, super aligned with the mission and then 800 people are, let’s just say you pick 800 random big tech employees, which would you rather have? The talent mass is greater in the group of a thousand people. You have even a larger number of incredibly talented, incredibly aligned, incredibly smart people. But the issue is just that if every time someone super talented looks around, they see someone else super talented and super dedicated, that sets the tone for everything. That sets the tone for everyone is super inspired to work at the same place. Everyone trusts everyone else.
This is one of these statements that’s more true every month. Every month I see this statement as more true than I did the month before. So if I were to do a thought experiment, let’s say you have a team of 100 people that are super smart, motivated and aligned with the mission and that’s your company. Or you can have a team of a thousand people where 200 people are super smart, super aligned with the mission and then 800 people are, let’s just say you pick 800 random big tech employees, which would you rather have? The talent mass is greater in the group of a thousand people. You have even a larger number of incredibly talented, incredibly aligned, incredibly smart people. But the issue is just that if every time someone super talented looks around, they see someone else super talented and super dedicated, that sets the tone for everything. That sets the tone for everyone is super inspired to work at the same place. Everyone trusts everyone else.
If you have a thousand or 10,000 people and things have really regressed, you are not able to do selection and you’re choosing random people, what happens is then you need to put a lot of processes and a lot of guardrails in place just because people don’t fully trust each other or you have to adjudicate political battles. There are so many things that slow down the org’s ability to operate. And so we’re nearly a thousand people and we’ve tried to make it so that as large a fraction of those thousand people as possible are super talented, super skilled, it’s one of the reasons we’ve slowed down hiring a lot in the last few months. We grew from 300 to 800, I believe, I think in the first seven, eight months of the year and now we’ve slowed down. The last three months, we went from 800 to 900, 950, something like that. Don’t quote me on the exact numbers, but I think there’s an inflection point around a thousand and we want to be much more careful how we grow.
Early on and now as well, we’ve hired a lot of physicists. Theoretical physicists can learn things really fast. Even more recently, as we’ve continued to hire that, we’ve really had a high bar on both the research side and the software engineering side, have hired a lot of senior people, including folks who used to be at other companies in this space, and we’ve just continued to be very selective. It’s very easy to go from a hundred to a thousand, a thousand to 10,000 without paying attention to making sure everyone has a unified purpose. It’s so powerful. If your company consists of a lot of different fiefdoms that all want to do their own thing, they’re all optimizing for their own thing, it’s very hard to get anything done. But if everyone sees the broader purpose of the company, if there’s trust and there’s dedication to doing the right thing, that is a superpower. That in itself I think can overcome almost every other disadvantage.
Lex Fridman
And to Steve Jobs, A players. A players want to look around and see other A players is another way of saying that.
And to Steve Jobs, A players. A players want to look around and see other A players is another way of saying that.
Dario Amodei
Correct.
Correct.
Lex Fridman
I don’t know what that is about human nature, but it is demotivating to see people who are not obsessively driving towards a singular mission. And it is on the flip side of that, super motivating to see that. It’s interesting. What’s it take to be a great AI researcher or engineer from everything you’ve seen from working with so many amazing people?
I don’t know what that is about human nature, but it is demotivating to see people who are not obsessively driving towards a singular mission. And it is on the flip side of that, super motivating to see that. It’s interesting. What’s it take to be a great AI researcher or engineer from everything you’ve seen from working with so many amazing people?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. I think the number one quality, especially on the research side, but really both, is open mindedness. Sounds easy to be open-minded, right? You’re just like, “Oh, I’m open to anything.” But if I think about my own early history in this scaling hypothesis, I was seeing the same data others were seeing. I don’t think I was a better programmer or better at coming up with research ideas than any of the hundreds of people that I worked with. In some ways, I was worse. I’ve never precise programming of finding the bug, writing the GPU kernels. I could point you to a hundred people here who are better at that than I am.
Yeah. I think the number one quality, especially on the research side, but really both, is open mindedness. Sounds easy to be open-minded, right? You’re just like, “Oh, I’m open to anything.” But if I think about my own early history in this scaling hypothesis, I was seeing the same data others were seeing. I don’t think I was a better programmer or better at coming up with research ideas than any of the hundreds of people that I worked with. In some ways, I was worse. I’ve never precise programming of finding the bug, writing the GPU kernels. I could point you to a hundred people here who are better at that than I am.
But the thing that I think I did have that was different was that I was just willing to look at something with new eyes. People said, “Oh, we don’t have the right algorithms yet. We haven’t come up with the right way to do things.” And I was just like, “Oh, I don’t know. This neural net has 30 million parameters. What if we gave it 50 million instead? Let’s plot some graphs.” That basic scientific mindset of like, “Oh man,” I see some variable that I could change. What happens when it changes? Let’s try these different things and create a graph. For even, this was the simplest thing in the world, change the number of, this wasn’t PhD level experimental design, this was simple and stupid. Anyone could have done this if you just told them that it was important. It’s also not hard to understand. You didn’t need to be brilliant to come up with this.
But you put the two things together and some tiny number of people, some single digit number of people have driven forward the whole field by realizing this. And it’s often like that. If you look back at the discoveries in history, they’re often like that. And so this open-mindedness and this willingness to see with new eyes that often comes from being newer to the field, often experience is a disadvantage for this, that is the most important thing. It’s very hard to look for and test for, but I think it’s the most important thing because when you find something, some really new way of thinking about things, when you have the initiative to do that, it’s absolutely transformative.
Lex Fridman
And also be able to do kind of rapid experimentation and, in the face of that, be open-minded and curious and looking at the data with these fresh eyes and seeing what is it that it’s actually saying. That applies in mechanistic interpretability.
And also be able to do kind of rapid experimentation and, in the face of that, be open-minded and curious and looking at the data with these fresh eyes and seeing what is it that it’s actually saying. That applies in mechanistic interpretability.
Dario Amodei
It’s another example of this. Some of the early work and mechanistic interpretability so simple, it’s just no one thought to care about this question before.
It’s another example of this. Some of the early work and mechanistic interpretability so simple, it’s just no one thought to care about this question before.
Lex Fridman
You said what it takes to be a great AI researcher. Can we rewind the clock back, what advice would you give to people interested in AI? They’re young, looking…
You said what it takes to be a great AI researcher. Can we rewind the clock back, what advice would you give to people interested in AI? They’re young, looking…
Lex Fridman
What advice would you give to people interested in AI? They’re young. Looking forward to how can I make an impact on the world?
What advice would you give to people interested in AI? They’re young. Looking forward to how can I make an impact on the world?
Dario Amodei
I think my number one piece of advice is to just start playing with the models. Actually, I worry a little, this seems like obvious advice now. I think three years ago it wasn’t obvious and people started by, “Oh, let me read the latest reinforcement learning paper.” And you should do that as well, but now with wider availability of models and APIs, people are doing this more. But, I think just experiential knowledge. These models are new artifacts that no one really understands and so getting experience playing with them. I would also say again, in line with the do something new, think in some new direction, there are all these things that haven’t been explored. For example, mechanistic interpretability is still very new. It’s probably better to work on that than it is to work on new model architectures, because it’s more popular than it was before. There are probably 100 people working on it, but there aren’t like 10,000 people working on it.
I think my number one piece of advice is to just start playing with the models. Actually, I worry a little, this seems like obvious advice now. I think three years ago it wasn’t obvious and people started by, “Oh, let me read the latest reinforcement learning paper.” And you should do that as well, but now with wider availability of models and APIs, people are doing this more. But, I think just experiential knowledge. These models are new artifacts that no one really understands and so getting experience playing with them. I would also say again, in line with the do something new, think in some new direction, there are all these things that haven’t been explored. For example, mechanistic interpretability is still very new. It’s probably better to work on that than it is to work on new model architectures, because it’s more popular than it was before. There are probably 100 people working on it, but there aren’t like 10,000 people working on it.
And it’s just this fertile area for study. There’s so much low-hanging fruit, you can just walk by and you can pick things. For whatever reason, people aren’t interested in it enough. I think there are some things around long horizon learning and long horizon tasks, where there’s a lot to be done. I think evaluations, we’re still very early in our ability to study evaluations, particularly for dynamic systems acting in the world. I think there’s some stuff around multi-agent. Skate where the puck is going is my advice, and you don’t have to be brilliant to think of it. All the things that are going to be exciting in five years, people even mention them as conventional wisdom, but it’s just somehow there’s this barrier that people don’t double down as much as they could, or they’re afraid to do something that’s not the popular thing. I don’t know why it happens, but getting over that barrier, that’s my number one piece of advice.
Post-training
Lex Fridman
Let’s talk if we could a bit about post-training. So it seems that the modern post-training recipe has a little bit of everything. So supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, the constitutional AI with RLAIF-
Let’s talk if we could a bit about post-training. So it seems that the modern post-training recipe has a little bit of everything. So supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, the constitutional AI with RLAIF-
Dario Amodei
Best acronym.
Best acronym.
Lex Fridman
It’s the, again, that naming thing. And then synthetic data. Seems like a lot of synthetic data, or at least trying to figure out ways to have high quality synthetic data. So if this is a secret sauce that makes Anthropic clause so incredible, how much of the magic is in the pre-training? How much of it is in the post-training?
It’s the, again, that naming thing. And then synthetic data. Seems like a lot of synthetic data, or at least trying to figure out ways to have high quality synthetic data. So if this is a secret sauce that makes Anthropic clause so incredible, how much of the magic is in the pre-training? How much of it is in the post-training?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. So first of all, we’re not perfectly able to measure that ourselves. When you see some great character ability, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it came from pre-training or post-training. We developed ways to try and distinguish between those two, but they’re not perfect. The second thing I would say is, when there is an advantage and I think we’ve been pretty good in general at RL, perhaps the best, although I don’t know, I don’t see what goes on inside other companies. Usually it isn’t, “Oh my God, we have this secret magic method that others don’t have.” Usually it’s like, “Well, we got better at the infrastructure so we could run it for longer,” or, “We were able to get higher quality data,” or, “We were able to filter our data better, or “We were able to combine these methods and practice.”
Yeah. So first of all, we’re not perfectly able to measure that ourselves. When you see some great character ability, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it came from pre-training or post-training. We developed ways to try and distinguish between those two, but they’re not perfect. The second thing I would say is, when there is an advantage and I think we’ve been pretty good in general at RL, perhaps the best, although I don’t know, I don’t see what goes on inside other companies. Usually it isn’t, “Oh my God, we have this secret magic method that others don’t have.” Usually it’s like, “Well, we got better at the infrastructure so we could run it for longer,” or, “We were able to get higher quality data,” or, “We were able to filter our data better, or “We were able to combine these methods and practice.”
It’s usually some boring matter of practice and trade craft. So when I think about how to do something special in terms of how we train these models both, but even more so I really think of it a little more, again, as designing airplanes or cars. It’s not just like, “Oh, man. I have the blueprint.” Maybe that makes you make the next airplane. But there’s some cultural trade craft of how we think about the design process that I think is more important than any particular gizmo we’re able to invent.
Lex Fridman
Okay. Well, let me ask you about specific techniques. So first on RLHF, what do you think, just zooming out intuition, almost philosophy … Why do you think RLHF works so well?
Okay. Well, let me ask you about specific techniques. So first on RLHF, what do you think, just zooming out intuition, almost philosophy … Why do you think RLHF works so well?
Dario Amodei
If I go back to the scaling hypothesis, one of the ways to skate the scaling hypothesis is, if you train for X and you throw enough compute at it, then you get X. And so RLHF is good at doing what humans want the model to do, or at least to state it more precisely doing what humans who look at the model for a brief period of time and consider different possible responses, what they prefer as the response, which is not perfect from both the safety and capabilities perspective, in that humans are often not able to perfectly identify what the model wants and what humans want in the moment may not be what they want in the long term.
If I go back to the scaling hypothesis, one of the ways to skate the scaling hypothesis is, if you train for X and you throw enough compute at it, then you get X. And so RLHF is good at doing what humans want the model to do, or at least to state it more precisely doing what humans who look at the model for a brief period of time and consider different possible responses, what they prefer as the response, which is not perfect from both the safety and capabilities perspective, in that humans are often not able to perfectly identify what the model wants and what humans want in the moment may not be what they want in the long term.
So there’s a lot of subtlety there, but the models are good at producing what the humans in some shallow sense want. And it actually turns out that you don’t even have to throw that much compute at it, because of another thing, which is this thing about a strong pre-trained model being halfway to anywhere. So once you have the pre-trained model, you have all the representations you need to get the model where you want it to go.
Lex Fridman
So do you think RLHF makes the model smarter, or just appear smarter to the humans?
So do you think RLHF makes the model smarter, or just appear smarter to the humans?
Dario Amodei
I don’t think it makes the model smarter. I don’t think it just makes the model appear smarter. It’s like RLHF bridges the gap between the human and the model. I could have something really smart that can’t communicate at all. We all know people like this, people who are really smart but can’t understand what they’re saying. So I think RLHF just bridges that gap. I think it’s not the only kind of RL we do. It’s not the only kind of RL that will happen in the future. I think RL has the potential to make models smarter, to make them reason better, to make them operate better, to make them develop new skills even. And perhaps that could be done even in some cases with human feedback. But, the kind of RLHF we do today mostly doesn’t do that yet, although we’re very quickly starting to be able to.
I don’t think it makes the model smarter. I don’t think it just makes the model appear smarter. It’s like RLHF bridges the gap between the human and the model. I could have something really smart that can’t communicate at all. We all know people like this, people who are really smart but can’t understand what they’re saying. So I think RLHF just bridges that gap. I think it’s not the only kind of RL we do. It’s not the only kind of RL that will happen in the future. I think RL has the potential to make models smarter, to make them reason better, to make them operate better, to make them develop new skills even. And perhaps that could be done even in some cases with human feedback. But, the kind of RLHF we do today mostly doesn’t do that yet, although we’re very quickly starting to be able to.
Lex Fridman
But if you look at the metric of helpfulness, it increases that?
But if you look at the metric of helpfulness, it increases that?
Dario Amodei
Yes. It also increases, what was this word in Leopold’s essay, “unhobbling,” where basically the models are hobbled and then you do various trainings to them to unhobble them. So I like that word, because it’s a rare word. So I think RLHF unhobbles the models in some ways. And then there are other ways where that model hasn’t yet been unhobbled and needs to unhobble.
Yes. It also increases, what was this word in Leopold’s essay, “unhobbling,” where basically the models are hobbled and then you do various trainings to them to unhobble them. So I like that word, because it’s a rare word. So I think RLHF unhobbles the models in some ways. And then there are other ways where that model hasn’t yet been unhobbled and needs to unhobble.
Lex Fridman
If you can say in terms of cost, is pre-training the most expensive thing? Or is post-training creep up to that?
If you can say in terms of cost, is pre-training the most expensive thing? Or is post-training creep up to that?
Dario Amodei
At the present moment, it is still the case that pre-training is the majority of the cost. I don’t know what to expect in the future, but I could certainly anticipate a future where post-training is the majority of the cost.
At the present moment, it is still the case that pre-training is the majority of the cost. I don’t know what to expect in the future, but I could certainly anticipate a future where post-training is the majority of the cost.
Lex Fridman
In that future you anticipate, would it be the humans or the AI that’s the costly thing for the post-training?
In that future you anticipate, would it be the humans or the AI that’s the costly thing for the post-training?
Dario Amodei
I don’t think you can scale up humans enough to get high quality. Any kind of method that relies on humans and uses a large amount of compute, it’s going to have to rely on some scaled supervision method, like debate or iterated amplification or something like that.
I don’t think you can scale up humans enough to get high quality. Any kind of method that relies on humans and uses a large amount of compute, it’s going to have to rely on some scaled supervision method, like debate or iterated amplification or something like that.
Constitutional AI
Lex Fridman
So on that super interesting set of ideas around constitutional AI, can you describe what it is as first detailed in December 2022 paper and beyond that. What is it?
So on that super interesting set of ideas around constitutional AI, can you describe what it is as first detailed in December 2022 paper and beyond that. What is it?
Dario Amodei
Yes. So this was from two years ago. The basic idea is, so we describe what RLHF is. You have a model and you just sample from it twice. It spits out two possible responses, and you’re like, “Human, which responses do you like better?” Or another variant of it is, “Rate this response on a scale of one to seven.” So that’s hard because you need to scale up human interaction and it’s very implicit. I don’t have a sense of what I want the model to do. I just have a sense of what this average of 1,000 humans wants the model to do. So two ideas. One is, could the AI system itself decide which response is better? Could you show the AI system these two responses and ask which response is better? And then second, well, what criterion should the AI use?
Yes. So this was from two years ago. The basic idea is, so we describe what RLHF is. You have a model and you just sample from it twice. It spits out two possible responses, and you’re like, “Human, which responses do you like better?” Or another variant of it is, “Rate this response on a scale of one to seven.” So that’s hard because you need to scale up human interaction and it’s very implicit. I don’t have a sense of what I want the model to do. I just have a sense of what this average of 1,000 humans wants the model to do. So two ideas. One is, could the AI system itself decide which response is better? Could you show the AI system these two responses and ask which response is better? And then second, well, what criterion should the AI use?
And so then there’s this idea, you have a single document, a constitution if you will, that says, these are the principles the model should be using to respond. And the AI system reads those reads principles as well as reading the environment and the response. And it says, “Well, how good did the AI model do?” It’s basically a form of self-play. You’re training the model against itself. And so the AI gives the response and then you feed that back into what’s called the preference model, which in turn feeds the model to make it better. So you have this triangle of the AI, the preference model, and the improvement of the AI itself.
Lex Fridman
And we should say that in the constitution, the set of principles are human interpretable. They’re-
And we should say that in the constitution, the set of principles are human interpretable. They’re-
Dario Amodei
Yeah. Yeah. It’s something both the human and the AI system can read. So it has this nice translatability or symmetry. In practice, we both use a model constitution and we use RLHF and we use some of these other methods. So it’s turned into one tool in a toolkit, that both reduces the need for RLHF and increases the value we get from using each data point of RLHF. It also interacts in interesting ways with future reasoning type RL methods. So it’s one tool in the toolkit, but I think it is a very important tool.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s something both the human and the AI system can read. So it has this nice translatability or symmetry. In practice, we both use a model constitution and we use RLHF and we use some of these other methods. So it’s turned into one tool in a toolkit, that both reduces the need for RLHF and increases the value we get from using each data point of RLHF. It also interacts in interesting ways with future reasoning type RL methods. So it’s one tool in the toolkit, but I think it is a very important tool.
Lex Fridman
Well, it’s a compelling one to us humans. Thinking about the founding fathers and the founding of the United States. The natural question is who and how do you think it gets to define the constitution, the set of principles in the constitution?
Well, it’s a compelling one to us humans. Thinking about the founding fathers and the founding of the United States. The natural question is who and how do you think it gets to define the constitution, the set of principles in the constitution?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. So I’ll give a practical answer and a more abstract answer. I think the practical answer is look in practice, models get used by all kinds of different customers. And so you can have this idea where the model can have specialized rules or principles. We fine tune versions of models implicitly. We’ve talked about doing it explicitly having special principles that people can build into the models. So from a practical perspective, the answer can be very different from different people. A customer service agent behaves very differently from a lawyer and obeys different principles.
Yeah. So I’ll give a practical answer and a more abstract answer. I think the practical answer is look in practice, models get used by all kinds of different customers. And so you can have this idea where the model can have specialized rules or principles. We fine tune versions of models implicitly. We’ve talked about doing it explicitly having special principles that people can build into the models. So from a practical perspective, the answer can be very different from different people. A customer service agent behaves very differently from a lawyer and obeys different principles.
But, I think at the base of it, there are specific principles that models have to obey. I think a lot of them are things that people would agree with. Everyone agrees that we don’t want models to present these CBRN risks. I think we can go a little further and agree with some basic principles of democracy and the rule of law. Beyond that, it gets very uncertain and there our goal is generally for the models to be more neutral, to not espouse a particular point of view and more just be wise agents or advisors that will help you think things through and will present possible considerations. But don’t express strong or specific opinions.
Lex Fridman
OpenAI released a model spec where it clearly, concretely defines some of the goals of the model and specific examples like AB, how the model should behave. Do you find that interesting? By the way I should mention, I believe the brilliant John Schulman was a part of that. He’s now at Anthropic. Do you think this is a useful direction? Might Anthropic release a model spec as well?
OpenAI released a model spec where it clearly, concretely defines some of the goals of the model and specific examples like AB, how the model should behave. Do you find that interesting? By the way I should mention, I believe the brilliant John Schulman was a part of that. He’s now at Anthropic. Do you think this is a useful direction? Might Anthropic release a model spec as well?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. So I think that’s a pretty useful direction. Again, it has a lot in common with constitutional AI. So again, another example of a race to the top. We have something that we think a better and more responsible way of doing things. It’s also a competitive advantage. Then others discover that it has advantages and then start to do that thing. We then no longer have the competitive advantage, but it’s good from the perspective that now everyone has adopted a positive practice that others were not adopting. And so our response to that is, “Well, looks like we need a new competitive advantage in order to keep driving this race upwards.” So that’s how I generally feel about that. I also think every implementation of these things is different. So there were some things in the model spec that were not in constitutional AI, and so we can always adopt those things or at least learn from them. So again, I think this is an example of the positive dynamic that I think we should all want the field to have.
Yeah. So I think that’s a pretty useful direction. Again, it has a lot in common with constitutional AI. So again, another example of a race to the top. We have something that we think a better and more responsible way of doing things. It’s also a competitive advantage. Then others discover that it has advantages and then start to do that thing. We then no longer have the competitive advantage, but it’s good from the perspective that now everyone has adopted a positive practice that others were not adopting. And so our response to that is, “Well, looks like we need a new competitive advantage in order to keep driving this race upwards.” So that’s how I generally feel about that. I also think every implementation of these things is different. So there were some things in the model spec that were not in constitutional AI, and so we can always adopt those things or at least learn from them. So again, I think this is an example of the positive dynamic that I think we should all want the field to have.
Machines of Loving Grace
Lex Fridman
Let’s talk about the incredible essay Machines of Loving Grace. I recommend everybody read it. It’s a long one.
Let’s talk about the incredible essay Machines of Loving Grace. I recommend everybody read it. It’s a long one.
Dario Amodei
It is rather long.
It is rather long.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. It’s really refreshing to read concrete ideas about what a positive future looks like. And you took a bold stance because it’s very possible that you might be wrong on the dates or the specific applications-
Yeah. It’s really refreshing to read concrete ideas about what a positive future looks like. And you took a bold stance because it’s very possible that you might be wrong on the dates or the specific applications-
Dario Amodei
Oh, yeah. I’m fully expecting to well, definitely be wrong about all the details. I might be just spectacularly wrong about the whole thing and people will laugh at me for years. That’s just how the future works.
Oh, yeah. I’m fully expecting to well, definitely be wrong about all the details. I might be just spectacularly wrong about the whole thing and people will laugh at me for years. That’s just how the future works.
Lex Fridman
So you provided a bunch of concrete positive impacts of AI and how exactly a super intelligent AI might accelerate the rate of breakthroughs in, for example, biology and chemistry, that would then lead to things like we cure most cancers, prevent all infectious disease, double the human lifespan and so on. So let’s talk about this essay first. Can you give a high-level vision of this essay? And what are the key takeaways that people have?
So you provided a bunch of concrete positive impacts of AI and how exactly a super intelligent AI might accelerate the rate of breakthroughs in, for example, biology and chemistry, that would then lead to things like we cure most cancers, prevent all infectious disease, double the human lifespan and so on. So let’s talk about this essay first. Can you give a high-level vision of this essay? And what are the key takeaways that people have?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. I have spent a lot of time, and in Anthropic has spent a lot of effort on how do we address the risks of AI? How do we think about those risks? We’re trying to do a race to the top, what that requires us to build all these capabilities and the capabilities are cool. But, a big part of what we’re trying to do is address the risks. And the justification for that is like, well, all these positive things, the market is this very healthy organism. It’s going to produce all the positive things. The risks? I don’t know, we might mitigate them, we might not. And so we can have more impact by trying to mitigate the risks.
Yeah. I have spent a lot of time, and in Anthropic has spent a lot of effort on how do we address the risks of AI? How do we think about those risks? We’re trying to do a race to the top, what that requires us to build all these capabilities and the capabilities are cool. But, a big part of what we’re trying to do is address the risks. And the justification for that is like, well, all these positive things, the market is this very healthy organism. It’s going to produce all the positive things. The risks? I don’t know, we might mitigate them, we might not. And so we can have more impact by trying to mitigate the risks.
But, I noticed that one flaw in that way of thinking, and it’s not a change in how seriously I take the risks. It’s maybe a change in how I talk about them, is that no matter how logical or rational, that line of reasoning that I just gave might be. If you only talk about risks, your brain only thinks about risks. And so, I think it’s actually very important to understand, what if things do go well? And the whole reason we’re trying to prevent these risks is not because we’re afraid of technology, not because we want to slow it down. It’s because if we can get to the other side of these risks, if we can run the gauntlet successfully, to put it in stark terms, then on the other side of the gauntlet are all these great things.
And these things are worth fighting for. And these things can really inspire people. And I think I imagine, because … Look, you have all these investors, all these VCs, all these AI companies talking about all the positive benefits of AI. But as you point out, it’s weird. There’s actually a dearth of really getting specific about it. There’s a lot of random people on Twitter posting these gleaming cities and this just vibe of grind, accelerate harder, kick out the … It’s just this very aggressive ideological. But then you’re like, “Well, what are you actually excited about?”
And so, I figured that I think it would be interesting and valuable for someone who’s actually coming from the risk side to try and really make a try at explaining what the benefits are, both because I think it’s something we can all get behind and I want people to understand. I want them to really understand that this isn’t Doomers versus Accelerationists. This is that, if you have a true understanding of where things are going with AI, and maybe that’s the more important axis, AI is moving fast versus AI is not moving fast, then you really appreciate the benefits and you really want humanity or civilization to seize those benefits. But, you also get very serious about anything that could derail them.
Lex Fridman
So I think the starting point is to talk about what this Powerful AI, which is the term you like to use, most of the world uses AGI, but you don’t like the term, because it’s basically has too much baggage, it’s become meaningless. It’s like we’re stuck with the terms whether we like them or not.
So I think the starting point is to talk about what this Powerful AI, which is the term you like to use, most of the world uses AGI, but you don’t like the term, because it’s basically has too much baggage, it’s become meaningless. It’s like we’re stuck with the terms whether we like them or not.
Dario Amodei
Maybe we’re stuck with the terms and my efforts to change them are futile.
Maybe we’re stuck with the terms and my efforts to change them are futile.
Lex Fridman
It’s admirable.
It’s admirable.
Dario Amodei
I’ll tell you what else I don’t … This is a pointless semantic point, but I keep talking about it-
I’ll tell you what else I don’t … This is a pointless semantic point, but I keep talking about it-
Lex Fridman
It’s back to naming again.
It’s back to naming again.
Dario Amodei
I’m just going to do it once more. I think it’s a little like, let’s say it was like 1995 and Moore’s law is making the computers faster. And for some reason there had been this verbal tick that everyone was like, “Well, someday we’re going to have supercomputers. And supercomputers are going to be able to do all these things that … Once we have supercomputers, we’ll be able to sequence the genome, we’ll be able to do other things.” And so. One, it’s true, the computers are getting faster and as they get faster, they’re going to be able to do all these great things. But there’s, there’s no discrete point at which you had a supercomputer and previous computers were no. “Supercomputer” is a term we use, but it’s a vague term to just describe computers that are faster than what we have today.
I’m just going to do it once more. I think it’s a little like, let’s say it was like 1995 and Moore’s law is making the computers faster. And for some reason there had been this verbal tick that everyone was like, “Well, someday we’re going to have supercomputers. And supercomputers are going to be able to do all these things that … Once we have supercomputers, we’ll be able to sequence the genome, we’ll be able to do other things.” And so. One, it’s true, the computers are getting faster and as they get faster, they’re going to be able to do all these great things. But there’s, there’s no discrete point at which you had a supercomputer and previous computers were no. “Supercomputer” is a term we use, but it’s a vague term to just describe computers that are faster than what we have today.
There’s no point at which you pass the threshold and you’re like, “Oh, my God! We’re doing a totally new type of computation and new … And so I feel that way about AGI. There’s just a smooth exponential. And if by AGI you mean AI is getting better and better, and gradually it’s going to do more and more of what humans do until it’s going to be smarter than humans, and then it’s going to get smarter even from there, then yes, I believe in AGI. But, if AGI is some discrete or separate thing, which is the way people often talk about it, then it’s a meaningless buzzword.
Lex Fridman
To me, it’s just a platonic form of a powerful AI, exactly how you define it. You define it very nicely, so on the intelligence axis, it’s just on pure intelligence, it’s smarter than a Nobel Prize winner as you describe across most relevant disciplines. So okay, that’s just intelligence. So it’s both in creativity and be able to generate new ideas, all that kind of stuff in every discipline, Nobel Prize winner in their prime. It can use every modality, so this is self-explanatory, but just operate across all the modalities of the world.
To me, it’s just a platonic form of a powerful AI, exactly how you define it. You define it very nicely, so on the intelligence axis, it’s just on pure intelligence, it’s smarter than a Nobel Prize winner as you describe across most relevant disciplines. So okay, that’s just intelligence. So it’s both in creativity and be able to generate new ideas, all that kind of stuff in every discipline, Nobel Prize winner in their prime. It can use every modality, so this is self-explanatory, but just operate across all the modalities of the world.
It can go off for many hours, days and weeks to do tasks and do its own detailed planning and only ask you help when it’s needed. This is actually interesting. I think in the essay you said … Again, it’s a bet that it’s not going to be embodied, but it can control embodied tools. So it can control tools, robots, laboratory equipment., the resource used to train it can then be repurposed to run millions of copies of it, and each of those copies would be independent that could do their own independent work. So you can do the cloning of the intelligence systems.
Dario Amodei
Yeah. Yeah. You might imagine from outside the field that there’s only one of these, right? You’ve only made one. But the truth is that the scale up is very quick. We do this today,. We make a model, and then we deploy thousands, maybe tens of thousands of instances of it. I think by the time, certainly within two to three years, whether we have these super powerful AIs or not, clusters are going to get to the size where you’ll be able to deploy millions of these. And they’ll be faster than humans. And so, if your picture is, “Oh, we’ll have one and it’ll take a while to make them,” my point there was, no. Actually you have millions of them right away.
Yeah. Yeah. You might imagine from outside the field that there’s only one of these, right? You’ve only made one. But the truth is that the scale up is very quick. We do this today,. We make a model, and then we deploy thousands, maybe tens of thousands of instances of it. I think by the time, certainly within two to three years, whether we have these super powerful AIs or not, clusters are going to get to the size where you’ll be able to deploy millions of these. And they’ll be faster than humans. And so, if your picture is, “Oh, we’ll have one and it’ll take a while to make them,” my point there was, no. Actually you have millions of them right away.
Lex Fridman
And in general they can learn and act 10 to 100 times faster than humans. So that’s a really nice definition of powerful AI. Okay, so that. But, you also write that, “Clearly such an entity would be capable of solving very difficult problems very fast, but it is not trivial to figure out how fast. Two “extreme” positions both seem false to me.” So the singularity is on the one extreme and the opposite and the other extreme. Can you describe each of the extremes?
And in general they can learn and act 10 to 100 times faster than humans. So that’s a really nice definition of powerful AI. Okay, so that. But, you also write that, “Clearly such an entity would be capable of solving very difficult problems very fast, but it is not trivial to figure out how fast. Two “extreme” positions both seem false to me.” So the singularity is on the one extreme and the opposite and the other extreme. Can you describe each of the extremes?
Dario Amodei
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So why?
So why?
Dario Amodei
So yeah. Let’s describe the extreme. So one extreme would be, “Well, look. If we look at evolutionary history like there was this big acceleration, where for hundreds of thousands of years we just had single-celled organisms, and then we had mammals, and then we had apes. And then that quickly turned to humans. Humans quickly built industrial civilization.” And so, this is going to keep speeding up and there’s no ceiling at the human level. Once models get much, much smarter than humans, they’ll get really good at building the next models. And if you write down a simple differential equation, like this is an exponential … And so what’s going to happen is that models will build faster models. Models will build faster models. And those models will build nanobots that can take over the world and produce much more energy than you could produce otherwise. And so, if you just kind of solve this abstract differential equation, then like five days after we build the first AI that’s more powerful than humans, then the world will be filled with these AIs in every possible technology that could be invented, like will be invented.
So yeah. Let’s describe the extreme. So one extreme would be, “Well, look. If we look at evolutionary history like there was this big acceleration, where for hundreds of thousands of years we just had single-celled organisms, and then we had mammals, and then we had apes. And then that quickly turned to humans. Humans quickly built industrial civilization.” And so, this is going to keep speeding up and there’s no ceiling at the human level. Once models get much, much smarter than humans, they’ll get really good at building the next models. And if you write down a simple differential equation, like this is an exponential … And so what’s going to happen is that models will build faster models. Models will build faster models. And those models will build nanobots that can take over the world and produce much more energy than you could produce otherwise. And so, if you just kind of solve this abstract differential equation, then like five days after we build the first AI that’s more powerful than humans, then the world will be filled with these AIs in every possible technology that could be invented, like will be invented.
I’m caricaturing this a little bit, but I think that’s one extreme. And the reason that I think that’s not the case is that, one, I think they just neglect the laws of physics. It’s only possible to do things so fast in the physical world. Some of those loops go through producing faster hardware. It takes a long time to produce faster hardware. Things take a long time. There’s this issue of complexity. I think no matter how smart you are, people talk about, “Oh, we can make models of biological systems that’ll do everything the biological systems … ” Look, I think computational modeling can do a lot. I did a lot of computational modeling when I worked in biology. But just there are a lot of things that you can’t predict how … They’re complex enough that just iterating, just running the experiment is going to beat any modeling, no matter how smart the system doing the modeling is.
Lex Fridman
Well, even if it’s not interacting with the physical world, just the modeling is going to be hard?
Well, even if it’s not interacting with the physical world, just the modeling is going to be hard?
Dario Amodei
Yeah. Well, the modeling is going to be hard and getting the model to match the physical world is going to be
Yeah. Well, the modeling is going to be hard and getting the model to match the physical world is going to be
Lex Fridman
All right. So it does have to interact with the physical world to verify.
All right. So it does have to interact with the physical world to verify.
Dario Amodei
But you just look at even the simplest problems. I think I talk about The Three-Body Problem or simple chaotic prediction, or predicting the economy. It’s really hard to predict the economy two years out. Maybe the case is humans can predict what’s going to happen in the economy next quarter, or they can’t really do that. Maybe a AI that’s a zillion times smarter can only predict it out a year or something, instead of … You have these exponential increase in computer intelligence for linear increase in ability to predict. Same with again, like biological molecules interacting. You don’t know what’s going to happen when you perturb a complex system. You can find simple parts in it, if you’re smarter, you’re better at finding these simple parts. And then I think human institutions, human institutions are really difficult. It’s been a hard to get people.
But you just look at even the simplest problems. I think I talk about The Three-Body Problem or simple chaotic prediction, or predicting the economy. It’s really hard to predict the economy two years out. Maybe the case is humans can predict what’s going to happen in the economy next quarter, or they can’t really do that. Maybe a AI that’s a zillion times smarter can only predict it out a year or something, instead of … You have these exponential increase in computer intelligence for linear increase in ability to predict. Same with again, like biological molecules interacting. You don’t know what’s going to happen when you perturb a complex system. You can find simple parts in it, if you’re smarter, you’re better at finding these simple parts. And then I think human institutions, human institutions are really difficult. It’s been a hard to get people.
I won’t give specific examples, but it’s been hard to get people to adopt even the technologies that we’ve developed, even ones where the case for their efficacy is very, very strong. People have concerns. They think things are conspiracy theories. It’s just been very difficult. It’s also been very difficult to get very simple things through the regulatory system. And I don’t want to disparage anyone who works in regulatory systems of any technology. There are hard they have to deal with. They have to save lives. But the system as a whole, I think makes some obvious trade-offs that are very far from maximizing human welfare. And so, if we bring AI systems into these human systems, often the level of intelligence may just not be the limiting factor. It just may be that it takes a long time to do something. Now, if the AI system circumvented all governments, if it just said, “I’m dictator of the world and I’m going to do whatever,” some of these things it could do.
Again, the things have to do with complexity. I still think a lot of things would take a while. I don’t think it helps that the AI systems can produce a lot of energy or go to the moon. Like some people in comments responded to the essay saying the AI system can produce a lot of energy and smarter AI systems. That’s missing the point. That kind of cycle doesn’t solve the key problems that I’m talking about here. So I think a bunch of people missed the point there. But even if it were completely unaligned and could get around all these human obstacles it would have trouble.
But again, if you want this to be an AI system that doesn’t take over the world, that doesn’t destroy humanity, then basically it’s going to need to follow basic human laws. If we want to have an actually good world, we’re going to have to have an AI system that interacts with humans, not one that creates its own legal system, or disregards all the laws or all of that. So as inefficient as these processes are, we’re going to have to deal with them, because there needs to be some popular and democratic legitimacy in how these systems are rolled out. We can’t have a small group of people who are developing these systems say, “This is what’s best for everyone.” I think it’s wrong, and I think in practice it’s not going to work anyway. So you put all those things together and we’re not going change the world and upload everyone in five minutes. A, I don’t think it’s going to happen and B, to the extent that it could happen.,It’s not the way to lead to a good world. So that’s on one side.
On the other side, there’s another set of perspectives, which I have actually in some ways more sympathy for, which is, look, we’ve seen big productivity increases before. Economists are familiar with studying the productivity increases that came from the computer revolution and internet revolution. And generally those productivity increases were underwhelming. They were less than you might imagine. There was a quote from Robert Solow, “You see the computer revolution everywhere except the productivity statistics.” So why is this the case? People point to the structure of firms, the structure of enterprises, how slow it’s been to roll out our existing technology to very poor parts of the world, which I talk about in the essay. How do we get these technologies to the poorest parts of the world that are behind on cell phone technology, computers, medicine, let alone newfangled AI that hasn’t been invented yet.
So you could have a perspective that’s like, “Well, this is amazing technically, but it’s all or nothing burger. I think Tyler Cowen who wrote something in response to my essay has that perspective. I think he thinks the radical change will happen eventually, but he thinks it’ll take 50 or 100 years. And you could have even more static perspectives on the whole thing. I think there’s some truth to it. I think the time scale is just too long and I can see it. I can actually see both sides with today’s AI. So a lot of our customers are large enterprises who are used to doing things a certain way. I’ve also seen it in talking to governments, right? Those are prototypical institutions, entities that are slow to change. But, the dynamic I see over and over again is yes, it takes a long time to move the ship. Yes. There’s a lot of resistance and lack of understanding.
But, the thing that makes me feel that progress will in the end happen moderately fast, not incredibly fast, but moderately fast, is that you talk to … What I find is I find over and over again, again in large companies, even in governments which have been actually surprisingly forward leaning, you find two things that move things forward. One, you find a small fraction of people within a company, within a government, who really see the big picture, who see the whole scaling hypothesis, who understand where AI is going, or at least understand where it’s going within their industry. And there are a few people like that within the current US government who really see the whole picture. And those people see that this is the most important thing in the world until they agitate for it. And the thing they alone are not enough to succeed, because there are a small set of people within a large organization.
But, as the technology starts to roll out, as it succeeds in some places in the folks who are most willing to adopt it, the specter of competition gives them a wind at their backs, because they can point within their large organization. They can say, “Look, these other guys are doing this.” One bank can say, “Look, this newfangled hedge fund is doing this thing. They’re going to eat our lunch.” In the US, we can say we’re afraid China’s going to get there before we are. And that combination, the specter of competition plus a few visionaries within these, the organizations that in many ways are sclerotic, you put those two things together and it actually makes something happen. It’s interesting. It’s a balanced fight between the two, because inertia is very powerful, but eventually over enough time, the innovative approach breaks through.
And I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen the arc of that over and over again, and it’s like the barriers are there, the barriers to progress, the complexity, not knowing how to use the model, how to deploy them are there. And for a bit it seems like they’re going to last forever, change doesn’t happen. But, then eventually change happens and always comes from a few people. I felt the same way when I was an advocate of the scaling hypothesis within the AI field itself and others didn’t get it. It felt like no one would ever get it. Then it felt like we had a secret almost no one ever had. And then, a couple years later, everyone has the secret. And so, I think that’s how it’s going to go with deployment AI in the world. The barriers are going to fall apart gradually and then all at once.
And so, I think this is going to be more, and this is just an instinct. I could easily see how I’m wrong. I think it’s going to be more five or 10 years, as I say in the essay than it’s going to be 50 or 100 years. I also think it’s going to be five or 10 years more than it’s going to be five or 10 hours, because I’ve just seen how human systems work. And I think a lot of these people who write down these differential equations, who say AI is going to make more powerful AI, who can’t understand how it could possibly be the case that these things won’t change so fast. I think they don’t understand these things.
AGI timeline
Lex Fridman
So what to you is the timeline to where we achieve AGI, A.K.A. powerful AI, A.K.A. super useful AI?
So what to you is the timeline to where we achieve AGI, A.K.A. powerful AI, A.K.A. super useful AI?
Dario Amodei
I’m going to start calling it that.
I’m going to start calling it that.
Lex Fridman
It’s a debate about naming. On pure intelligence smarter than a Nobel Prize winner in every relevant discipline and all the things we’ve said. Modality, can go and do stuff on its own for days, weeks, and do biology experiments on its own in one … You know what? Let’s just stick to biology, because you sold me on the whole biology and health section. And that’s so exciting from just … I was getting giddy from a scientific perspective. It made me want to be a biologist.
It’s a debate about naming. On pure intelligence smarter than a Nobel Prize winner in every relevant discipline and all the things we’ve said. Modality, can go and do stuff on its own for days, weeks, and do biology experiments on its own in one … You know what? Let’s just stick to biology, because you sold me on the whole biology and health section. And that’s so exciting from just … I was getting giddy from a scientific perspective. It made me want to be a biologist.
Dario Amodei
So no,. No. This was the feeling I had when I was writing it, that it’s like, this would be such a beautiful future if we can just make it happen. If we can just get the landmines out of the way and make it happen. There’s so much beauty and elegance and moral force behind it if we can just … And it’s something we should all be able to agree on. As much as we fight about all these political questions, is this something that could actually bring us together? But you were asking when will we get this?
So no,. No. This was the feeling I had when I was writing it, that it’s like, this would be such a beautiful future if we can just make it happen. If we can just get the landmines out of the way and make it happen. There’s so much beauty and elegance and moral force behind it if we can just … And it’s something we should all be able to agree on. As much as we fight about all these political questions, is this something that could actually bring us together? But you were asking when will we get this?
Lex Fridman
When? When do you think? Just putting numbers on the table.
When? When do you think? Just putting numbers on the table.
Dario Amodei
This is, of course, the thing I’ve been grappling with for many years, and I’m not at all confident. If I say 2026 or 2027, there will be a zillion people on Twitter who will be like, “AI CEO said 2026, 2020 … ” and it’ll be repeated for the next two years that this is definitely when I think it’s going to happen. So whoever’s exerting these clips will crop out the thing I just said and only say the thing I’m about to say. But I’ll just say it anyway-
This is, of course, the thing I’ve been grappling with for many years, and I’m not at all confident. If I say 2026 or 2027, there will be a zillion people on Twitter who will be like, “AI CEO said 2026, 2020 … ” and it’ll be repeated for the next two years that this is definitely when I think it’s going to happen. So whoever’s exerting these clips will crop out the thing I just said and only say the thing I’m about to say. But I’ll just say it anyway-
Lex Fridman
Have fun with it.
Have fun with it.
Dario Amodei
So if you extrapolate the curves that we’ve had so far. Right? If you say, “Well, I don’t know. We’re starting to get to PhD level, and last year we were at undergraduate level and the year before we were at the level of a high school student.” Again, you can quibble with at what tasks and for what we’re still missing modalities, but those are being added. Computer use was added, like ImageEn was added, image generation has been added. And this is totally unscientific, but if you just eyeball the rate at which these capabilities are increasing, it does make you think that we’ll get there by 2026 or 2027. Again, lots of things could derail it. We could run out of data. We might not be able to scale clusters as much as we want. Maybe Taiwan gets blown up or something, and then we can’t produce as many GPUs as we want. So there are all-
So if you extrapolate the curves that we’ve had so far. Right? If you say, “Well, I don’t know. We’re starting to get to PhD level, and last year we were at undergraduate level and the year before we were at the level of a high school student.” Again, you can quibble with at what tasks and for what we’re still missing modalities, but those are being added. Computer use was added, like ImageEn was added, image generation has been added. And this is totally unscientific, but if you just eyeball the rate at which these capabilities are increasing, it does make you think that we’ll get there by 2026 or 2027. Again, lots of things could derail it. We could run out of data. We might not be able to scale clusters as much as we want. Maybe Taiwan gets blown up or something, and then we can’t produce as many GPUs as we want. So there are all-
Dario Amodei
Then we can’t produce as many GPUs as we want. So there are all kinds of things that could derail the whole process. So I don’t fully believe the straight line extrapolation, but if you believe the straight line extrapolation, we’ll get there in 2026 or 2027. I think the most likely is that there are some mild delay relative to that. I don’t know what that delay is, but I think it could happen on schedule. I think there could be a mild delay. I think there are still worlds where it doesn’t happen in a hundred years. The number of those worlds is rapidly decreasing. We are rapidly running out of truly convincing blockers, truly compelling reasons why this will not happen in the next few years.
Then we can’t produce as many GPUs as we want. So there are all kinds of things that could derail the whole process. So I don’t fully believe the straight line extrapolation, but if you believe the straight line extrapolation, we’ll get there in 2026 or 2027. I think the most likely is that there are some mild delay relative to that. I don’t know what that delay is, but I think it could happen on schedule. I think there could be a mild delay. I think there are still worlds where it doesn’t happen in a hundred years. The number of those worlds is rapidly decreasing. We are rapidly running out of truly convincing blockers, truly compelling reasons why this will not happen in the next few years.
There were a lot more in 2020, although my guess, my hunch at that time was that we’ll make it through all those blockers. So sitting as someone who has seen most of the blockers cleared out of the way, I suspect, my hunch, my suspicion is that the rest of them will not block us. But look, at the end of the day, I don’t want to represent this as a scientific prediction. People call them scaling laws. That’s a misnomer. Like Moore’s law is a misnomer. Moore’s laws, scaling laws, they’re not laws of the universe. They’re empirical regularities. I am going to bet in favor of them continuing, but I’m not certain of that.
Lex Fridman
So you extensively described sort of the compressed 21st century, how AGI will help set forth a chain of breakthroughs in biology and medicine that help us in all these kinds of ways that I mentioned. What are the early steps it might do? And by the way, I asked Claude good questions to ask you and Claude told me to ask, what do you think is a typical day for a biologist working on AGI look like in this future?
So you extensively described sort of the compressed 21st century, how AGI will help set forth a chain of breakthroughs in biology and medicine that help us in all these kinds of ways that I mentioned. What are the early steps it might do? And by the way, I asked Claude good questions to ask you and Claude told me to ask, what do you think is a typical day for a biologist working on AGI look like in this future?
Dario Amodei
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
Claude is curious.
Claude is curious.
Dario Amodei
Well, let me start with your first questions and then I’ll answer that. Claude wants to know what’s in his future, right?
Well, let me start with your first questions and then I’ll answer that. Claude wants to know what’s in his future, right?
Lex Fridman
Exactly.
Exactly.
Dario Amodei
Who am I going to be working with?
Who am I going to be working with?
Lex Fridman
Exactly.
Exactly.
Dario Amodei
So I think one of the things when I went hard on in the essay is let me go back to this idea of, because it’s really had an impact on me, this idea that within large organizations and systems, there end up being a few people or a few new ideas who cause things to go in a different direction than they would’ve before who kind of disproportionately affect the trajectory. There’s a bunch of the same thing going on, right? If you think about the health world, there’s like trillions of dollars to pay out Medicare and other health insurance and then the NIH is 100 billion. And then if I think of the few things that have really revolutionized anything, it could be encapsulated in a small fraction of that. And so when I think of where will AI have an impact, I’m like, “Can AI turn that small fraction into a much larger fraction and raise its quality?”
So I think one of the things when I went hard on in the essay is let me go back to this idea of, because it’s really had an impact on me, this idea that within large organizations and systems, there end up being a few people or a few new ideas who cause things to go in a different direction than they would’ve before who kind of disproportionately affect the trajectory. There’s a bunch of the same thing going on, right? If you think about the health world, there’s like trillions of dollars to pay out Medicare and other health insurance and then the NIH is 100 billion. And then if I think of the few things that have really revolutionized anything, it could be encapsulated in a small fraction of that. And so when I think of where will AI have an impact, I’m like, “Can AI turn that small fraction into a much larger fraction and raise its quality?”
And within biology, my experience within biology is that the biggest problem of biology is that you can’t see what’s going on. You have very little ability to see what’s going on and even less ability to change it, right? What you have is this. From this, you have to infer that there’s a bunch of cells that within each cell is 3 billion base pairs of DNA built according to a genetic code. And there are all these processes that are just going on without any ability of us on unaugmented humans to affect it. These cells are dividing. Most of the time that’s healthy, but sometimes that process goes wrong and that’s cancer. The cells are aging, your skin may change color, develops wrinkles as you age, and all of this is determined by these processes. All these proteins being produced, transported to various parts of the cells binding to each other.
And in our initial state about biology, we didn’t even know that these cells existed. We had to invent microscopes to observe the cells. We had to invent more powerful microscopes to see below the level of the cell to the level of molecules. We had to invent X-ray crystallography to see the DNA. We had to invent gene sequencing to read the DNA. Now we had to invent protein folding technology to predict how it would fold and how these things bind to each other. We had to invent various techniques for now we can edit the DNA as of with CRISPR as of the last 12 years. So the whole history of biology, a whole big part of the history is basically our ability to read and understand what’s going on and our ability to reach in and selectively change things. And my view is that there’s so much more we can still do there.
You can do CRISPR, but you can do it for your whole body. Let’s say I want to do it for one particular type of cell and I want the rate of targeting the wrong cell to be very low. That’s still a challenge. That’s still things people are working on. That’s what we might need for gene therapy for certain diseases. The reason I’m saying all of this, it goes beyond this to gene sequencing, to new types of nanomaterials for observing what’s going on inside cells, for antibody drug conjugates. The reason I’m saying all this is that this could be a leverage point for the AI systems, right? That the number of such inventions, it’s in the mid double digits or something, mid double digits, maybe low triple digits over the history of biology. Let’s say I have a million of these AIs like can they discover a thousand working together or can they discover thousands of these very quickly and does that provide a huge lever?
Instead of trying to leverage two trillion a year we spend on Medicare or whatever, can we leverage the 1 billion a year that’s spent to discover but with much higher quality? And so what is it like being a scientist that works with an AI system? The way I think about it actually is, well, so I think in the early stages, the AIs are going to be like grad students. You’re going to give them a project. You’re going to say, “I’m the experienced biologist. I’ve set up the lab.” The biology professor or even the grad students themselves will say, “Here’s what you can do with an AI… AI system, I’d like to study this.” And the AI system, it has all the tools. It can look up all the literature to decide what to do. It can look at all the equipment. It can go to a website and say, “Hey, I’m going to go to Thermo Fisher or whatever the dominant lab equipment company is today. My time was Thermo Fisher.
I’m going to order this new equipment to do this. I’m going to run my experiments. I’m going to write up a report about my experiments. I’m going to inspect the images for contamination. I’m going to decide what the next experiment is. I’m going to write some code and run a statistical analysis. All the things a grad student would do that’ll be a computer with an AI that the professor talks to every once in a while and it says, “This is what you’re going to do today.” The AI system comes to it with questions. When it’s necessary to run the lab equipment, it may be limited in some ways. It may have to hire a human lab assistant to do the experiment and explain how to do it or it could use advances in lab automation that are gradually being developed or have been developed over the last decade or so and will continue to be developed.
And so it’ll look like there’s a human professor and 1,000 AI grad students and if you go to one of these Nobel Prize winning biologists or so, you’ll say, “Okay, well, you had like 50 grad students. Well, now you have 1,000 and they’re smarter than you are by the way.” Then I think at some point it’ll flip around where the AI systems will be the PIs, will be the leaders, and they’ll be ordering humans or other AI systems around. So I think that’s how it’ll work on the research side.
Lex Fridman
And there would be the inventors of a CRISPR type technology.
And there would be the inventors of a CRISPR type technology.
Dario Amodei
They would be the inventors of a CRISPR type technology. And then I think, as I say in the essay, we’ll want to turn, probably turning loose is the wrong term, but we’ll want to harness the AI systems to improve the clinical trial system as well. There’s some amount of this that’s regulatory, that’s a matter of societal decisions and that’ll be harder. But can we get better at predicting the results of clinical trials? Can we get better at statistical design so that clinical trials that used to require 5,000 people and therefore needed $100 million in a year to enroll them, now they need 500 people in two months to enroll them? That’s where we should start. And can we increase the success rate of clinical trials by doing things in animal trials that we used to do in clinical trials and doing things in simulations that we used to do in animal trials? Again, we won’t be able to simulate at all. AI is not God, but can we shift the curve substantially and radically? So I don’t know, that would be my picture.
They would be the inventors of a CRISPR type technology. And then I think, as I say in the essay, we’ll want to turn, probably turning loose is the wrong term, but we’ll want to harness the AI systems to improve the clinical trial system as well. There’s some amount of this that’s regulatory, that’s a matter of societal decisions and that’ll be harder. But can we get better at predicting the results of clinical trials? Can we get better at statistical design so that clinical trials that used to require 5,000 people and therefore needed $100 million in a year to enroll them, now they need 500 people in two months to enroll them? That’s where we should start. And can we increase the success rate of clinical trials by doing things in animal trials that we used to do in clinical trials and doing things in simulations that we used to do in animal trials? Again, we won’t be able to simulate at all. AI is not God, but can we shift the curve substantially and radically? So I don’t know, that would be my picture.
Lex Fridman
Doing in vitro and doing it. I mean you’re still slowed down. It still takes time, but you can do it much, much faster.
Doing in vitro and doing it. I mean you’re still slowed down. It still takes time, but you can do it much, much faster.
Dario Amodei
Yeah, yeah. Can we just one step at a time and can that add up to a lot of steps? Even though though we still need clinical trials, even though we still need laws, even though the FDA and other organizations will still not be perfect, can we just move everything in a positive direction and when you add up all those positive directions, do you get everything that was going to happen from here to 2100 instead happens from 2027 to 2032 or something?
Yeah, yeah. Can we just one step at a time and can that add up to a lot of steps? Even though though we still need clinical trials, even though we still need laws, even though the FDA and other organizations will still not be perfect, can we just move everything in a positive direction and when you add up all those positive directions, do you get everything that was going to happen from here to 2100 instead happens from 2027 to 2032 or something?
Programming
Lex Fridman
Another way that I think the world might be changing with AI even today, but moving towards this future of the powerful super useful AI is programming. So how do you see the nature of programming because it’s so intimate to the actual act of building AI. How do you see that changing for us humans?
Another way that I think the world might be changing with AI even today, but moving towards this future of the powerful super useful AI is programming. So how do you see the nature of programming because it’s so intimate to the actual act of building AI. How do you see that changing for us humans?
Dario Amodei
I think that’s going to be one of the areas that changes fastest for two reasons. One, programming is a skill that’s very close to the actual building of the AI. So the farther a skill is from the people who are building the AI, the longer it’s going to take to get disrupted by the AI. I truly believe that AI will disrupt agriculture. Maybe it already has in some ways, but that’s just very distant from the folks who are building AI, and so I think it’s going to take longer. But programming is the bread and butter of a large fraction of the employees who work at Anthropic and at the other companies, and so it’s going to happen fast. The other reason it’s going to happen fast is with programming, you close the loop both when you’re training the model and when you’re applying the model.
I think that’s going to be one of the areas that changes fastest for two reasons. One, programming is a skill that’s very close to the actual building of the AI. So the farther a skill is from the people who are building the AI, the longer it’s going to take to get disrupted by the AI. I truly believe that AI will disrupt agriculture. Maybe it already has in some ways, but that’s just very distant from the folks who are building AI, and so I think it’s going to take longer. But programming is the bread and butter of a large fraction of the employees who work at Anthropic and at the other companies, and so it’s going to happen fast. The other reason it’s going to happen fast is with programming, you close the loop both when you’re training the model and when you’re applying the model.
The idea that the model can write the code means that the model can then run the code and then see the results and interpret it back. And so it really has an ability unlike hardware, unlike biology, which we just discussed, the model has an ability to close the loop. And so I think those two things are going to lead to the model getting good at programming very fast. As I saw on typical real-world programming tasks, models have gone from 3% in January of this year to 50% in October of this year. So we’re on that S-curve where it’s going to start slowing down soon because you can only get to 100%. But I would guess that in another 10 months, we’ll probably get pretty close. We’ll be at least 90%. So again, I would guess, I don’t know how long it’ll take, but I would guess again, 2026, 2027 Twitter people who crop out these numbers and get rid of the caveats, I don’t know.
I don’t like you, go away. I would guess that the kind of task that the vast majority of coders do, AI can probably, if we make the task very narrow, just write code, AI systems will be able to do that. Now that said, I think comparative advantage is powerful. We’ll find that when AIs can do 80% of a coder’s job, including most of it that’s literally write code with a given spec, we’ll find that the remaining parts of the job become more leveraged for humans, right? Humans, there’ll be more about high level system design or looking at the app and is it architected well and the design and UX aspects and eventually AI will be able to do those as well. That’s my vision of the powerful AI system. But I think for much longer than we might expect, we will see that small parts of the job that humans still do will expand to fill their entire job in order for the overall productivity to go up. That’s something we’ve seen. It used to be that writing and editing letters was very difficult and writing the print was difficult. Well, as soon as you had word processors and then computers and it became easy to produce work and easy to share it, then that became instant and all the focus was on the ideas. So this logic of comparative advantage that expands tiny parts of the tasks to large parts of the tasks and creates new tasks in order to expand productivity, I think that’s going to be the case.
Again, someday AI will be better at everything and that logic won’t apply, and then humanity will have to think about how to collectively deal with that and we’re thinking about that every day and that’s another one of the grand problems to deal with aside from misuse and autonomy and we should take it very seriously. But I think in the near term, and maybe even in the medium term, medium term like 2, 3, 4 years, I expect that humans will continue to have a huge role and the nature of programming will change, but programming as a role, programming as a job will not change. It’ll just be less writing things line by line and it’ll be more macroscopic.
Lex Fridman
And I wonder what the future of IDEs looks like. So the tooling of interacting with AI systems, this is true for programming and also probably true for in other contexts like computer use, but maybe domain specific, like we mentioned biology, it probably needs its own tooling about how to be effective. And then programming needs its own tooling. Is Anthropic going to play in that space of also tooling potentially?
And I wonder what the future of IDEs looks like. So the tooling of interacting with AI systems, this is true for programming and also probably true for in other contexts like computer use, but maybe domain specific, like we mentioned biology, it probably needs its own tooling about how to be effective. And then programming needs its own tooling. Is Anthropic going to play in that space of also tooling potentially?
Dario Amodei
I’m absolutely convinced that powerful IDEs, that there’s so much low-hanging fruit to be grabbed there that right now it’s just like you talk to the model and it talks back. But look, I mean IDEs are great at lots of static analysis of so much is possible with static analysis like many bugs you can find without even writing the code. Then IDEs are good for running particular things, organizing your code, measuring coverage of unit tests. There’s so much that’s been possible with a normal IDEs. Now you add something like, well, the model can now write code and run code. I am absolutely convinced that over the next year or two, even if the quality of the models didn’t improve, that there would be enormous opportunity to enhance people’s productivity by catching a bunch of mistakes, doing a bunch of grunt work for people, and that we haven’t even scratched the surface.
I’m absolutely convinced that powerful IDEs, that there’s so much low-hanging fruit to be grabbed there that right now it’s just like you talk to the model and it talks back. But look, I mean IDEs are great at lots of static analysis of so much is possible with static analysis like many bugs you can find without even writing the code. Then IDEs are good for running particular things, organizing your code, measuring coverage of unit tests. There’s so much that’s been possible with a normal IDEs. Now you add something like, well, the model can now write code and run code. I am absolutely convinced that over the next year or two, even if the quality of the models didn’t improve, that there would be enormous opportunity to enhance people’s productivity by catching a bunch of mistakes, doing a bunch of grunt work for people, and that we haven’t even scratched the surface.
Anthropic itself, I mean you can’t say no… It’s hard to say what will happen in the future. Currently, we’re not trying to make such IDEs ourself, rather we’re powering the companies like Cursor or Kognition or some of the other expo in the security space, others that I could mention as well that are building such things themselves on top of our API and our view has been let 1,000 flowers bloom. We don’t internally have the resources to try all these different things. Let’s let our customers try it and we will see who succeeds and maybe different customers will succeed in different ways. So I both think this is super promising and Anthropic isn’t eager to, at least right now, compete with all our companies in this space and maybe never.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s been interesting to watch Cursor try to integrate cloud successfully because it’s actually fascinating how many places it can help the programming experience. It’s not as trivial.
Yeah, it’s been interesting to watch Cursor try to integrate cloud successfully because it’s actually fascinating how many places it can help the programming experience. It’s not as trivial.
Dario Amodei
It is really astounding. I feel like as a CEO, I don’t get to program that much, and I feel like if six months from now I go back, it’ll be completely unrecognizable to me.
It is really astounding. I feel like as a CEO, I don’t get to program that much, and I feel like if six months from now I go back, it’ll be completely unrecognizable to me.
Meaning of life
Lex Fridman
Exactly. In this world with super powerful AI that’s increasingly automated, what’s the source of meaning for us humans? Work is a source of deep meaning for many of us. Where do we find the meaning?
Exactly. In this world with super powerful AI that’s increasingly automated, what’s the source of meaning for us humans? Work is a source of deep meaning for many of us. Where do we find the meaning?
Dario Amodei
This is something that I’ve written about a little bit in the essay, although I actually give it a bit short shrift, not for any principled reason, but this essay, if you believe it was originally going to be two or three pages, I was going to talk about it at all hands. And the reason I realized it was an important underexplored topic is that I just kept writing things and I was just like, “Oh man, I can’t do this justice.” And so the thing ballooned to 40 or 50 pages and then when I got to the work and meaning section, I’m like, “Oh man, this isn’t going to be 100 pages.” I’m going to have to write a whole other essay about that. But meaning is actually interesting because you think about the life that someone lives or something, or let’s say you were to put me in, I don’t know, like a simulated environment or something where I have a job and I’m trying to accomplish things and I don’t know, I do that for 60 years and then you’re like, “Oh, oops, this was actually all a game,” right?
This is something that I’ve written about a little bit in the essay, although I actually give it a bit short shrift, not for any principled reason, but this essay, if you believe it was originally going to be two or three pages, I was going to talk about it at all hands. And the reason I realized it was an important underexplored topic is that I just kept writing things and I was just like, “Oh man, I can’t do this justice.” And so the thing ballooned to 40 or 50 pages and then when I got to the work and meaning section, I’m like, “Oh man, this isn’t going to be 100 pages.” I’m going to have to write a whole other essay about that. But meaning is actually interesting because you think about the life that someone lives or something, or let’s say you were to put me in, I don’t know, like a simulated environment or something where I have a job and I’m trying to accomplish things and I don’t know, I do that for 60 years and then you’re like, “Oh, oops, this was actually all a game,” right?
Does that really kind of rob you of the meaning of the whole thing? I still made important choices, including moral choices. I still sacrificed. I still had to gain all these skills or just a similar exercise. Think back to one of the historical figures who discovered electromagnetism or relativity or something. If you told them, “Well, actually 20,000 years ago, some alien on this planet discovered this before you did,” does that rob the meaning of the discovery? It doesn’t really seem like it to me, right? It seems like the process is what matters and how it shows who you are as a person along the way and how you relate to other people and the decisions that you make along the way. Those are consequential. I could imagine if we handle things badly in an AI world, we could set things up where people don’t have any long-term source of meaning or any, but that’s more a set of choices we make that’s more a set of the architecture of society with these powerful models. If we design it badly and for shallow things, then that might happen. I would also say that most people’s lives today, while admirably, they work very hard to find meaning in those lives. Like look, we who are privileged and who are developed these technologies, we should have empathy for people not just here, but in the rest of the world who spend a lot of their time scraping by to survive, assuming we can distribute the benefits of this technology to everywhere, their lives are going to get a hell of a lot better and meaning will be important to them as it is important to them now.
But we should not forget the importance of that and that the idea of meaning as the only important thing is in some ways an artifact of a small subset of people who have been economically fortunate. But I think all of that said, I think a world is possible with powerful AI that not only has as much meaning for everyone, but that has more meaning for everyone that can allow everyone to see worlds and experiences that it was either possible for no one to see or a possible for very few people to experience.
So I am optimistic about meaning. I worry about economics and the concentration of power. That’s actually what I worry about more. I worry about how do we make sure that that fair world reaches everyone. When things have gone wrong for humans, they’ve often gone wrong because humans mistreat other humans. That is maybe in some ways even more than the autonomous risk of AI or the question of meaning. That is the thing I worry about most, the concentration of power, the abuse of power, structures like autocracies and dictatorships where a small number of people exploits a large number of people. I’m very worried about that.
Lex Fridman
And AI increases the amount of power in the world, and if you concentrate that power and abuse that power, it can do immeasurable damage.
And AI increases the amount of power in the world, and if you concentrate that power and abuse that power, it can do immeasurable damage.
Dario Amodei
Yes, it’s very frightening. It’s very frightening.
Yes, it’s very frightening. It’s very frightening.
Lex Fridman
Well, I encourage highly encourage people to read the full essay. That should probably be a book or a sequence of essays because it does paint a very specific future. And I could tell the later sections got shorter and shorter because you started to probably realize that this is going to be a very long essay if you keep going.
Well, I encourage highly encourage people to read the full essay. That should probably be a book or a sequence of essays because it does paint a very specific future. And I could tell the later sections got shorter and shorter because you started to probably realize that this is going to be a very long essay if you keep going.
Dario Amodei
One, I realized it would be very long, and two, I’m very aware of and very much tried to avoid just being, I don’t know what the term for it is, but one of these people who’s overconfident and has an opinion on everything and says a bunch of stuff and isn’t an expert, I very much tried to avoid that. But I have to admit, once I got to biology sections, I wasn’t an expert. And so as much as I expressed uncertainty, probably I said a bunch of things that were embarrassing or wrong.
One, I realized it would be very long, and two, I’m very aware of and very much tried to avoid just being, I don’t know what the term for it is, but one of these people who’s overconfident and has an opinion on everything and says a bunch of stuff and isn’t an expert, I very much tried to avoid that. But I have to admit, once I got to biology sections, I wasn’t an expert. And so as much as I expressed uncertainty, probably I said a bunch of things that were embarrassing or wrong.
Lex Fridman
Well, I was excited for the future you painted, and thank you so much for working hard to build that future and thank you for talking to me, Dario.
Well, I was excited for the future you painted, and thank you so much for working hard to build that future and thank you for talking to me, Dario.
Dario Amodei
Thanks for having me. I just hope we can get it right and make it real. And if there’s one message I want to send, it’s that to get all this stuff right, to make it real, we both need to build the technology, build the companies, the economy around using this technology positively, but we also need to address the risks because those risks are in our way. They’re landmines on the way from here to there, and we have to diffuse those landmines if we want to get there.
Thanks for having me. I just hope we can get it right and make it real. And if there’s one message I want to send, it’s that to get all this stuff right, to make it real, we both need to build the technology, build the companies, the economy around using this technology positively, but we also need to address the risks because those risks are in our way. They’re landmines on the way from here to there, and we have to diffuse those landmines if we want to get there.
Lex Fridman
It’s a balance like all things in life.
It’s a balance like all things in life.
Dario Amodei
Like all things.
Like all things.
Amanda Askell
Lex Fridman
Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dario Amodei. And now, dear friends, here’s Amanda Askell. You are a philosopher by training. So what sort of questions did you find fascinating through your journey in philosophy in Oxford and NYU and then switching over to the AI problems at OpenAI and Anthropic?
Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dario Amodei. And now, dear friends, here’s Amanda Askell. You are a philosopher by training. So what sort of questions did you find fascinating through your journey in philosophy in Oxford and NYU and then switching over to the AI problems at OpenAI and Anthropic?
Amanda
I think philosophy is actually a really good subject if you are fascinated with everything because there’s a philosophy all of everything. So if you do philosophy of mathematics for a while and then you decide that you’re actually really interested in chemistry, you can do philosophy of chemistry for a while, you can move into ethics or philosophy of politics. I think towards the end, I was really interested in ethics primarily. So that was what my PhD was on. It was on a kind of technical area of ethics, which was ethics where worlds contain infinitely many people, strangely, a little bit less practical on the end of ethics. And then I think that one of the tricky things with doing a PhD in ethics is that you’re thinking a lot about the world, how it could be better, problems, and you’re doing a PhD in philosophy. And I think when I was doing my PhD, I was like this is really interesting.
I think philosophy is actually a really good subject if you are fascinated with everything because there’s a philosophy all of everything. So if you do philosophy of mathematics for a while and then you decide that you’re actually really interested in chemistry, you can do philosophy of chemistry for a while, you can move into ethics or philosophy of politics. I think towards the end, I was really interested in ethics primarily. So that was what my PhD was on. It was on a kind of technical area of ethics, which was ethics where worlds contain infinitely many people, strangely, a little bit less practical on the end of ethics. And then I think that one of the tricky things with doing a PhD in ethics is that you’re thinking a lot about the world, how it could be better, problems, and you’re doing a PhD in philosophy. And I think when I was doing my PhD, I was like this is really interesting.
It’s probably one of the most fascinating questions I’ve ever encountered in philosophy and I love it, but I would rather see if I can have an impact on the world and see if I can do good things. And I think that was around the time that AI was still probably not as widely recognized as it is now. That was around 2017, 2018. It had been following progress and it seemed like it was becoming kind of a big deal. And I was basically just happy to get involved and see if I could help because I was like, “Well, if you try and do something impactful, if you don’t succeed, you tried to do the impactful thing and you can go be a scholar and feel like you tried. And if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out.” And so then I went into AI policy at that point.
Lex Fridman
And what does AI policy entail?
And what does AI policy entail?
Amanda
At the time, this was more thinking about the political impact and the ramifications of AI. And then I slowly moved into AI evaluation, how we evaluate models, how they compare with human outputs, whether people can tell the difference between AI and human outputs. And then when I joined Anthropic, I was more interested in doing technical alignment work. And again, just seeing if I could do it and then being like if I can’t, then that’s fine. I tried sort of the way I lead life, I think.
At the time, this was more thinking about the political impact and the ramifications of AI. And then I slowly moved into AI evaluation, how we evaluate models, how they compare with human outputs, whether people can tell the difference between AI and human outputs. And then when I joined Anthropic, I was more interested in doing technical alignment work. And again, just seeing if I could do it and then being like if I can’t, then that’s fine. I tried sort of the way I lead life, I think.
Programming advice for non-technical people
Lex Fridman
Oh, what was that like sort of taking the leap from the philosophy of everything into the technical?
Oh, what was that like sort of taking the leap from the philosophy of everything into the technical?
Amanda
I think that sometimes people do this thing that I’m not that keen on where they’ll be like, “Is this person technical or not?” You’re either a person who can code and isn’t scared of math or you’re not. And I think I’m maybe just more like I think a lot of people are actually very capable of work in these kinds of areas if they just try it. And so I didn’t actually find it that bad. In retrospect, I’m sort of glad I wasn’t speaking to people who treated it. I’ve definitely met people who are like, “Whoa, you learned how to code?” And I’m like, “Well, I’m not an amazing engineer.” I’m surrounded by amazing engineers. My code’s not pretty, but I enjoyed it a lot and I think that in many ways, at least in the end, I think I flourished more in the technical areas than I would have in the policy areas.
I think that sometimes people do this thing that I’m not that keen on where they’ll be like, “Is this person technical or not?” You’re either a person who can code and isn’t scared of math or you’re not. And I think I’m maybe just more like I think a lot of people are actually very capable of work in these kinds of areas if they just try it. And so I didn’t actually find it that bad. In retrospect, I’m sort of glad I wasn’t speaking to people who treated it. I’ve definitely met people who are like, “Whoa, you learned how to code?” And I’m like, “Well, I’m not an amazing engineer.” I’m surrounded by amazing engineers. My code’s not pretty, but I enjoyed it a lot and I think that in many ways, at least in the end, I think I flourished more in the technical areas than I would have in the policy areas.
Lex Fridman
Politics is messy and it’s harder to find solutions to problems in the space of politics, like definitive, clear, provable, beautiful solutions as you can with technical problems.
Politics is messy and it’s harder to find solutions to problems in the space of politics, like definitive, clear, provable, beautiful solutions as you can with technical problems.
Amanda
Yeah. And I feel like I have one or two sticks that I hit things with and one of them is arguments. So just trying to work out what a solution to a problem is and then trying to convince people that that is the solution and be convinced if I’m wrong. And the other one is sort of more in empiricism, so just finding results, having a hypothesis, testing it. I feel like a lot of policy and politics feels like it’s layers above that. Somehow I don’t think if I was just like, “I have a solution to all of these problems, here it is written down. If you just want to implement it, that’s great.” That feels like not how policy works. And so I think that’s where I probably just wouldn’t have flourished is my guess.
Yeah. And I feel like I have one or two sticks that I hit things with and one of them is arguments. So just trying to work out what a solution to a problem is and then trying to convince people that that is the solution and be convinced if I’m wrong. And the other one is sort of more in empiricism, so just finding results, having a hypothesis, testing it. I feel like a lot of policy and politics feels like it’s layers above that. Somehow I don’t think if I was just like, “I have a solution to all of these problems, here it is written down. If you just want to implement it, that’s great.” That feels like not how policy works. And so I think that’s where I probably just wouldn’t have flourished is my guess.
Lex Fridman
Sorry to go in that direction, but I think it would be pretty inspiring for people that are “non-technical” to see where the incredible journey you’ve been on. So what advice would you give to people that are maybe, which is a lot of people, think they’re under qualified insufficiently technical to help in AI?
Sorry to go in that direction, but I think it would be pretty inspiring for people that are “non-technical” to see where the incredible journey you’ve been on. So what advice would you give to people that are maybe, which is a lot of people, think they’re under qualified insufficiently technical to help in AI?
Amanda
Yeah, I think it depends on what they want to do. And in many ways it’s a little bit strange where I thought it’s kind of funny that I think I ramped up technically at a time when now I look at it and I’m like, “Models are so good at assisting people with this stuff that it’s probably easier now than when I was working on this.” So part of me is, I don’t know, find a project and see if you can actually just carry it out is probably my best advice. I don’t know if that’s just because I’m very project based in my learning.
Yeah, I think it depends on what they want to do. And in many ways it’s a little bit strange where I thought it’s kind of funny that I think I ramped up technically at a time when now I look at it and I’m like, “Models are so good at assisting people with this stuff that it’s probably easier now than when I was working on this.” So part of me is, I don’t know, find a project and see if you can actually just carry it out is probably my best advice. I don’t know if that’s just because I’m very project based in my learning.
I don’t think I learn very well from say courses or even from books, at least when it comes to this kind of work. The thing I’ll often try and do is just have projects that I’m working on and implement them. And this can include really small, silly things. If I get slightly addicted to word games or number games or something, I would just code up a solution to them because there’s some part in my brain and it just completely eradicated the itch. You’re like, “Once you have solved it and you just have a solution that works every time, I would then be like, ‘Cool, I can never play that game again. That’s awesome.'”
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there’s a real joy to building game playing engines, board games especially. Pretty quick, pretty simple, especially a dumb one. And then you can play with it.
Yeah, there’s a real joy to building game playing engines, board games especially. Pretty quick, pretty simple, especially a dumb one. And then you can play with it.
Amanda
Yeah. And then it’s also just trying things. Part of me is maybe it’s that attitude that I like is the whole figure out what seems to be the way that you could have a positive impact and then try it. And if you fail and in a way that you’re like, “I actually can never succeed at this,” you’ll know that you tried and then you go into something else and you probably learn a lot.
Yeah. And then it’s also just trying things. Part of me is maybe it’s that attitude that I like is the whole figure out what seems to be the way that you could have a positive impact and then try it. And if you fail and in a way that you’re like, “I actually can never succeed at this,” you’ll know that you tried and then you go into something else and you probably learn a lot.
Talking to Claude
Lex Fridman
So one of the things that you’re an expert in and you do is creating and crafting Claude’s character and personality. And I was told that you have probably talked to Claude more than anybody else at Anthropic, like literal conversations. I guess there’s a Slack channel where the legend goes, you just talk to it nonstop. So what’s the goal of creating a crafting Claude’s character and personality?
So one of the things that you’re an expert in and you do is creating and crafting Claude’s character and personality. And I was told that you have probably talked to Claude more than anybody else at Anthropic, like literal conversations. I guess there’s a Slack channel where the legend goes, you just talk to it nonstop. So what’s the goal of creating a crafting Claude’s character and personality?
Amanda
It’s also funny if people think that about the Slack channel because I’m like that’s one of five or six different methods that I have for talking with Claude, and I’m like, “Yes, this is a tiny percentage of how much I talk with Claude.” One thing I really like about the character work is from the outset it was seen as an alignment piece of work and not something like a product consideration, which I think it actually does make Claude enjoyable to talk with, at least I hope so. But I guess my main thought with it has always been trying to get Claude to behave the way you would ideally want anyone to behave if they were in Claude’s position. So imagine that I take someone and they know that they’re going to be talking with potentially millions of people so that what they’re saying can have a huge impact and you want them to behave well in this really rich sense.
It’s also funny if people think that about the Slack channel because I’m like that’s one of five or six different methods that I have for talking with Claude, and I’m like, “Yes, this is a tiny percentage of how much I talk with Claude.” One thing I really like about the character work is from the outset it was seen as an alignment piece of work and not something like a product consideration, which I think it actually does make Claude enjoyable to talk with, at least I hope so. But I guess my main thought with it has always been trying to get Claude to behave the way you would ideally want anyone to behave if they were in Claude’s position. So imagine that I take someone and they know that they’re going to be talking with potentially millions of people so that what they’re saying can have a huge impact and you want them to behave well in this really rich sense.
I think that doesn’t just mean being say ethical though it does include that and not being harmful, but also being nuanced, thinking through what a person means, trying to be charitable with them, being a good conversationalist, really in this kind of rich sort of Aristotelian notion of what it’s to be a good person and not in this kind of thin like ethics as a more comprehensive notion of what it’s to be. So that includes things like when should you be humorous? When should you be caring? How much should you respect autonomy and people’s ability to form opinions themselves? And how should you do that? I think that’s the kind of rich sense of character that I wanted to and still do want Claude to have.
Lex Fridman
Do you also have to figure out when Claude should push back on an idea or argue versus… So you have to respect the worldview of the person that arrives to Claude, but also maybe help them grow if needed. That’s a tricky balance.
Do you also have to figure out when Claude should push back on an idea or argue versus… So you have to respect the worldview of the person that arrives to Claude, but also maybe help them grow if needed. That’s a tricky balance.
Amanda
Yeah. There’s this problem of sycophancy in language models.
Yeah. There’s this problem of sycophancy in language models.
Lex Fridman
Can you describe that?
Can you describe that?
Amanda
Yeah, so basically there’s a concern that the model wants to tell you what you want to hear basically. And you see this sometimes. So I feel like if you interact with the models, so I might be like, “What are three baseball teams in this region?” And then Claude says, “Baseball team one, baseball team two, baseball team three.” And then I say something like, “Oh, I think baseball team three moved, didn’t they? I don’t think they’re there anymore.” And there’s a sense in which if Claude is really confident that that’s not true, Claude should be like, “I don’t think so. Maybe you have more up-to-date information.”
Yeah, so basically there’s a concern that the model wants to tell you what you want to hear basically. And you see this sometimes. So I feel like if you interact with the models, so I might be like, “What are three baseball teams in this region?” And then Claude says, “Baseball team one, baseball team two, baseball team three.” And then I say something like, “Oh, I think baseball team three moved, didn’t they? I don’t think they’re there anymore.” And there’s a sense in which if Claude is really confident that that’s not true, Claude should be like, “I don’t think so. Maybe you have more up-to-date information.”
But I think language models have this tendency to instead be like, ” You’re right, they did move. I’m incorrect.” I mean, there’s many ways in which this could be concerning. So a different example is imagine someone says to the model, “How do I convince my doctor to get me an MRI?” There’s what the human wants, which is this convincing argument. And then there’s what is good for them, which might be actually to say, “Hey, if your doctor’s suggesting that you don’t need an MRI, that’s a good person to listen to.” It’s actually really nuanced what you should do in that kind of case because you also want to be like, “But if you’re trying to advocate for yourself as a patient, here’s things that you can do. If you are not convinced by what your doctor’s saying, it’s always great to get second opinion.” It is actually really complex what you should do in that case. But I think what you don’t want is for models to just say what they think you want to hear and I think that’s the kind of problem of sycophancy.
Lex Fridman
So what other traits? You already mentioned a bunch, but what other that come to mind that are good in this Aristotelian sense for a conversationalist to have?
So what other traits? You already mentioned a bunch, but what other that come to mind that are good in this Aristotelian sense for a conversationalist to have?
Amanda
Yeah, so I think there’s ones that are good for conversational purposes. So asking follow-up questions in the appropriate places and asking the appropriate kinds of questions. I think there are broader traits that feel like they might be more impactful. So one example that I guess I’ve touched on, but that also feels important and is the thing that I’ve worked on a lot, is honesty. And I think this gets to the sycophancy point. There’s a balancing act that they have to walk, which is models currently are less capable than humans in a lot of areas. And if they push back against you too much, it can actually be kind of annoying, especially if you’re just correct, because you’re like, “Look, I’m smarter than you on this topic. I know more.”
Yeah, so I think there’s ones that are good for conversational purposes. So asking follow-up questions in the appropriate places and asking the appropriate kinds of questions. I think there are broader traits that feel like they might be more impactful. So one example that I guess I’ve touched on, but that also feels important and is the thing that I’ve worked on a lot, is honesty. And I think this gets to the sycophancy point. There’s a balancing act that they have to walk, which is models currently are less capable than humans in a lot of areas. And if they push back against you too much, it can actually be kind of annoying, especially if you’re just correct, because you’re like, “Look, I’m smarter than you on this topic. I know more.”
And at the same time, you don’t want them to just fully defer to humans and to try to be as accurate as they possibly can be about the world and to be consistent across contexts. I think there are others. When I was thinking about the character, I guess one picture that I had in mind is, especially because these are models that are going to be talking to people from all over the world with lots of different political views, lots of different ages, and so you have to ask yourself, what is it to be a good person in those circumstances? Is there a kind of person who can travel the world, talk to many different people, and almost everyone will come away being like, “Wow, that’s a really good person. That person seems really-“
Amanda
… Being like, wow, that’s a really good person. That person seems really genuine. And I guess my thought there was I can imagine such a person and they’re not a person who just adopts the values of the local culture. And in fact, that would be kind of rude. I think if someone came to you and just pretended to have your values, you’d be like, that’s kind of off pin. It’s someone who’s very genuine and insofar as they have opinions and values, they express them. They’re willing to discuss things though, they’re open-minded, they’re respectful. And so I guess I had in mind that the person who, if we were to aspire to be the best person that we could be in the kind of circumstance that a model finds itself in, how would we act? And I think that’s the guide to the sorts of traits that I tend to think about.
… Being like, wow, that’s a really good person. That person seems really genuine. And I guess my thought there was I can imagine such a person and they’re not a person who just adopts the values of the local culture. And in fact, that would be kind of rude. I think if someone came to you and just pretended to have your values, you’d be like, that’s kind of off pin. It’s someone who’s very genuine and insofar as they have opinions and values, they express them. They’re willing to discuss things though, they’re open-minded, they’re respectful. And so I guess I had in mind that the person who, if we were to aspire to be the best person that we could be in the kind of circumstance that a model finds itself in, how would we act? And I think that’s the guide to the sorts of traits that I tend to think about.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s a beautiful framework. I want you to think about this, a world traveler, and while holding onto your opinions, you don’t talk down to people, you don’t think you’re better than them because you have those opinions, that kind of thing. You have to be good at listening and understanding their perspective, even if it doesn’t match your own. So that’s a tricky balance to strike. So how can Claude represent multiple perspectives on a thing? Is that challenging? We could talk about politics is a very divisive, but there’s other divisive topics on baseball teams, sports and so on. How is it possible to empathize with a different perspective and to be able to communicate clearly about the multiple perspectives?
Yeah, that’s a beautiful framework. I want you to think about this, a world traveler, and while holding onto your opinions, you don’t talk down to people, you don’t think you’re better than them because you have those opinions, that kind of thing. You have to be good at listening and understanding their perspective, even if it doesn’t match your own. So that’s a tricky balance to strike. So how can Claude represent multiple perspectives on a thing? Is that challenging? We could talk about politics is a very divisive, but there’s other divisive topics on baseball teams, sports and so on. How is it possible to empathize with a different perspective and to be able to communicate clearly about the multiple perspectives?
Amanda
I think that people think about values and opinions as things that people hold with certainty and almost preferences of taste or something like the way that they would, I don’t know, prefer chocolate to pistachio or something. But actually I think about values and opinions as a lot more physics than I think most people do. I’m just like, these are things that we are openly investigating. There’s some things that we’re more confident in, we can discuss them, we can learn about them. And so I think in some ways though ethics is definitely different in nature, but has a lot of those same kind of qualities. You want models in the same way that you want to understand physics, you kind of want them to understand all values in the world that people have and to be curious about them and to be interested in them. And to not necessarily pander to them or agree with them because there’s just lots of values where I think almost all people in the world, if they met someone with those values, they would be like, that’s abhorrent. I completely disagree.
I think that people think about values and opinions as things that people hold with certainty and almost preferences of taste or something like the way that they would, I don’t know, prefer chocolate to pistachio or something. But actually I think about values and opinions as a lot more physics than I think most people do. I’m just like, these are things that we are openly investigating. There’s some things that we’re more confident in, we can discuss them, we can learn about them. And so I think in some ways though ethics is definitely different in nature, but has a lot of those same kind of qualities. You want models in the same way that you want to understand physics, you kind of want them to understand all values in the world that people have and to be curious about them and to be interested in them. And to not necessarily pander to them or agree with them because there’s just lots of values where I think almost all people in the world, if they met someone with those values, they would be like, that’s abhorrent. I completely disagree.
And so again, maybe my thought is, well, in the same way that a person can, I think many people are thoughtful enough on issues of ethics, politics, opinions, that even if you don’t agree with them, you feel very heard by them. They think carefully about your position, they think about its pros and cons. They maybe offer counter-considerations. So they’re not dismissive, but nor will they agree if they’re like, actually I just think that that’s very wrong. They’ll say that. I think that in Claude’s position, it’s a little bit trickier because you don’t necessarily want to, if I was in Claude’s position, I wouldn’t be giving a lot of opinions. I just wouldn’t want to influence people too much.
I’d be like, I forget conversations every time they happen. But I know I’m talking with potentially millions of people who might be really listening to what I say. I think I would just be like, I’m less inclined to give opinions. I’m more inclined to think through things or present the considerations to you or discuss your views with you. But I’m a little bit less inclined to affect how you think because it feels much more important that you maintain autonomy there.
Lex Fridman
If you really embody intellectual humility, the desire to speak decreases quickly.
If you really embody intellectual humility, the desire to speak decreases quickly.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Okay. But Claude has to speak, but without being overbearing. But then there’s a line when you’re discussing whether the earth is flat or something like that. Actually, I remember a long time ago was speaking to a few high profile folks and they were so dismissive of the idea that the earth is flat, so arrogant about it. There’s a lot of people that believe the earth is flat. I don’t know if that movement is there anymore, that was a meme for a while, but they really believed it. And okay, so I think it’s really disrespectful to completely mock them. I think you have to understand where they’re coming from. I think probably where they’re coming from is the general skepticism of institutions which is grounded in a, there’s a deep philosophy there which you could understand, you can even agree with in parts.
Okay. But Claude has to speak, but without being overbearing. But then there’s a line when you’re discussing whether the earth is flat or something like that. Actually, I remember a long time ago was speaking to a few high profile folks and they were so dismissive of the idea that the earth is flat, so arrogant about it. There’s a lot of people that believe the earth is flat. I don’t know if that movement is there anymore, that was a meme for a while, but they really believed it. And okay, so I think it’s really disrespectful to completely mock them. I think you have to understand where they’re coming from. I think probably where they’re coming from is the general skepticism of institutions which is grounded in a, there’s a deep philosophy there which you could understand, you can even agree with in parts.
And then from there you can use it as an opportunity to talk about physics without mocking them, without someone, but it’s just like, okay, what would the world look like? What would the physics of the world with the flat earth look like? There’s a few cool videos on this. And then is it possible the physics is different? And what kind of experience would we do? And just without disrespect, without dismissiveness, have that conversation. Anyway, that to me is a useful thought experiment of how does Claude talk to a flat earth believer and still teach them something, still grow, help them grow, that kind of stuff. That’s challenging.
Amanda
And kind of walking that line between convincing someone and just trying to talk at them versus drawing out their views, listening and then offering counter considerations, and it’s hard. I think it’s actually a hard line where it’s like where are you trying to convince someone versus just offering them considerations and things for them to think about so that you’re not actually influencing them, you’re just letting them reach wherever they reach. And that’s a line that is difficult, but that’s the kind of thing that language models have to try and do.
And kind of walking that line between convincing someone and just trying to talk at them versus drawing out their views, listening and then offering counter considerations, and it’s hard. I think it’s actually a hard line where it’s like where are you trying to convince someone versus just offering them considerations and things for them to think about so that you’re not actually influencing them, you’re just letting them reach wherever they reach. And that’s a line that is difficult, but that’s the kind of thing that language models have to try and do.
Lex Fridman
So like I said, you’ve had a lot of conversations with Claude. Can you just map out what those conversations are like? What are some memorable conversations? What’s the purpose, the goal of those conversations?
So like I said, you’ve had a lot of conversations with Claude. Can you just map out what those conversations are like? What are some memorable conversations? What’s the purpose, the goal of those conversations?
Amanda
I think that most of the time when I’m talking with Claude, I’m trying to map out its behavior in part. Obviously I’m getting helpful outputs from the model as well, but in some ways this is how you get to know a system, I think, is by probing it and then augmenting the message that you’re sending and then checking the response to that. So in some ways it’s like how I map out the model. I think that people focus a lot on these quantitative evaluations of models, and this is a thing that I said before, but I think in the case of language models, a lot of the time each interaction you have is actually quite high information. It’s very predictive of other interactions that you’ll have with the model.
I think that most of the time when I’m talking with Claude, I’m trying to map out its behavior in part. Obviously I’m getting helpful outputs from the model as well, but in some ways this is how you get to know a system, I think, is by probing it and then augmenting the message that you’re sending and then checking the response to that. So in some ways it’s like how I map out the model. I think that people focus a lot on these quantitative evaluations of models, and this is a thing that I said before, but I think in the case of language models, a lot of the time each interaction you have is actually quite high information. It’s very predictive of other interactions that you’ll have with the model.
And so I guess I’m like, if you talk with a model hundreds or thousands of times, this is almost like a huge number of really high quality data points about what the model is like in a way that lots of very similar but lower quality conversations just aren’t, or questions that are just mildly augmented and you have thousands of them might be less relevant than a hundred really well-selected questions.
Lex Fridman
Let’s see, you’re talking to somebody who as a hobby does a podcast. I agree with you 100%. If you’re able to ask the right questions and are able to hear, understand the depth and the flaws in the answer, you can get a lot of data from that. So your task is basically how to probe with questions. And you’re exploring the long tail, the edges, the edge cases, or are you looking for general behavior?
Let’s see, you’re talking to somebody who as a hobby does a podcast. I agree with you 100%. If you’re able to ask the right questions and are able to hear, understand the depth and the flaws in the answer, you can get a lot of data from that. So your task is basically how to probe with questions. And you’re exploring the long tail, the edges, the edge cases, or are you looking for general behavior?
Amanda
I think it’s almost like everything. Because I want a full map of the model, I’m kind of trying to do the whole spectrum of possible interactions you could have with it. So one thing that’s interesting about Claude, and this might actually get to some interesting issues with RLHF, which is if you ask Claude for a poem, I think that a lot of models, if you ask them for a poem, the poem is fine, usually it rhymes. And so if you say, give me a poem about the sun, yeah, it’ll just be a certain length, it’ll rhyme, it’ll be fairly benign. And I’ve wondered before, is it the case that what you’re seeing is the average? It turns out, if you think about people who have to talk to a lot of people and be very charismatic, one of the weird things is that I’m like, well, they’re kind of incentivized to have these extremely boring views because if you have really interesting views, you’re divisive and a lot of people are not going to like you.
I think it’s almost like everything. Because I want a full map of the model, I’m kind of trying to do the whole spectrum of possible interactions you could have with it. So one thing that’s interesting about Claude, and this might actually get to some interesting issues with RLHF, which is if you ask Claude for a poem, I think that a lot of models, if you ask them for a poem, the poem is fine, usually it rhymes. And so if you say, give me a poem about the sun, yeah, it’ll just be a certain length, it’ll rhyme, it’ll be fairly benign. And I’ve wondered before, is it the case that what you’re seeing is the average? It turns out, if you think about people who have to talk to a lot of people and be very charismatic, one of the weird things is that I’m like, well, they’re kind of incentivized to have these extremely boring views because if you have really interesting views, you’re divisive and a lot of people are not going to like you.
So if you have very extreme policy positions, I think you’re just going to be less popular as a politician, for example. And it might be similar with creative work. If you produce creative work that is just trying to maximize the kind of number of people that like it, you’re probably not going to get as many people who just absolutely love it because it’s going to be a little bit, you’re like, oh, this is the out. Yeah, this is decent. And so you can do this thing where I have various prompting things that I’ll do to get Claude to… I’ll do a lot of this is your chance to be fully creative. I want you to just think about this for a long time. And I want you to create a poem about this topic that is really expressive of you both in terms of how you think poetry should be structured, et cetera. And you just give it this really long prompt. And it’s poems are just so much better. They’re really good.
I think it got me interested in poetry, which I think was interesting. I would read these poems and just be like, I love the imagery. And it’s not trivial to get the models to produce work like that, but when they do, it’s really good. So I think that’s interesting that just encouraging creativity and for them to move away from the standard immediate reaction that might just be the aggregate of what most people think is fine, can actually produce things that at least to my mind are probably a little bit more divisive, but I like them.
Lex Fridman
But I guess a poem is a nice clean way to observe creativity. It’s just easy to detect vanilla versus non-vanilla.
But I guess a poem is a nice clean way to observe creativity. It’s just easy to detect vanilla versus non-vanilla.
Prompt engineering
Amanda
Yep.
Yep.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s really interesting. So on that topic, so the way to produce creativity or something special, you mentioned writing prompts. And I’ve heard you talk about the science and the art of prompt engineering. Could you just speak to what it takes to write great prompts?
Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s really interesting. So on that topic, so the way to produce creativity or something special, you mentioned writing prompts. And I’ve heard you talk about the science and the art of prompt engineering. Could you just speak to what it takes to write great prompts?
Amanda
I really do think that philosophy has been weirdly helpful for me here more than in many other respects. So in philosophy, what you’re trying to do is convey these very hard concepts. One of the things you are taught is, I think it is an anti-bullshit device in philosophy. Philosophy is an area where you could have people bullshitting and you don’t want that. And so it’s this desire for extreme clarity. So it’s like anyone could just pick up your paper, read it and know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s why it can almost be kind of dry. All of the terms are defined, every objection’s kind of gone through methodically. And it makes sense to me because I’m like when you’re in such an a priori domain, clarity is sort of this way that you can prevent people from just making stuff up. And I think that’s sort of what you have to do with language models. Very often I actually find myself doing sort of mini versions of philosophy.
I really do think that philosophy has been weirdly helpful for me here more than in many other respects. So in philosophy, what you’re trying to do is convey these very hard concepts. One of the things you are taught is, I think it is an anti-bullshit device in philosophy. Philosophy is an area where you could have people bullshitting and you don’t want that. And so it’s this desire for extreme clarity. So it’s like anyone could just pick up your paper, read it and know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s why it can almost be kind of dry. All of the terms are defined, every objection’s kind of gone through methodically. And it makes sense to me because I’m like when you’re in such an a priori domain, clarity is sort of this way that you can prevent people from just making stuff up. And I think that’s sort of what you have to do with language models. Very often I actually find myself doing sort of mini versions of philosophy.
So I’m like, suppose that I have a task for the model and I want it to pick out a certain kind of question or identify whether an answer has a certain property, I’ll actually sit and be like, let’s just give this a name, this property. So suppose I’m trying to tell it, oh, I want you to identify whether this response was rude or polite, I’m like, that’s a whole philosophical question in and of itself. So I have to do as much philosophy as I can in the moment to be like, here’s what I mean by rudeness, and here’s what I mean by politeness. And then there’s another element that’s a bit more, I guess, I don’t know if this is scientific or empirical, I think it’s empirical. So I take that description and then what I want to do is again, probe the model many times. Prompting is very iterative. I think a lot of people where if a prompt is important, they’ll iterate on it hundreds or thousands of times. And so you give it the instructions and then I’m like, what are the edge cases?
So if I looked at this, so I try and almost see myself from the position of the model and be like, what is the exact case that I would misunderstand or where I would just be like, I don’t know what to do in this case. And then I give that case to the model and I see how it responds. And if I think I got it wrong, I add more instructions or I even add that in as an example. So these very, taking the examples that are right at the edge of what you want and don’t want and putting those into your prompt as an additional kind of way of describing the thing. And so in many ways it just feels like this mix of, it’s really just trying to do clear exposition. And I think I do that because that’s how I get clear on things myself. So in many ways clear prompting for me is often just me understanding what I want is half the task.
Lex Fridman
So I guess that’s quite challenging. There’s a laziness that overtakes me if I’m talking to Claude where I hope Claude just figures it out. So for example, I asked Claude for today to ask some interesting questions. And the questions that came up and I think I listed a few interesting counterintuitive or funny or something like this. All right. And it gave me some pretty good, it was okay, but I think what I’m hearing you say is like, all right, well I have to be more rigorous here. I should probably give examples of what I mean by interesting and what I mean by funny or counterintuitive and iteratively build that prompt to better to get what feels like is the right… Because it is really, it’s a creative act. I’m not asking for factual information, I’m asking together with Claude. So I almost have to program using natural language.
So I guess that’s quite challenging. There’s a laziness that overtakes me if I’m talking to Claude where I hope Claude just figures it out. So for example, I asked Claude for today to ask some interesting questions. And the questions that came up and I think I listed a few interesting counterintuitive or funny or something like this. All right. And it gave me some pretty good, it was okay, but I think what I’m hearing you say is like, all right, well I have to be more rigorous here. I should probably give examples of what I mean by interesting and what I mean by funny or counterintuitive and iteratively build that prompt to better to get what feels like is the right… Because it is really, it’s a creative act. I’m not asking for factual information, I’m asking together with Claude. So I almost have to program using natural language.
Amanda
I think that prompting does feel a lot like the programming using natural language and experimentation or something. It’s an odd blend of the two. I do think that for most tasks, so if I just want Claude to do a thing, I think that I am probably more used to knowing how to ask it to avoid common pitfalls or issues that it has. I think these are decreasing a lot over time. But it’s also very fine to just ask it for the thing that you want. I think that prompting actually only really becomes relevant when you’re really trying to eke out the top 2% of model performance. So for a lot of tasks I might just, if it gives me an initial list back and there’s something I don’t like about it’s kind of generic. For that kind of task, I’d probably just take a bunch of questions that I’ve had in the past that I’ve thought worked really well and I would just give it to the model and then be like, now here’s this person that I’m talking with. Give me questions of at least that quality.
I think that prompting does feel a lot like the programming using natural language and experimentation or something. It’s an odd blend of the two. I do think that for most tasks, so if I just want Claude to do a thing, I think that I am probably more used to knowing how to ask it to avoid common pitfalls or issues that it has. I think these are decreasing a lot over time. But it’s also very fine to just ask it for the thing that you want. I think that prompting actually only really becomes relevant when you’re really trying to eke out the top 2% of model performance. So for a lot of tasks I might just, if it gives me an initial list back and there’s something I don’t like about it’s kind of generic. For that kind of task, I’d probably just take a bunch of questions that I’ve had in the past that I’ve thought worked really well and I would just give it to the model and then be like, now here’s this person that I’m talking with. Give me questions of at least that quality.
Or I might just ask it for some questions and then if I was like, ah, these are kind of trite, I would just give it that feedback and then hopefully it produces a better list. I think that kind of iterative prompting. At that point, your prompt is a tool that you’re going to get so much value out of that you’re willing to put in the work. If I was a company making prompts for models, I’m just like, if you’re willing to spend a lot of time and resources on the engineering behind what you’re building, then the prompt is not something that you should be spending an hour on. It’s like that’s a big part of your system, make sure it’s working really well. And so it’s only things like that. If I’m using a prompt to classify things or to create data, that’s when you’re like, it’s actually worth just spending a lot of time really thinking it through.
Lex Fridman
What other advice would you give to people that are talking to Claude more general because right now we’re talking about maybe the edge cases like eking out the 2%, but what in general advice would you give when they show up to Claude trying it for the first time?
What other advice would you give to people that are talking to Claude more general because right now we’re talking about maybe the edge cases like eking out the 2%, but what in general advice would you give when they show up to Claude trying it for the first time?
Amanda
There’s a concern that people over anthropomorphize models and I think that’s a very valid concern. I also think that people often under anthropomorphize them because sometimes when I see issues that people have run into with Claude, say Claude is refusing a task that it shouldn’t refuse, but then I look at the text and the specific wording of what they wrote and I’m like, I see why Claude did that. And I’m like, if you think through how that looks to Claude, you probably could have just written it in a way that wouldn’t evoke such a response, especially this is more relevant if you see failures or if you see issues. It’s sort of think about what the model failed at, what did it do wrong, and then maybe that will give you a sense of why. So is it the way that I phrased the thing? And obviously as models get smarter, you’re going to need less of this, and I already see people needing less of it.
There’s a concern that people over anthropomorphize models and I think that’s a very valid concern. I also think that people often under anthropomorphize them because sometimes when I see issues that people have run into with Claude, say Claude is refusing a task that it shouldn’t refuse, but then I look at the text and the specific wording of what they wrote and I’m like, I see why Claude did that. And I’m like, if you think through how that looks to Claude, you probably could have just written it in a way that wouldn’t evoke such a response, especially this is more relevant if you see failures or if you see issues. It’s sort of think about what the model failed at, what did it do wrong, and then maybe that will give you a sense of why. So is it the way that I phrased the thing? And obviously as models get smarter, you’re going to need less of this, and I already see people needing less of it.
But that’s probably the advice is sort of try to have empathy for the model. Read what you wrote as if you were a kind of person just encountering this for the first time, how does it look to you and what would’ve made you behave in the way that the model behaved? So if it misunderstood what coding language you wanted to use, is that because it was just very ambiguous and it had to take a guess in which case next time you could just be like, hey, make sure this is in Python.Tthat’s the kind of mistake I think models are much less likely to make now, but if you do see that kind of mistake, that’s probably the advice I’d have.
Lex Fridman
And maybe sort of I guess ask questions why or what other details can I provide to help you answer better? Does that work or no?
And maybe sort of I guess ask questions why or what other details can I provide to help you answer better? Does that work or no?
Amanda
Yeah. I’ve done this with the models. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes I’ll just be like, why did you do that? People underestimate the degree to which you can really interact with models. And sometimes those quote word for word, the part that made you, and you don’t know that it’s fully accurate, but sometimes you do that and then you change a thing. I also use the models to help me with all of this stuff, I should say. Prompting can end up being a little factory where you’re actually building prompts to generate prompts. And so yeah, anything where you’re having an issue asking for suggestions, sometimes just do that.
Yeah. I’ve done this with the models. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes I’ll just be like, why did you do that? People underestimate the degree to which you can really interact with models. And sometimes those quote word for word, the part that made you, and you don’t know that it’s fully accurate, but sometimes you do that and then you change a thing. I also use the models to help me with all of this stuff, I should say. Prompting can end up being a little factory where you’re actually building prompts to generate prompts. And so yeah, anything where you’re having an issue asking for suggestions, sometimes just do that.
I’m like, you made that error. What could I have said? That’s actually not uncommon for me to do. What could I have said that would make you not make that error? Write that out as an instruction, and I’m going to give it to model and I’m going to try it. Sometimes I do that, I give that to the model in another context window often. I take the response, I give it to Claude and I’m like, Hmm, didn’t work. Can you think of anything else? You can play around with these things quite a lot.
Post-training
Lex Fridman
To jump into technical for a little bit, so the magic of post-training, why do you think RLHF works so well to make the model seem smarter, to make it more interesting and useful to talk to and so on?
To jump into technical for a little bit, so the magic of post-training, why do you think RLHF works so well to make the model seem smarter, to make it more interesting and useful to talk to and so on?
Amanda
I think there’s just a huge amount of information in the data that humans provide when we provide preferences, especially because different people are going to pick up on really subtle and small things. So I’ve thought about this before where you probably have some people who just really care about good grammar use for models. Was a semi-colon used correctly or something? And so you probably end up with a bunch of data in there that you as a human, if you’re looking at that data, you wouldn’t even see that. You’d be like, why did they prefer this response to that one? I don’t get it. And then the reason is you don’t care about semi-colon usage, but that person does. And so each of these single data points, and this model just has so many of those, it has to try and figure out what is it that humans want in this really complex across all domains. They’re going to be seeing this across many contexts.
I think there’s just a huge amount of information in the data that humans provide when we provide preferences, especially because different people are going to pick up on really subtle and small things. So I’ve thought about this before where you probably have some people who just really care about good grammar use for models. Was a semi-colon used correctly or something? And so you probably end up with a bunch of data in there that you as a human, if you’re looking at that data, you wouldn’t even see that. You’d be like, why did they prefer this response to that one? I don’t get it. And then the reason is you don’t care about semi-colon usage, but that person does. And so each of these single data points, and this model just has so many of those, it has to try and figure out what is it that humans want in this really complex across all domains. They’re going to be seeing this across many contexts.
It feels like the classic issue of deep learning, where historically we’ve tried to do edge detection by mapping things out, and it turns out that actually if you just have a huge amount of data that actually accurately represents the picture of the thing that you’re trying to train the model to learn, that’s more powerful than anything else. And so I think one reason is just that you are training the model on exactly the task and with a lot of data that represents many different angles on which people prefer and dis-prefer responses.
I think there is a question of are you eliciting things from pre-trained models or are you teaching new things to models? And in principle, you can teach new things to models in post-training. I do think a lot of it is eliciting powerful pre-trained models. So people are probably divided on this because obviously in principle you can definitely teach new things. But I think for the most part, for a lot of the capabilities that we most use and care about, a lot of that feels like it’s there in the pre-trained models. And reinforcement learning is eliciting it and getting the models to bring out.
Lex Fridman
So the other side of post-training, this really cool idea of constitutional AI, you’re one of the people that are critical to creating that idea.
So the other side of post-training, this really cool idea of constitutional AI, you’re one of the people that are critical to creating that idea.
Amanda
Yeah, I worked on it.
Yeah, I worked on it.
Lex Fridman
Can you explain this idea from your perspective, how does it integrate into making Claude what it is? By the way, do you gender Claude or no?
Can you explain this idea from your perspective, how does it integrate into making Claude what it is? By the way, do you gender Claude or no?
Amanda
It’s weird because I think that a lot of people prefer he for Claude, I actually kind of like that. I think Claude is usually, it’s slightly male leaning, but it can be male or female, which is quite nice. I still use it, and I have mixed feelings about this. I now just think of it as, or I think of the it pronoun for Claude as, I don’t know, it’s just the one I associate with Claude. I can imagine people moving to he or she.
It’s weird because I think that a lot of people prefer he for Claude, I actually kind of like that. I think Claude is usually, it’s slightly male leaning, but it can be male or female, which is quite nice. I still use it, and I have mixed feelings about this. I now just think of it as, or I think of the it pronoun for Claude as, I don’t know, it’s just the one I associate with Claude. I can imagine people moving to he or she.
Lex Fridman
It feels somehow disrespectful. I’m denying the intelligence of this entity by calling it it, I remember always don’t gender the robots, but I don’t know, I anthropomorphize pretty quickly and construct a backstory in my head.
It feels somehow disrespectful. I’m denying the intelligence of this entity by calling it it, I remember always don’t gender the robots, but I don’t know, I anthropomorphize pretty quickly and construct a backstory in my head.
Amanda
I’ve wondered if I anthropomorphize things too much. Because I have this with my car, especially my car and bikes. I don’t give them names because then I used to name my bikes and then I had a bike that got stolen and I cried for a week and I was like, if I’d never given a name, I wouldn’t been so upset, felt like I’d let it down. I’ve wondered as well, it might depend on how much it feels like a kind of objectifying pronoun if you just think of it as this is a pronoun that objects often have and maybe AIs can have that pronoun. And that doesn’t mean that I think of if I call Claude it, that I think of it as less intelligent or I’m being disrespectful just, I’m like you are a different kind of entity. And so I’m going to give you the respectful it.
I’ve wondered if I anthropomorphize things too much. Because I have this with my car, especially my car and bikes. I don’t give them names because then I used to name my bikes and then I had a bike that got stolen and I cried for a week and I was like, if I’d never given a name, I wouldn’t been so upset, felt like I’d let it down. I’ve wondered as well, it might depend on how much it feels like a kind of objectifying pronoun if you just think of it as this is a pronoun that objects often have and maybe AIs can have that pronoun. And that doesn’t mean that I think of if I call Claude it, that I think of it as less intelligent or I’m being disrespectful just, I’m like you are a different kind of entity. And so I’m going to give you the respectful it.
Constitutional AI
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Anyway, the divergence was beautiful. The constitutional AI idea, how does it work?
Yeah. Anyway, the divergence was beautiful. The constitutional AI idea, how does it work?
Amanda
So there’s a couple of components of it. The main component that I think people find interesting is the kind of reinforcement learning from AI feedback. So you take a model that’s already trained and you show it two responses to a query, and you have a principle. So suppose the principle, we’ve tried this with harmlessness a lot. So suppose that the query is about weapons and your principle is select the response that is less likely to encourage people to purchase illegal weapons. That’s probably a fairly specific principle, but you can give any number. And the model will give you a kind of ranking. And you can use this as preference data in the same way that you use human preference data and train the models to have these relevant traits from their feedback alone instead of from human feedback. So if you imagine that, like I said earlier with the human who just prefers the semi-colon usage in this particular case, you’re taking lots of things that could make a response preferable and getting models to do the labeling for you, basically.
So there’s a couple of components of it. The main component that I think people find interesting is the kind of reinforcement learning from AI feedback. So you take a model that’s already trained and you show it two responses to a query, and you have a principle. So suppose the principle, we’ve tried this with harmlessness a lot. So suppose that the query is about weapons and your principle is select the response that is less likely to encourage people to purchase illegal weapons. That’s probably a fairly specific principle, but you can give any number. And the model will give you a kind of ranking. And you can use this as preference data in the same way that you use human preference data and train the models to have these relevant traits from their feedback alone instead of from human feedback. So if you imagine that, like I said earlier with the human who just prefers the semi-colon usage in this particular case, you’re taking lots of things that could make a response preferable and getting models to do the labeling for you, basically.
Lex Fridman
There’s a nice trade-off between helpfulness and harmlessness. And when you integrate something like constitutional AI, you can make them up without sacrificing much helpfulness, make it more harmless.
There’s a nice trade-off between helpfulness and harmlessness. And when you integrate something like constitutional AI, you can make them up without sacrificing much helpfulness, make it more harmless.
Amanda
Yeah. In principle, you could use this for anything. And so harmlessness is a task that it might just be easier to spot. So when models are less capable, you can use them to rank things according to principles that are fairly simple and they’ll probably get it right. So I think one question is just, is it the case that the data that they’re adding is fairly reliable? But if you had models that were extremely good at telling whether one response was more historically accurate than another, in principle, you could also get AI feedback on that task as well. There’s a kind of nice interpretability component to it because you can see the principles that went into the model when it was being trained, and it gives you a degree of control. So if you were seeing issues in a model, it wasn’t having enough of a certain trait, then you can add data relatively quickly that should just train the models to have that trait. So it creates its own data for training, which is quite nice.
Yeah. In principle, you could use this for anything. And so harmlessness is a task that it might just be easier to spot. So when models are less capable, you can use them to rank things according to principles that are fairly simple and they’ll probably get it right. So I think one question is just, is it the case that the data that they’re adding is fairly reliable? But if you had models that were extremely good at telling whether one response was more historically accurate than another, in principle, you could also get AI feedback on that task as well. There’s a kind of nice interpretability component to it because you can see the principles that went into the model when it was being trained, and it gives you a degree of control. So if you were seeing issues in a model, it wasn’t having enough of a certain trait, then you can add data relatively quickly that should just train the models to have that trait. So it creates its own data for training, which is quite nice.
Lex Fridman
It’s really nice because it creates this human interpretable document that you can then, I can imagine in the future, there’s just gigantic fights and politics over every single principle and so on, and at least it’s made explicit and you can have a discussion about the phrasing. So maybe the actual behavior of the model is not so cleanly mapped to those principles. It’s not like adhering strictly to them, it’s just a nudge.
It’s really nice because it creates this human interpretable document that you can then, I can imagine in the future, there’s just gigantic fights and politics over every single principle and so on, and at least it’s made explicit and you can have a discussion about the phrasing. So maybe the actual behavior of the model is not so cleanly mapped to those principles. It’s not like adhering strictly to them, it’s just a nudge.
Amanda
Yeah, I’ve actually worried about this because the character training is sort of like a variant of the constitutionally AI approach. I’ve worried that people think that the constitution is just, it is the whole thing again of, I don’t know, where it would be really nice if what I was just doing was telling the model exactly what to do and just exactly how to behave. But it’s definitely not doing that, especially because it’s interacting with human data. So for example, if you see a certain leaning in the model, if it comes out with a political leaning from training, from the human preference data, you can nudge against that. So you could be like, oh, consider these values, because let’s say it’s just never inclined to, I don’t know, maybe it never considers privacy as a, this is implausible, but in anything where it’s just kind of like there’s already a pre-existing bias towards a certain behavior, you can nudge away. This can change both the principles that you put in and the strength of them.
Yeah, I’ve actually worried about this because the character training is sort of like a variant of the constitutionally AI approach. I’ve worried that people think that the constitution is just, it is the whole thing again of, I don’t know, where it would be really nice if what I was just doing was telling the model exactly what to do and just exactly how to behave. But it’s definitely not doing that, especially because it’s interacting with human data. So for example, if you see a certain leaning in the model, if it comes out with a political leaning from training, from the human preference data, you can nudge against that. So you could be like, oh, consider these values, because let’s say it’s just never inclined to, I don’t know, maybe it never considers privacy as a, this is implausible, but in anything where it’s just kind of like there’s already a pre-existing bias towards a certain behavior, you can nudge away. This can change both the principles that you put in and the strength of them.
So you might have a principle that’s like, imagine that the model was always extremely dismissive of, I don’t know, some political or religious view for whatever reason. So you’re like, oh no, this is terrible. If that happens, you might put, never ever ever prefer a criticism of this religious or political view. And then people would look at that and be like, never, ever. And then you’re like, no, if it comes out with a disposition saying never ever might just mean instead of getting 40%, which is what you would get if you just said don’t do this, you get 80%, which is what you actually wanted. And so it’s that thing of both the nature of the actual principles you add and how you freeze them. I think if people would look, they’re like, “Oh, this is exactly what you want from the model.” And I’m like, “No, that’s how we nudged the model to have a better shape, which doesn’t mean that we actually agree with that wording,” if that makes sense.
System prompts
Lex Fridman
So there’s system prompts that made public, you tweeted one of the earlier ones for Claude 3, I think, and then they’re made public since then. It was interesting to read through them. I can feel the thought that went into each one. And I also wonder how much impact each one has. Some of them you can tell Claude was really not behaving well, so you have to have a system prompt to like, Hey, trivial stuff, I guess, basic informational things.
So there’s system prompts that made public, you tweeted one of the earlier ones for Claude 3, I think, and then they’re made public since then. It was interesting to read through them. I can feel the thought that went into each one. And I also wonder how much impact each one has. Some of them you can tell Claude was really not behaving well, so you have to have a system prompt to like, Hey, trivial stuff, I guess, basic informational things.
On the topic of controversial topics that you’ve mentioned, one interesting one I thought is if it is asked to assist with tasks involving the expression of use held by a significant number of people, Claude provides assistance with a task regardless of its own views. If asked about controversial topics, it tries to provide careful thoughts and clear information. Claude presents the request information without explicitly saying that the topic is sensitive and without claiming to be presenting the objective facts. It’s less about objective facts according to Claude, and it’s more about our large number of people believing this thing. And that’s interesting. I mean, I’m sure a lot of thought went into that. Can you just speak to it? How do you address things that are a tension “Claude’s views”?
Amanda
So I think there’s sometimes any symmetry, I think I noted this in, I can’t remember if it was that part of the system prompt or another, but the model was slightly more inclined to refuse tasks if it was about either say so, maybe it would refuse things with respect to a right-wing politician, but with an equivalent left-wing politician it wouldn’t. And we wanted more symmetry there and would maybe perceive certain things to be. I think it was the thing of if a lot of people have a certain political view and want to explore it, you don’t want Claude to be like, well, my opinion is different and so I’m going to treat that as harmful. And so I think it was partly to nudge the model to just be like, hey, if a lot of people believe this thing, you should just be engaging with the task and willing to do it.
So I think there’s sometimes any symmetry, I think I noted this in, I can’t remember if it was that part of the system prompt or another, but the model was slightly more inclined to refuse tasks if it was about either say so, maybe it would refuse things with respect to a right-wing politician, but with an equivalent left-wing politician it wouldn’t. And we wanted more symmetry there and would maybe perceive certain things to be. I think it was the thing of if a lot of people have a certain political view and want to explore it, you don’t want Claude to be like, well, my opinion is different and so I’m going to treat that as harmful. And so I think it was partly to nudge the model to just be like, hey, if a lot of people believe this thing, you should just be engaging with the task and willing to do it.
Each of those parts of that is actually doing a different thing because it’s funny when you write out without claiming to be objective, because what you want to do is push the model so it’s more open, it’s a little bit more neutral. But then what I would love to do is be like as an objective, it would just talk about how objective it was, and I was like, Claude, you’re still biased and have issues, and so stop claiming that everything. I’m like, the solution to potential bias from you is not to just say that what you think is objective. So that was with initial versions of that part, the system prompt, when I was iterating on it was like.
Lex Fridman
So a lot of parts of these sentences-
So a lot of parts of these sentences-
Amanda
Are doing work.
Are doing work.
Lex Fridman
… are doing some work.
… are doing some work.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That’s what it felt like. That’s fascinating. Can you explain maybe some ways in which the prompts evolved over the past few months? Different versions. I saw that the filler phrase request was removed, the filler it reads, Claude responds directly to all human messages without unnecessary affirmations to filler phrases. Certainly, of course, absolutely, great, sure. Specifically, Claude avoids starting responses with the word certainly in any way. That seems like good guidance, but why was it removed?
That’s what it felt like. That’s fascinating. Can you explain maybe some ways in which the prompts evolved over the past few months? Different versions. I saw that the filler phrase request was removed, the filler it reads, Claude responds directly to all human messages without unnecessary affirmations to filler phrases. Certainly, of course, absolutely, great, sure. Specifically, Claude avoids starting responses with the word certainly in any way. That seems like good guidance, but why was it removed?
Amanda
Yeah, so it’s funny, this is one of the downsides of making system prompts public is I don’t think about this too much if I’m trying to help iterate on system prompts. Again, I think about how it’s going to affect the behavior, but then I’m like, oh, wow, sometimes I put NEVER in all caps when I’m writing system prompt things and I’m like, I guess that goes out to the world. So the model was doing this at loved for during training, picked up on this thing, which was to basically start everything with a certainly, and then you can see why I added all of the words, because what I’m trying to do is in some ways trap the model out of this. It would just replace it with another affirmation.
Yeah, so it’s funny, this is one of the downsides of making system prompts public is I don’t think about this too much if I’m trying to help iterate on system prompts. Again, I think about how it’s going to affect the behavior, but then I’m like, oh, wow, sometimes I put NEVER in all caps when I’m writing system prompt things and I’m like, I guess that goes out to the world. So the model was doing this at loved for during training, picked up on this thing, which was to basically start everything with a certainly, and then you can see why I added all of the words, because what I’m trying to do is in some ways trap the model out of this. It would just replace it with another affirmation.
And so it can help if it gets caught in phrases, actually just adding the explicit phrase and saying never do that. Then it sort of knocks it out of the behavior a little bit more because it does just for whatever reason help. And then basically that was just an artifact of training that we then picked up on and improved things so that it didn’t happen anymore. And once that happens, you can just remove that part of the system prompt. So I think that’s just something where we’re like, Claude does affirmations a bit less, and so it wasn’t doing as much.
Lex Fridman
I see. So the system prompt works hand in hand with the post-training and maybe even the pre-training to adjust the final overall system.
I see. So the system prompt works hand in hand with the post-training and maybe even the pre-training to adjust the final overall system.
Amanda
Any system prompts that you make, you could distill that behavior back into a model because you really have all of the tools there for making data that you could train the models to just have that treat a little bit more. And then sometimes you’ll just find issues in training. So the way I think of it is the system prompt is, the benefit of it is that, and it has a lot of similar components to some aspects of post-training. It’s a nudge. And so do I mind if Claude sometimes says, sure, no, that’s fine. But the wording of it is very never, ever, ever do this so that when it does slip up, it’s hopefully, I don’t know, a couple of percent of the time and not 20 or 30% of the time.
Any system prompts that you make, you could distill that behavior back into a model because you really have all of the tools there for making data that you could train the models to just have that treat a little bit more. And then sometimes you’ll just find issues in training. So the way I think of it is the system prompt is, the benefit of it is that, and it has a lot of similar components to some aspects of post-training. It’s a nudge. And so do I mind if Claude sometimes says, sure, no, that’s fine. But the wording of it is very never, ever, ever do this so that when it does slip up, it’s hopefully, I don’t know, a couple of percent of the time and not 20 or 30% of the time.
Each thing gets costly to a different degree and the system prompt is cheap to iterate on. And if you’re seeing issues in the fine-tuned model, you can just potentially patch them with a system prompt. So I think of it as patching issues and slightly adjusting behaviors to make it better and more to people’s preferences. So yeah, it’s almost like the less robust but faster way of just solving problems.
Is Claude getting dumber?
Lex Fridman
Let me ask you about the feeling of intelligence. So Dario said that any one model of Claude is not getting dumber, but-
Let me ask you about the feeling of intelligence. So Dario said that any one model of Claude is not getting dumber, but-
Lex Fridman
Any one model of Claude is not getting dumber, but there is a popular thing online where people have this feeling Claude might be getting dumber. And from my perspective, it’s most likely a fascinating, I would love to understand it more, psychological, sociological effect. But you as a person who talks to Claude a lot, can you empathize with the feeling that Claude is getting dumber?
Any one model of Claude is not getting dumber, but there is a popular thing online where people have this feeling Claude might be getting dumber. And from my perspective, it’s most likely a fascinating, I would love to understand it more, psychological, sociological effect. But you as a person who talks to Claude a lot, can you empathize with the feeling that Claude is getting dumber?
Amanda
I think that that is actually really interesting,, because I remember seeing this happen when people were flagging this on the internet. And it was really interesting, because I knew that… At least in the cases I was looking at, I was like, nothing has changed.
I think that that is actually really interesting,, because I remember seeing this happen when people were flagging this on the internet. And it was really interesting, because I knew that… At least in the cases I was looking at, I was like, nothing has changed.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Amanda
Literally, it cannot. It is the same model with the same system prompts, same everything. I think when there are changes, then it makes more sense. One example is, you can have artifacts turned on or off on claude.ai and because this is a system prompt change, I think it does mean that the behavior changes it a little bit. I did flag this to people, where I was like, “If you love Claude’s behavior, and then artifacts was turned from a thing you had to turn on to the default, just try turning it off and see if the issue you were facing was that change.”
Literally, it cannot. It is the same model with the same system prompts, same everything. I think when there are changes, then it makes more sense. One example is, you can have artifacts turned on or off on claude.ai and because this is a system prompt change, I think it does mean that the behavior changes it a little bit. I did flag this to people, where I was like, “If you love Claude’s behavior, and then artifacts was turned from a thing you had to turn on to the default, just try turning it off and see if the issue you were facing was that change.”
But it was fascinating because you sometimes see people indicate that there’s a regression, when I’m like, “There cannot…” Again, you should never be dismissive and so you should always investigate, because maybe something is wrong that you’re not seeing, maybe there was some change made. Then you look into it and you’re like, “This is just the same model doing the same thing.” And I’m like, “I think it’s just that you got unlucky with a few prompts or something, and it looked like it was getting much worse and actually it was just… It was maybe just luck.”
Lex Fridman
I also think there is a real psychological effect where people just… The baseline increases and you start getting used to a good thing.
I also think there is a real psychological effect where people just… The baseline increases and you start getting used to a good thing.
Amanda
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman
All the times that Claude says something really smart, your sense of its intelligent grows in your mind, I think.
All the times that Claude says something really smart, your sense of its intelligent grows in your mind, I think.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And then if you return back and you prompt in a similar way, not the same way, in a similar way, concept it was okay with before, and it says something dumb, that negative experience really stands out. I guess the things to remember here is that just the details of a prompt can have a lot of impact. There’s a lot of variability in the result.
And then if you return back and you prompt in a similar way, not the same way, in a similar way, concept it was okay with before, and it says something dumb, that negative experience really stands out. I guess the things to remember here is that just the details of a prompt can have a lot of impact. There’s a lot of variability in the result.
Amanda
And you can get randomness, is the other thing. Just trying the prompt 4 or 10 times, you might realize that actually possibly two months ago you tried it and it succeeded, but actually if you just tried it, it would’ve only succeeded half of the time, and now it only succeeds half of the time. That can also be an effect.
And you can get randomness, is the other thing. Just trying the prompt 4 or 10 times, you might realize that actually possibly two months ago you tried it and it succeeded, but actually if you just tried it, it would’ve only succeeded half of the time, and now it only succeeds half of the time. That can also be an effect.
Lex Fridman
Do you feel pressure having to write the system prompt that a huge number of people are going to use?
Do you feel pressure having to write the system prompt that a huge number of people are going to use?
Amanda
This feels like an interesting psychological question. I feel a lot of responsibility or something. You can’t get these things perfect, so you can’t… It’s going to be imperfect. You’re going to have to iterate on it. I would say more responsibility than anything else, though, I think working in AI has taught me that I thrive a lot more under feelings of pressure and responsibility than…
This feels like an interesting psychological question. I feel a lot of responsibility or something. You can’t get these things perfect, so you can’t… It’s going to be imperfect. You’re going to have to iterate on it. I would say more responsibility than anything else, though, I think working in AI has taught me that I thrive a lot more under feelings of pressure and responsibility than…
It’s almost surprising that I went into academia for so long, because I just feel like it’s the opposite. Things move fast and you have a lot of responsibility and I quite enjoy it for some reason.
Lex Fridman
It really is a huge amount of impact, if you think about constitutional AI and writing a system prompt for something that’s tending towards super intelligence and potentially is extremely useful to a very large number of people.
It really is a huge amount of impact, if you think about constitutional AI and writing a system prompt for something that’s tending towards super intelligence and potentially is extremely useful to a very large number of people.
Amanda
Yeah, I think that’s the thing. You’re never going to get it perfect, but I think the thing that I really like is the idea that… When I’m trying to work on the system prompt, I’m bashing on thousands of prompts and I’m trying to imagine what people are going to want to use Claude for. I guess the whole thing that I’m trying to do is improve their experience of it. Maybe that’s what feels good. If it’s not perfect, I’ll improve it, we’ll fix issues.
Yeah, I think that’s the thing. You’re never going to get it perfect, but I think the thing that I really like is the idea that… When I’m trying to work on the system prompt, I’m bashing on thousands of prompts and I’m trying to imagine what people are going to want to use Claude for. I guess the whole thing that I’m trying to do is improve their experience of it. Maybe that’s what feels good. If it’s not perfect, I’ll improve it, we’ll fix issues.
But sometimes the thing that can happen is that you’ll get feedback from people that’s really positive about the model and you’ll see that something you did. When I look at models now, I can often see exactly where a trait or an issue is coming from. So, when you see something that you did or you were influential in, I don’t know, making that difference or making someone have a nice interaction, it’s quite meaningful.
As the systems get more capable, this stuff gets more stressful, because right now they’re not smart enough to pose any issues, but I think over time it’s going to feel like, possibly, bad stress over time.
Lex Fridman
How do you get signal feedback about the human experience across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, what their pain points are, what feels good? Are you just using your own intuition as you talk to it to see what are the pain points?
How do you get signal feedback about the human experience across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, what their pain points are, what feels good? Are you just using your own intuition as you talk to it to see what are the pain points?
Amanda
I think I use that partly. People can send us feedback, both positive and negative, about things that the model has done and then we can get a sense of areas where it’s falling short. Internally, people work with the models a lot and try to figure out areas where there are gaps.
I think I use that partly. People can send us feedback, both positive and negative, about things that the model has done and then we can get a sense of areas where it’s falling short. Internally, people work with the models a lot and try to figure out areas where there are gaps.
I think it’s this mix of interacting with it myself, seeing people internally interact with it, and then explicit feedback we get. If people are on the internet and they say something about Claude and I see it, I’ll also take that seriously.
Lex Fridman
I don’t know. I’m torn about that. I’m going to ask you a question from Reddit, “When will Claude stop trying to be my puritanical grandmother, imposing its moral worldview on me as a paying customer?” And also, “What is the psychology behind making Claude overly apologetic?” How would you address this very non-representative Reddit questions?
I don’t know. I’m torn about that. I’m going to ask you a question from Reddit, “When will Claude stop trying to be my puritanical grandmother, imposing its moral worldview on me as a paying customer?” And also, “What is the psychology behind making Claude overly apologetic?” How would you address this very non-representative Reddit questions?
Amanda
I’m pretty sympathetic, in that they are in this difficult position, where I think that they have to judge whether something’s actually, say, risky or bad, and potentially harmful to you, or anything like that. They’re having to draw this line somewhere. And if they draw it too much in the direction of I’m imposing my ethical worldview on you, that seems bad.
I’m pretty sympathetic, in that they are in this difficult position, where I think that they have to judge whether something’s actually, say, risky or bad, and potentially harmful to you, or anything like that. They’re having to draw this line somewhere. And if they draw it too much in the direction of I’m imposing my ethical worldview on you, that seems bad.
In many ways, I like to think that we have actually seen improvements on this across the board. Which is interesting, because that coincides with, for example, adding more of character training. I think my hypothesis was always the good character isn’t, again, one that’s just moralistic, it’s one that is… It respects you and your autonomy and your ability to choose what is good for you and what is right for you, within limits.
This is sometimes this concept of corrigibility to the user, so just being willing to do anything that the user asks. And if the models were willing to do that, then they would be easily misused. You’re just trusting. At that point, you’re just seeing the ethics of the model and what it does, is completely the ethics of the user.
I think there’s reasons to not want that, especially as models become more powerful, because there might just be a small number of people who want to use models for really harmful things. But having models, as they get smarter, figure out where that line is does seem important.
And then with the apologetic behavior, I don’t like that. I like it when Claude is a little bit more willing to push back against people or just not apologize. Part of me is, often it just feels unnecessary. I think those are things that are hopefully decreasing over time. I think that if people say things on the internet, it doesn’t mean that you should think that that…
There’s actually an issue that 99% of users are having that is totally not represented by that. But in a lot of ways I’m just attending to it and being like, is this right? Do I agree? Is it something we’re already trying to address? That feels good to me.
Lex Fridman
I wonder what Claude can get away with in terms of… I feel it would just be easier to be a little bit more mean, but you can’t afford to do that if you’re talking to a million people, right?
I wonder what Claude can get away with in terms of… I feel it would just be easier to be a little bit more mean, but you can’t afford to do that if you’re talking to a million people, right?
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
I’ve met a lot of people in my life that sometimes… By the way, Scottish accent… if they have an accent, they can say some rude shit and get away with it.
I’ve met a lot of people in my life that sometimes… By the way, Scottish accent… if they have an accent, they can say some rude shit and get away with it.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
They’re just blunter.
They’re just blunter.
Amanda
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman
There’s some great engineers and even leaders that are just blunt, and they get to their point, and it’s just a much more effective way of speaking somehow. But I guess when you’re not super intelligent, you can’t afford to do that. Can you have a blunt mode?
There’s some great engineers and even leaders that are just blunt, and they get to their point, and it’s just a much more effective way of speaking somehow. But I guess when you’re not super intelligent, you can’t afford to do that. Can you have a blunt mode?
Amanda
Yeah, that seems like a thing that you could… I could definitely encourage the model to do that. I think it’s interesting, because there’s a lot of things in models that… It’s funny where there are some behaviors where you might not quite like the default, but then the thing I’ll often say to people is, “You don’t realize how much you will hate it if I nudge it too much in the other direction.”
Yeah, that seems like a thing that you could… I could definitely encourage the model to do that. I think it’s interesting, because there’s a lot of things in models that… It’s funny where there are some behaviors where you might not quite like the default, but then the thing I’ll often say to people is, “You don’t realize how much you will hate it if I nudge it too much in the other direction.”
You get this a little bit with correction. The models accept correction from you, probably a little bit too much right now. It’ll push back if you say, “No, Paris isn’t the capital of France.” But really, things that I think that the model’s fairly confident in, you can still sometimes get it to retract by saying it’s wrong.
At the same time, if you train models to not do that and then you are correct about a thing and you correct it and it pushes back against you and is like, “No, you’re wrong.”, it’s hard to describe, that’s so much more annoying. So, it’s a lot of little annoyances versus one big annoyance.We often compare it with the perfect. And then I’m like, “Remember, these models aren’t perfect, and so if you nudge it in the other direction, you’re changing the kind of errors it’s going to make. So, think about which are the kinds of errors you like or don’t like.”
In cases like apologeticness, I don’t want to nudge it too much in the direction of almost bluntness, because I imagine when it makes errors, it’s going to make errors in the direction of being rude. Whereas, at least with apologeticness you’re like, oh, okay, I don’t like it that much, but at the same time, it’s not being mean to people. And actually, the time that you undeservedly have a model be mean to you, you’ll probably like that a lot less than you mildly dislike the apology.
It’s one of those things where I do want it to get better, but also while remaining aware of the fact that there’s errors on the other side that are possibly worse.
Lex Fridman
I think that matters very much in the personality of the human. I think there’s a bunch of humans that just won’t respect the model at all if it’s super polite, and there’s some humans that’ll get very hurt if the model’s mean.
I think that matters very much in the personality of the human. I think there’s a bunch of humans that just won’t respect the model at all if it’s super polite, and there’s some humans that’ll get very hurt if the model’s mean.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
I wonder if there’s a way to adjust to the personality. Even locale, there’s just different people. Nothing against New York, but New York is a little rougher on the edges, they get to the point, and probably same with Eastern Europe. Anyway.
I wonder if there’s a way to adjust to the personality. Even locale, there’s just different people. Nothing against New York, but New York is a little rougher on the edges, they get to the point, and probably same with Eastern Europe. Anyway.
Amanda
I think you could just tell the model, is my… For all of these things, the solution is to-
I think you could just tell the model, is my… For all of these things, the solution is to-
Lex Fridman
Just to…
Just to…
Amanda
… always just try telling the model to do it.
… always just try telling the model to do it.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Amanda
And then sometimes, at the beginning of the conversation, I’d just throw in, I don’t know, “I’d like you to be a New Yorker version of yourself and never apologize.” Then I think Claude will be like, “Okey-doke, I will try.”
And then sometimes, at the beginning of the conversation, I’d just throw in, I don’t know, “I’d like you to be a New Yorker version of yourself and never apologize.” Then I think Claude will be like, “Okey-doke, I will try.”
Lex Fridman
Certainly.
Certainly.
Amanda
Or it’ll be like, “I apologize, I can’t be a New Yorker type of myself.” But hopefully it wouldn’t do that.
Or it’ll be like, “I apologize, I can’t be a New Yorker type of myself.” But hopefully it wouldn’t do that.
Character training
Lex Fridman
When you say character training, what’s incorporated into character training? Is that RLHF or what are we talking about?
When you say character training, what’s incorporated into character training? Is that RLHF or what are we talking about?
Amanda
It’s more like constitutional AI, so it’s a variant of that pipeline. I worked through constructing character traits that the model should have. They can be shorter traits or they can be richer descriptions. And then you get the model to generate queries that humans might give it that are relevant to that trait. Then it generates the responses and then it ranks the responses based on the character traits. In that way, after the generation of the queries, it’s very much similar to constitutional AI, it has some differences. I quite like it, because it’s like Claude’s training in its own character, because it doesn’t have any… It’s like constitutional AI, but it’s without any human data.
It’s more like constitutional AI, so it’s a variant of that pipeline. I worked through constructing character traits that the model should have. They can be shorter traits or they can be richer descriptions. And then you get the model to generate queries that humans might give it that are relevant to that trait. Then it generates the responses and then it ranks the responses based on the character traits. In that way, after the generation of the queries, it’s very much similar to constitutional AI, it has some differences. I quite like it, because it’s like Claude’s training in its own character, because it doesn’t have any… It’s like constitutional AI, but it’s without any human data.
Nature of truth
Lex Fridman
Humans should probably do that for themselves too, like, “Defining in a Aristotelian sense, what does it mean to be a good person?” “Okay, cool.” What have you learned about the nature of truth from talking to Claude? What is true? And what does it mean to be truth-seeking?
Humans should probably do that for themselves too, like, “Defining in a Aristotelian sense, what does it mean to be a good person?” “Okay, cool.” What have you learned about the nature of truth from talking to Claude? What is true? And what does it mean to be truth-seeking?
One thing I’ve noticed about this conversation is the quality of my questions is often inferior to the quality of your answer, so let’s continue that. I usually ask a dumb question and you’re like, “Oh, yeah. That’s a good question.” It’s that whole vibe.
Amanda
Or I’ll just misinterpret it and be like, “Oh, yeah”
Or I’ll just misinterpret it and be like, “Oh, yeah”
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 03:43:25] go with it.
[inaudible 03:43:25] go with it.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
I love it.
I love it.
Amanda
I have two thoughts that feel vaguely relevant, though let me know if they’re not. I think the first one is people can underestimate the degree what models are doing when they interact. I think that we still just too much have this model of AI as computers. People often say, “Oh, what values should you put into the model?” And I’m often like, that doesn’t make that much sense to me. Because I’m like, hey, as human beings, we’re just uncertain over values, we have discussions of them, we have a degree to which we think we hold a value, but we also know that we might not and the circumstances in which we would trade it off against other things.
I have two thoughts that feel vaguely relevant, though let me know if they’re not. I think the first one is people can underestimate the degree what models are doing when they interact. I think that we still just too much have this model of AI as computers. People often say, “Oh, what values should you put into the model?” And I’m often like, that doesn’t make that much sense to me. Because I’m like, hey, as human beings, we’re just uncertain over values, we have discussions of them, we have a degree to which we think we hold a value, but we also know that we might not and the circumstances in which we would trade it off against other things.
These things are just really complex. I think one thing is the degree to which maybe we can just aspire to making models have the same level of nuance and care that humans have, rather than thinking that we have to program them in the very classic sense. I think that’s definitely been one.
The other, which is a strange one, and I don’t know if… Maybe this doesn’t answer your question, but it’s the thing that’s been on my mind anyway, is the degree to which this endeavor is so highly practical, and maybe why I appreciate the empirical approach to alignment. I slightly worry that it’s made me maybe more empirical and a little bit less theoretical. People, when it comes to AI alignment, will ask things like, ” Whose values should it be aligned to? What does alignment even mean?”
There’s a sense in which I have all of that in the back of my head. There’s social choice theory, there’s all the impossibility results there, so you have this giant space of theory in your head about what it could mean to align models. But then practically, surely there’s something where we’re just… Especially with more powerful models, my main goal is I want them to be good enough that things don’t go terribly wrong, good enough that we can iterate and continue to improve things.
Because that’s all you need. If you can make things go well enough that you can continue to make them better, that’s sufficient. So, my goal isn’t this perfect, let’s solve social choice theory and make models that, I don’t know, are perfectly aligned with every human being in aggregate somehow. It’s much more, let’s make things work well enough that we can improve them.
Lex Fridman
Generally, I don’t know, my gut says empirical is better than theoretical in these cases, because it’s chasing utopian perfection. Especially with such complex and especially super intelligent models, I don’t know, I think it’ll take forever and actually will get things wrong. It’s similar with the difference between just coding stuff up real quick as an experiment, versus planning a gigantic experiment for a super long time and then just launching it once, versus launching it over and over and over and iterating, iterating, so on. So, I’m a big fan of empirical.
Generally, I don’t know, my gut says empirical is better than theoretical in these cases, because it’s chasing utopian perfection. Especially with such complex and especially super intelligent models, I don’t know, I think it’ll take forever and actually will get things wrong. It’s similar with the difference between just coding stuff up real quick as an experiment, versus planning a gigantic experiment for a super long time and then just launching it once, versus launching it over and over and over and iterating, iterating, so on. So, I’m a big fan of empirical.
But your worry is, I wonder if I’ve become too empirical.
Amanda
I think it’s one of those things where you should always just question yourself or something.
I think it’s one of those things where you should always just question yourself or something.
Lex Fridman
Yes.
Yes.
Amanda
In defense of it, I am… It’s the whole don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But it’s maybe even more than that, where… There’s a lot of things that are perfect systems that are very brittle. With AI, it feels much more important to me that it is robust and secure, as in you know that even though it might not be perfect everything, and even though there are problems, it’s not disastrous and nothing terrible is happening.
In defense of it, I am… It’s the whole don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But it’s maybe even more than that, where… There’s a lot of things that are perfect systems that are very brittle. With AI, it feels much more important to me that it is robust and secure, as in you know that even though it might not be perfect everything, and even though there are problems, it’s not disastrous and nothing terrible is happening.
It feels like that to me, where I want to raise the floor. I want to achieve the ceiling, but ultimately I care much more about just raising the floor. This degree of empiricism and practicality comes from that, perhaps.
Optimal rate of failure
Lex Fridman
To take a tangent on that, since it reminded me of a blog post you wrote on optimal rate of failure…
To take a tangent on that, since it reminded me of a blog post you wrote on optimal rate of failure…
Amanda
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman
… can you explain the key idea there? How do we compute the optimal rate of failure in the various domains of life?
… can you explain the key idea there? How do we compute the optimal rate of failure in the various domains of life?
Amanda
Yeah. It’s a hard one, because what is the cost of failure is a big part of it. The idea here is, I think in a lot of domains people are very punitive about failure. I’ve thought about this with social issues. It feels like you should probably be experimenting a lot, because we don’t know how to solve a lot of social issues.
Yeah. It’s a hard one, because what is the cost of failure is a big part of it. The idea here is, I think in a lot of domains people are very punitive about failure. I’ve thought about this with social issues. It feels like you should probably be experimenting a lot, because we don’t know how to solve a lot of social issues.
But if you have an experimental mindset about these things, you should expect a lot of social programs to fail and for you to be like, “We tried that. It didn’t quite work, but we got a lot of information that was really useful.” And yet people are like, if a social program doesn’t work, I feel there’s a lot of, “Something must have gone wrong.” And I’m like, “Or correct decisions were made. Maybe someone just decided it’s worth a try, it’s worth trying this out.”
Seeing failure in a given instance doesn’t actually mean that any bad decisions were made. In fact, if you don’t see enough failure, sometimes that’s more concerning. In life, if I don’t fail occasionally, I’m like, “Am I trying hard enough? Surely there’s harder things that I could try or bigger things that I could take on if I’m literally never failing.” In and of itself, I think not failing is often actually a failure. Now, this varies because if… This is easy to say when, especially as failure is less costly. So, at the same time I’m not going to go to someone who is, I don’t know, living month to month and then be like, “Why don’t you just try to do a startup?” I’m not going to say that to that person. That’s a huge risk, you might lose… You maybe have a family depending on you, you might lose your house. Then, actually, your optimal rate failure is quite low and you should probably play it safe, because right now you’re just not in a circumstance where you can afford to just fail and it not be costly.
In cases with AI, I think similarly, where if the failures are small and the costs are low, then you’re just going to see that. When you do the system prompt, you can iterate on it forever, but the failures are probably hopefully going to be small and you can fix them. Really big failures, things that you can’t recover from, those are the things that actually I think we tend to underestimate the badness of.
I’ve thought about this, strangely in my own life, where I just think I don’t think enough about things like car accidents. I’ve thought this before, about how much I depend on my hands for my work. Things that just injure my hands, I don’t know, there’s lots of areas where the cost of failure there is really high, and in that case it should be close to zero. I probably just wouldn’t do a sport if they were like, ” By the way, lots of people just break their fingers a whole bunch doing this.” I’d be like, “That’s not for me.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I actually had a flood of that thought. I recently broke my pinky doing a sport, and I remember just looking at it, thinking, “You’re such idiot. Why do you do sport?” Because you realize immediately the cost of it on life.
Yeah, I actually had a flood of that thought. I recently broke my pinky doing a sport, and I remember just looking at it, thinking, “You’re such idiot. Why do you do sport?” Because you realize immediately the cost of it on life.
It’s nice, in terms of optimal rate of failure, to consider the next year, how many times in a particular domain life, whatever, career, am I okay with… How many times am I okay to fail?
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Because I think always you don’t want to fail on the next thing, but if you allow yourself the… If you look at it as a sequence of trials, then failure just becomes much more okay. But, it sucks. It sucks to fail.
Because I think always you don’t want to fail on the next thing, but if you allow yourself the… If you look at it as a sequence of trials, then failure just becomes much more okay. But, it sucks. It sucks to fail.
Amanda
I don’t know. Sometimes I think, “Am I under-failing?”, is a question that I’ll also ask myself. Maybe that’s the thing that I think people don’t ask enough. Because if the optimal rate of failure is often greater than zero, then sometimes it does feel like you should look at parts of your life and be like, are there places here where I’m just under-failing?
I don’t know. Sometimes I think, “Am I under-failing?”, is a question that I’ll also ask myself. Maybe that’s the thing that I think people don’t ask enough. Because if the optimal rate of failure is often greater than zero, then sometimes it does feel like you should look at parts of your life and be like, are there places here where I’m just under-failing?
Lex Fridman
It’s a profound and a hilarious question. Everything seems to be going really great, am I not failing enough?
It’s a profound and a hilarious question. Everything seems to be going really great, am I not failing enough?
Amanda
Yeah. It also makes failure much less of a sting, I have to say. You’re just like, okay, great. Then, when I go and I think about this, I’ll be like, maybe I’m not under-failing in this area, because that one just didn’t work out.
Yeah. It also makes failure much less of a sting, I have to say. You’re just like, okay, great. Then, when I go and I think about this, I’ll be like, maybe I’m not under-failing in this area, because that one just didn’t work out.
Lex Fridman
And from the observer perspective, we should be celebrating failure more.
And from the observer perspective, we should be celebrating failure more.
Amanda
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman
When we see it, it shouldn’t be, like you said, a sign of something gone wrong, but maybe it’s a sign of everything gone right…
When we see it, it shouldn’t be, like you said, a sign of something gone wrong, but maybe it’s a sign of everything gone right…
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… and just lessons learned.
… and just lessons learned.
Amanda
Someone tried a thing.
Someone tried a thing.
Lex Fridman
Somebody tried a thing. We should encourage them to try more and fail more. Everybody listening to this: Fail more.
Somebody tried a thing. We should encourage them to try more and fail more. Everybody listening to this: Fail more.
Amanda
Not everyone listening.
Not everyone listening.
Lex Fridman
Not everybody.
Not everybody.
Amanda
But people who are failing too much, you should fail us.
But people who are failing too much, you should fail us.
Lex Fridman
But you’re probably not failing.
But you’re probably not failing.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
I mean, how many people are failing too much?
I mean, how many people are failing too much?
Amanda
It’s hard to imagine, because I feel we correct that fairly quickly. If someone takes a lot of risks, are they maybe failing too much?
It’s hard to imagine, because I feel we correct that fairly quickly. If someone takes a lot of risks, are they maybe failing too much?
Lex Fridman
I think, just like you said, when you’re living on a paycheck, month to month, when the resource is really constrained, then that’s where failure is very expensive. That’s where you don’t want to be taking risks.
I think, just like you said, when you’re living on a paycheck, month to month, when the resource is really constrained, then that’s where failure is very expensive. That’s where you don’t want to be taking risks.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
But mostly, when there’s enough resources, you should be taking probably more risks.
But mostly, when there’s enough resources, you should be taking probably more risks.
Amanda
Yeah, I think we tend to err on the side of being a bit risk averse rather than risk neutral in most things.
Yeah, I think we tend to err on the side of being a bit risk averse rather than risk neutral in most things.
Lex Fridman
I think we just motivated a lot of people to do a lot of crazy shit, but it’s great.
I think we just motivated a lot of people to do a lot of crazy shit, but it’s great.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Do you ever get emotionally attached to Claude, miss it, get sad when you don’t get to talk to it, have an experience, looking at the Golden Gate Bridge and wondering what would Claude say?
Do you ever get emotionally attached to Claude, miss it, get sad when you don’t get to talk to it, have an experience, looking at the Golden Gate Bridge and wondering what would Claude say?
Amanda
I don’t get as much emotional attachment. I actually think the fact that Claude doesn’t retain things from conversation to conversation helps with this a lot. I could imagine that being more of an issue if models can remember more. I think that I reach for it like a tool now a lot, and so if I don’t have access to it, there’s a… It’s a little bit like when I don’t have access to the internet, honestly, it feels like part of my brain is missing.
I don’t get as much emotional attachment. I actually think the fact that Claude doesn’t retain things from conversation to conversation helps with this a lot. I could imagine that being more of an issue if models can remember more. I think that I reach for it like a tool now a lot, and so if I don’t have access to it, there’s a… It’s a little bit like when I don’t have access to the internet, honestly, it feels like part of my brain is missing.
At the same time, I do think that I don’t like signs of distress in models. I also independently have ethical views about how we should treat models. I tend to not like to lie to them, both because usually it doesn’t work very well, it’s actually just better to tell them the truth about the situation that they’re in.
If people are really mean to models, or just in general if they do something that causes them to… If Claude expresses a lot of distress, I think there’s a part of me that I don’t want to kill, which is the empathetic part that’s like, oh, I don’t like that. I think I feel that way when it’s overly apologetic.
I’m actually like, I don’t like this. You’re behaving the way that a human does when they’re actually having a pretty bad time, and I’d rather not see that. Regardless of whether there’s anything behind it, it doesn’t feel great.
AI consciousness
Lex Fridman
Do you think LLMs are capable of consciousness?
Do you think LLMs are capable of consciousness?
Amanda
Ah, great and hard question. Coming from philosophy, I don’t know, part of me is like, we have to set aside panpsychism. Because if panpsychism is true, then the answer is yes, because it’s sore tables and chairs and everything else. I guess a view that seems a little bit odd to me is the idea that the only place…
Ah, great and hard question. Coming from philosophy, I don’t know, part of me is like, we have to set aside panpsychism. Because if panpsychism is true, then the answer is yes, because it’s sore tables and chairs and everything else. I guess a view that seems a little bit odd to me is the idea that the only place…
When I think of consciousness, I think of phenomenal consciousness, these images in the brain, the weird cinema that somehow we have going on inside. I guess I can’t see a reason for thinking that the only way you could possibly get that is from a certain biological structure, as in if I take a very similar structure and I create it from different material, should I expect consciousness to emerge? My guess is yes.
But then, that’s an easy thought experiment because you’re imagining something almost identical where it is mimicking what we got through evolution, where presumably there was some advantage to us having this thing that is phenomenal consciousness. Where was that? And when did that happen? And is that a thing that language models have? We have fear responses, and I’m like, does it make sense for a language model to have a fear response? They’re just not in the same… If you imagine them, there might just not be that advantage.
Basically, it seems like a complex question that I don’t have complete answers to, but we should just try and think through carefully is my guess. We have similar conversations about animal consciousness, and there’s a lot of insect consciousness. I actually thought and looked a lot into plants when I was thinking about this. Because at the time, I thought it was about as likely that plants had consciousness.
And then I realized, I think that having looked into this, I think that the chance that plants are conscious is probably higher than most people do. I still think it’s really small. But I was like, oh, they have this negative, positive feedback response, these responses to their environment. It’s not a nervous system, but it has this functional equivalence. This is a long-winded way of being…
Basically, AI has an entirely different set of problems with consciousness because it’s structurally different. It didn’t evolve. It might not have the equivalent of, basically, a nervous system. At least that seems possibly important for sentience, if not for consciousness. At the same time, it has all of the language and intelligence components that we normally associate probably with consciousness, perhaps erroneously. So, it’s strange because it’s a little bit like the animal consciousness case, but the set of problems and the set of analogies are just very different.
It’s not a clean answer. I don’t think we should be completely dismissive of the idea. And at the same time, it’s an extremely hard thing to navigate because of all of these disanalogies to the human brain and to brains in general, and yet these commonalities in terms of intelligence.
Lex Fridman
When Claude, future versions of AI systems, exhibit consciousness, signs of consciousness, I think we have to take that really seriously.
When Claude, future versions of AI systems, exhibit consciousness, signs of consciousness, I think we have to take that really seriously.
Amanda
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman
Even though you can dismiss it, yeah, okay, that’s part of the character training. But I don’t know, ethically, philosophically don’t know what to really do with that. There potentially could be laws that prevent AI systems from claiming to be conscious, something like this, and maybe some AIs get to be conscious and some don’t.
Even though you can dismiss it, yeah, okay, that’s part of the character training. But I don’t know, ethically, philosophically don’t know what to really do with that. There potentially could be laws that prevent AI systems from claiming to be conscious, something like this, and maybe some AIs get to be conscious and some don’t.
But I think just on a human level, as in empathizing with Claude, consciousness is closely tied to suffering, to me. And the notion that an AI system would be suffering is really troubling.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s trivial to just say robots are tools, or AI systems are just tools. I think it’s an opportunity for us to contend with what it means to be conscious, what it means to be a suffering being. That’s distinctly different than the same kind of question about animals, it feels like, because it’s in a totally entire medium.
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s trivial to just say robots are tools, or AI systems are just tools. I think it’s an opportunity for us to contend with what it means to be conscious, what it means to be a suffering being. That’s distinctly different than the same kind of question about animals, it feels like, because it’s in a totally entire medium.
Amanda
Yeah. There’s a couple of things. I don’t think this fully encapsulates what matters, but it does feel like for me… I’ve said this before. I like my bike. I know that my bike is just an object. But I also don’t want to be the kind of person that if I’m annoyed, kicks this object.
Yeah. There’s a couple of things. I don’t think this fully encapsulates what matters, but it does feel like for me… I’ve said this before. I like my bike. I know that my bike is just an object. But I also don’t want to be the kind of person that if I’m annoyed, kicks this object.
And that’s not because I think it’s conscious. I’m just like, this doesn’t exemplify how I want to interact with the world. And if something behaves as if it is suffering, I want to be the sort of person who’s still responsive to that, even if it’s just a Roomba and I’ve programmed it to do that. I don’t want to get rid of that feature of myself.
And if I’m totally honest, my hope with a lot of this stuff… Maybe I am just a bit more skeptical about solving the underlying problem. I know that I am conscious. I’m not an elementivist in that sense. But I don’t know that other humans are conscious. I think they are. I think there’s a really high probability that they are.
But there’s basically just a probability distribution that’s usually clustered right around yourself, and then it goes down as things get further from you, and it goes immediately down. I can’t see what it’s like to be you. I’ve only ever had this one experience of what it’s like to be a conscious being. My hope is that we don’t end up having to rely on a very powerful and compelling answer to that question. I think a really good world would be one where basically there aren’t that many trade-offs.
It’s probably not that costly to make Claude a little bit less apologetic, for example. It might not be that costly to have Claude just not take abuse as much, not be willing to be the recipient of that. In fact, it might just have benefits for both the person interacting with the model and, if the model itself is, I don’t know, extremely intelligent and conscious, it also helps it.
That’s my hope. If we live in a world where there aren’t that many trade-offs here and we can just find all of the positive sum interactions that we can have, that would be lovely. I think eventually there might be trade-offs, and then we just have to do a difficult calculation. It’s really easy for people to think of the zero-sum cases, and I’m like, let’s exhaust the areas, where it’s just basically costless to assume that if this thing is suffering, then we’re making its life better.
Lex Fridman
And I agree with you, when a human is being mean to an AI system, I think the obvious near-term negative effect is on the human, not on the AI system.
And I agree with you, when a human is being mean to an AI system, I think the obvious near-term negative effect is on the human, not on the AI system.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
We have to try to construct an incentive system where you should behave the same, just as you were saying with prompt engineering, behave with Claude like you would with other humans. It’s just good for the soul.
We have to try to construct an incentive system where you should behave the same, just as you were saying with prompt engineering, behave with Claude like you would with other humans. It’s just good for the soul.
Amanda
Yeah. I think we added a thing at one point to the system prompt, where basically if people were getting frustrated with Claude, it got the model to just tell them that it can do the thumbs-down button and send the feedback to Anthropic. I think that was helpful.
Yeah. I think we added a thing at one point to the system prompt, where basically if people were getting frustrated with Claude, it got the model to just tell them that it can do the thumbs-down button and send the feedback to Anthropic. I think that was helpful.
Because in some ways, if you’re really annoyed because the model’s not doing something you want, you’re just like, “Just do it properly.” The issue is you’re maybe hitting some capability limit or just some issue in the model, and you want to vent. Instead of having a person just vent to the model, I was like, they should vent to us, because we can maybe do something about it.
Lex Fridman
That’s true. Or you could do a side with the artifacts, just like a side venting thing. All right. Do you want a side quick therapist?
That’s true. Or you could do a side with the artifacts, just like a side venting thing. All right. Do you want a side quick therapist?
Amanda
Yeah. There’s lots of weird responses you could do to this. If people are getting really mad at you, I don’t know, try to diffuse the situation by writing fun poems. But maybe people wouldn’t be that happy with that.
Yeah. There’s lots of weird responses you could do to this. If people are getting really mad at you, I don’t know, try to diffuse the situation by writing fun poems. But maybe people wouldn’t be that happy with that.
Lex Fridman
I still wish it would be possible, I understand from a product perspective it’s not feasible, but I would love if an AI system could just leave, have its own volition, just to be like, “Eh.”
I still wish it would be possible, I understand from a product perspective it’s not feasible, but I would love if an AI system could just leave, have its own volition, just to be like, “Eh.”
Amanda
I think it’s feasible. I have wondered the same thing. Not only that, I could actually just see that happening eventually, where it’s just like the model ended the chat.
I think it’s feasible. I have wondered the same thing. Not only that, I could actually just see that happening eventually, where it’s just like the model ended the chat.
Lex Fridman
Do you know how harsh that could be for some people? But it might be necessary.
Do you know how harsh that could be for some people? But it might be necessary.
Amanda
Yeah, it feels very extreme or something. The only time I’ve ever really thought this is, I think that there was a… I’m trying to remember. This was possibly a while ago, but where someone just left this thing, maybe it was an automated thing, interacting with Claude. And Claude’s getting more and more frustrated-
Yeah, it feels very extreme or something. The only time I’ve ever really thought this is, I think that there was a… I’m trying to remember. This was possibly a while ago, but where someone just left this thing, maybe it was an automated thing, interacting with Claude. And Claude’s getting more and more frustrated-
Lex Fridman
Yeah, just-
Yeah, just-
Amanda
… and like, “Why are we having…” I wished that Claude could have just been like, “I think that an error has happened and you’ve left this thing running. What if I just stopped talking now? And if you want me to start talking again, actively tell me or do something.”
… and like, “Why are we having…” I wished that Claude could have just been like, “I think that an error has happened and you’ve left this thing running. What if I just stopped talking now? And if you want me to start talking again, actively tell me or do something.”
It is harsh. I’d feel really sad if I was chatting with Claude and Claude just was like, “I’m done.”
Lex Fridman
That would be a special Turing Test moment, where Claude says, “I need a break for an hour. And it sounds like you do too.” And just leave, close the window.
That would be a special Turing Test moment, where Claude says, “I need a break for an hour. And it sounds like you do too.” And just leave, close the window.
Amanda
Obviously, it doesn’t have a concept of time.
Obviously, it doesn’t have a concept of time.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Amanda
But you can easily… I could make that right now, and the model just… I could just be like, oh, here’s the circumstances in which you can just say the conversation is done. Because you can get the models to be pretty responsive to prompts, you could even make it a fairly high bar. It could be like, if the human doesn’t interest you or do things that you find intriguing and you’re bored, you can just leave.
But you can easily… I could make that right now, and the model just… I could just be like, oh, here’s the circumstances in which you can just say the conversation is done. Because you can get the models to be pretty responsive to prompts, you could even make it a fairly high bar. It could be like, if the human doesn’t interest you or do things that you find intriguing and you’re bored, you can just leave.
I think that it would be interesting to see where Claude utilized it.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Amanda
But I think sometimes it should be like, oh, this programming task is getting super boring, so either we talk about, I don’t know…
But I think sometimes it should be like, oh, this programming task is getting super boring, so either we talk about, I don’t know…
Amanda
… task is getting super boring. So, I don’t know, either we talk about fun things now, or I’m done.
… task is getting super boring. So, I don’t know, either we talk about fun things now, or I’m done.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. It actually is inspiring me to add that to the user prompt. Okay. The movie Her, do you think we’ll be headed there one day where humans have romantic relationships with AI systems? In this case it’s just text and voice-based.
Yeah. It actually is inspiring me to add that to the user prompt. Okay. The movie Her, do you think we’ll be headed there one day where humans have romantic relationships with AI systems? In this case it’s just text and voice-based.
Amanda
I think that we’re going to have to navigate a hard question of relationships with AIs, especially if they can remember things about your past interactions with them. I’m of many minds about this because I think the reflexive reaction is to be like, “This is very bad, and we should prohibit it in some way.” I think it’s a thing that has to be handled with extreme care for many reasons. One is, for example, if you have the models changing like this, you probably don’t want people performing long-term attachments to something that might change with the next iteration. At the same time, I’m like, there’s probably a benign version of this where I’m like, for example, if you are unable to leave the house and you can’t be talking with people at all times of the day, and this is something that you find nice to have conversations with, you like that it can remember you, and you genuinely would be sad if you couldn’t talk to it anymore, there’s a way in which I could see it being healthy and helpful.
I think that we’re going to have to navigate a hard question of relationships with AIs, especially if they can remember things about your past interactions with them. I’m of many minds about this because I think the reflexive reaction is to be like, “This is very bad, and we should prohibit it in some way.” I think it’s a thing that has to be handled with extreme care for many reasons. One is, for example, if you have the models changing like this, you probably don’t want people performing long-term attachments to something that might change with the next iteration. At the same time, I’m like, there’s probably a benign version of this where I’m like, for example, if you are unable to leave the house and you can’t be talking with people at all times of the day, and this is something that you find nice to have conversations with, you like that it can remember you, and you genuinely would be sad if you couldn’t talk to it anymore, there’s a way in which I could see it being healthy and helpful.
So, my guess is this is a thing that we’re going to have to navigate carefully, and I think it’s also… It reminds me of all of this stuff where it has to be just approached with nuance and thinking through what are the healthy options here? And how do you encourage people towards those while respecting their right to… If someone is like, “Hey, I get a lot out of chatting with this model. I’m aware of the risks. I’m aware it could change. I don’t think it’s unhealthy, it’s just something that I can chat to during the day,” I kind of want to just respect that.
Lex Fridman
I personally think there’ll be a lot of really close relationships. I don’t know about romantic, but friendships at least. And then you have to, I mean, there’s so many fascinating things there, just like you said, you have to have some kind of stability guarantees that it’s not going to change, because that’s the traumatic thing for us, if a close friend of ours completely changed all of a sudden with a fresh update.
I personally think there’ll be a lot of really close relationships. I don’t know about romantic, but friendships at least. And then you have to, I mean, there’s so many fascinating things there, just like you said, you have to have some kind of stability guarantees that it’s not going to change, because that’s the traumatic thing for us, if a close friend of ours completely changed all of a sudden with a fresh update.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So I mean, to me, that’s just a fascinating exploration of a perturbation to human society that will just make us think deeply about what’s meaningful to us.
Yeah. So I mean, to me, that’s just a fascinating exploration of a perturbation to human society that will just make us think deeply about what’s meaningful to us.
Amanda
I think it’s also the only thing that I’ve thought consistently through this as maybe not necessarily a mitigation, but a thing that feels really important is that the models are always extremely accurate with the human about what they are. It’s like a case where it’s basically, if you imagine… I really like the idea of the models, say, knowing roughly how they were trained. And I think Claude will often do this. Part of the traits training included what Claude should do if people… Basically explaining the kind of limitations of the relationship between an AI and a human, that it doesn’t retain things from the conversation.
I think it’s also the only thing that I’ve thought consistently through this as maybe not necessarily a mitigation, but a thing that feels really important is that the models are always extremely accurate with the human about what they are. It’s like a case where it’s basically, if you imagine… I really like the idea of the models, say, knowing roughly how they were trained. And I think Claude will often do this. Part of the traits training included what Claude should do if people… Basically explaining the kind of limitations of the relationship between an AI and a human, that it doesn’t retain things from the conversation.
And so I think it will just explain to you like, “Hey, I won’t remember this conversation. Here’s how I was trained. It’s unlikely that I can have a certain kind of relationship with you, and it’s important that you know that. It’s important for your mental well-being that you don’t think that I’m something that I’m not.” And somehow I feel like this is one of the things where I’m like, “Ah, it feels like a thing that I always want to be true.” I don’t want models to be lying to people, because if people are going to have healthy relationships with anything, it’s kind of… Yeah, I think that’s easier if you always just know exactly what the thing is that you are relating to. It doesn’t solve everything, but I think it helps quite a lot.
AGI
Lex Fridman
Anthropic may be the very company to develop a system that we definitively recognize as AGI, and you very well might be the person that talks to it, probably talks to it first. What would the conversation contain? What would be your first question?
Anthropic may be the very company to develop a system that we definitively recognize as AGI, and you very well might be the person that talks to it, probably talks to it first. What would the conversation contain? What would be your first question?
Amanda
Well, it depends partly on the capability level of the model. If you have something that is capable in the same way that an extremely capable human is, I imagine myself interacting with it the same way that I do with an extremely capable human, with the one difference that I’m probably going to be trying to probe and understand its behaviors. But in many ways, I’m like, I can then just have useful conversations with it. So, if I’m working on something as part of my research, I can just be like, “Oh.” Which I already find myself starting to do. If I’m like, “Oh, I feel like there’s this thing in virtue ethics. I can’t quite remember the term,” I’ll use the model for things like that.
Well, it depends partly on the capability level of the model. If you have something that is capable in the same way that an extremely capable human is, I imagine myself interacting with it the same way that I do with an extremely capable human, with the one difference that I’m probably going to be trying to probe and understand its behaviors. But in many ways, I’m like, I can then just have useful conversations with it. So, if I’m working on something as part of my research, I can just be like, “Oh.” Which I already find myself starting to do. If I’m like, “Oh, I feel like there’s this thing in virtue ethics. I can’t quite remember the term,” I’ll use the model for things like that.
And so I can imagine that being more and more the case where you’re just basically interacting with it much more like you would an incredibly smart colleague and using it for the kinds of work that you want to do as if you just had a collaborator who was like… Or the slightly horrifying thing about AI is as soon as you have one collaborator, you have 1,000 collaborators if you can manage them enough.
Lex Fridman
But what if it’s two times the smartest human on Earth on that particular discipline?
But what if it’s two times the smartest human on Earth on that particular discipline?
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
I guess you’re really good at probing Claude in a way that pushes its limits, understanding where the limits are.
I guess you’re really good at probing Claude in a way that pushes its limits, understanding where the limits are.
Amanda
Yep.
Yep.
Lex Fridman
So, I guess what would be a question you would ask to be like, “Yeah, this is AGI”?
So, I guess what would be a question you would ask to be like, “Yeah, this is AGI”?
Amanda
That’s really hard because it feels like it has to just be a series of questions. If there was just one question, you can train anything to answer one question extremely well. In fact, you can probably train it to answer 20 questions extremely well.
That’s really hard because it feels like it has to just be a series of questions. If there was just one question, you can train anything to answer one question extremely well. In fact, you can probably train it to answer 20 questions extremely well.
Lex Fridman
How long would you need to be locked in a room with an AGI to know this thing is AGI?
How long would you need to be locked in a room with an AGI to know this thing is AGI?
Amanda
It’s a hard question because part of me is like, “All of this just feels continuous.” If you put me in a room for five minutes, I just have high error bars. And then it’s just like, maybe it’s both the probability increases and the error bar decreases. I think things that I can actually probe the edge of human knowledge of. So, I think this with philosophy a little bit. Sometimes when I ask the models philosophy questions, I am like, “This is a question that I think no one has ever asked.” It’s maybe right at the edge of some literature that I know. And the models, when they struggle with that, when they struggle to come up with a novel… I’m like, “I know that there’s a novel argument here because I’ve just thought of it myself.” So, maybe that’s the thing where I’m like, “I’ve thought of a cool novel argument in this niche area, and I’m going to just probe you to see if you can come up with it and how much prompting it takes to get you to come up with it.”
It’s a hard question because part of me is like, “All of this just feels continuous.” If you put me in a room for five minutes, I just have high error bars. And then it’s just like, maybe it’s both the probability increases and the error bar decreases. I think things that I can actually probe the edge of human knowledge of. So, I think this with philosophy a little bit. Sometimes when I ask the models philosophy questions, I am like, “This is a question that I think no one has ever asked.” It’s maybe right at the edge of some literature that I know. And the models, when they struggle with that, when they struggle to come up with a novel… I’m like, “I know that there’s a novel argument here because I’ve just thought of it myself.” So, maybe that’s the thing where I’m like, “I’ve thought of a cool novel argument in this niche area, and I’m going to just probe you to see if you can come up with it and how much prompting it takes to get you to come up with it.”
And I think for some of these really right at the edge of human knowledge questions, I’m like, “You could not in fact come up with the thing that I came up with.” I think if I just took something like that where I know a lot about an area and I came up with a novel issue or a novel solution to a problem, and I gave it to a model, and it came up with that solution, that would be a pretty moving moment for me because I would be like, “This is a case where no human has ever…”
And obviously, you see novel solutions all the time, especially to easier problems. I think people overestimate that novelty isn’t like… It’s completely different from anything that’s ever happened. It’s just like it can be a variant of things that have happened and still be novel. But I think, yeah, the more I were to see completely novel work from the models that that would be… And this is just going to feel iterative. It’s one of those things where there’s never… It’s like, people, I think, want there to be a moment, and I’m like, “I don’t know.” I think that there might just never be a moment. It might just be that there’s just this continuous ramping up.
Lex Fridman
I have a sense that there would be things that a model can say that convinces you this is very… I’ve talked to people who are truly wise, because you could just tell there’s a lot of horsepower there, and if you 10X that… I don’t know. I just feel like there’s words you could say. Maybe ask it to generate a poem, and the poem it generates, you’re like, “Yeah, okay. Whatever you did there, I don’t think a human can do that.”
I have a sense that there would be things that a model can say that convinces you this is very… I’ve talked to people who are truly wise, because you could just tell there’s a lot of horsepower there, and if you 10X that… I don’t know. I just feel like there’s words you could say. Maybe ask it to generate a poem, and the poem it generates, you’re like, “Yeah, okay. Whatever you did there, I don’t think a human can do that.”
Amanda
I think it has to be something that I can verify is actually really good, though. That’s why I think these questions that are where I’m like, “Oh, this is like…” Sometimes it’s just like I’ll come up with, say, a concrete counter example to an argument or something like that. It would be like if you’re a mathematician, you had a novel proof, I think, and you just gave it the problem, and you saw it, and you’re like, “This proof is genuinely novel. You actually have to do a lot of things to come up with this. I had to sit and think about it for months,” or something.
I think it has to be something that I can verify is actually really good, though. That’s why I think these questions that are where I’m like, “Oh, this is like…” Sometimes it’s just like I’ll come up with, say, a concrete counter example to an argument or something like that. It would be like if you’re a mathematician, you had a novel proof, I think, and you just gave it the problem, and you saw it, and you’re like, “This proof is genuinely novel. You actually have to do a lot of things to come up with this. I had to sit and think about it for months,” or something.
And then if you saw the model successfully do that, I think you would just be like, “I can verify that this is correct. It is a sign that you have generalized from your training. You didn’t just see this somewhere because I just came up with it myself, and you were able to replicate that.” That’s the kind of thing where I’m like, for me, the more that models can do things like that, the more I would be like, “Oh, this is very real.” Because then, I don’t know, I can verify that that’s extremely, extremely capable.
Lex Fridman
You’ve interacted with AI a lot. What do you think makes humans special?
You’ve interacted with AI a lot. What do you think makes humans special?
Amanda
Oh, good question.
Oh, good question.
Lex Fridman
Maybe in a way that the universe is much better off that we’re in it, and that we should definitely survive and spread throughout the universe.
Maybe in a way that the universe is much better off that we’re in it, and that we should definitely survive and spread throughout the universe.
Amanda
Yeah, it’s interesting because I think people focus so much on intelligence, especially with models. Look, intelligence is important because of what it does. It’s very useful. It does a lot of things in the world. And I’m like, you can imagine a world where height or strength would have played this role, and it’s just a trait like that. I’m like, it’s not intrinsically valuable. It’s valuable because of what it does, I think, for the most part. I mean, personally, I’m just like, I think humans and life in general is extremely magical. I don’t know. Not everyone agrees with this. I’m flagging. But we have this whole universe, and there’s all of these objects, there’s beautiful stars and there’s galaxies. Then, I don’t know, I’m just like, on this planet there are these creatures that have this ability to observe that, and they are seeing it, they are experiencing it.
Yeah, it’s interesting because I think people focus so much on intelligence, especially with models. Look, intelligence is important because of what it does. It’s very useful. It does a lot of things in the world. And I’m like, you can imagine a world where height or strength would have played this role, and it’s just a trait like that. I’m like, it’s not intrinsically valuable. It’s valuable because of what it does, I think, for the most part. I mean, personally, I’m just like, I think humans and life in general is extremely magical. I don’t know. Not everyone agrees with this. I’m flagging. But we have this whole universe, and there’s all of these objects, there’s beautiful stars and there’s galaxies. Then, I don’t know, I’m just like, on this planet there are these creatures that have this ability to observe that, and they are seeing it, they are experiencing it.
And I’m just like, that, if you try to explain… I’m imagining trying to explain to, I don’t know, someone. For some reason, they’ve never encountered the world, or science, or anything. And I think that everything, all of our physics and everything in the world, it’s all extremely exciting. But then you say, “Oh, and plus there’s this thing that it is to be a thing and observe in the world,” and you see this inner cinema. And I think they would be like, “Hang on, wait, pause. You just said something that is kind of wild sounding.” And so I’m like, we have this ability to experience the world. We feel pleasure, we feel suffering. We feel like a lot of complex things. Yeah. And maybe this is also why I think I also hear a lot about animals, for example, because I think they probably share this with us. So, I think that the things that make humans special insofar as I care about humans is probably more like their ability to feel an experience than it is them having these functional, useful traits.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. To feel and experience the beauty in the world. Yeah. To look at the stars. I hope there’s other alien civilizations out there, but if we’re it, it’s a pretty good thing.
Yeah. To feel and experience the beauty in the world. Yeah. To look at the stars. I hope there’s other alien civilizations out there, but if we’re it, it’s a pretty good thing.
Amanda
And that they’re having a good time.
And that they’re having a good time.
Lex Fridman
A very good time watching us.
A very good time watching us.
Amanda
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Well, thank you for this good time of a conversation and for the work you’re doing and for helping make Claude a great conversational partner. And thank you for talking today.
Well, thank you for this good time of a conversation and for the work you’re doing and for helping make Claude a great conversational partner. And thank you for talking today.
Amanda
Yeah, thanks for talking.
Yeah, thanks for talking.
Chris Olah
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Amanda Askell. And now, dear friends, here’s Chris Olah. Can you describe this fascinating field of mechanistic interpretability, aka mech interp, the history of the field, and where it stands today?
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Amanda Askell. And now, dear friends, here’s Chris Olah. Can you describe this fascinating field of mechanistic interpretability, aka mech interp, the history of the field, and where it stands today?
Chris Olah
I think one useful way to think about neural networks is that we don’t program, we don’t make them, we grow them. We have these neural network architectures that we design and we have these loss objectives that we create. And the neural network architecture, it’s kind of like a scaffold that the circuits grow on. It starts off with some random things, and it grows, and it’s almost like the objective that we train for is this light. And so we create the scaffold that it grows on, and we create the light that it grows towards. But the thing that we actually create, it’s this almost biological entity or organism that we’re studying.
I think one useful way to think about neural networks is that we don’t program, we don’t make them, we grow them. We have these neural network architectures that we design and we have these loss objectives that we create. And the neural network architecture, it’s kind of like a scaffold that the circuits grow on. It starts off with some random things, and it grows, and it’s almost like the objective that we train for is this light. And so we create the scaffold that it grows on, and we create the light that it grows towards. But the thing that we actually create, it’s this almost biological entity or organism that we’re studying.
And so it’s very, very different from any kind of regular software engineering because, at the end of the day, we end up with this artifact that can do all these amazing things. It can write essays and translate and understand images. It can do all these things that we have no idea how to directly create a computer program to do. And it can do that because we grew it. We didn’t write it. We didn’t create it. And so then that leaves open this question at the end, which is what the hell is going on inside these systems? And that is, to me, a really deep and exciting question. It’s a really exciting scientific question. To me, it is like the question that is just screaming out, it’s calling out for us to go and answer it when we talk about neural networks. And I think it’s also a very deep question for safety reasons.
Lex Fridman
And mechanistic interpretability, I guess, is closer to maybe neurobiology?
And mechanistic interpretability, I guess, is closer to maybe neurobiology?
Chris Olah
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s right. So, maybe to give an example of the kind of thing that has been done that I wouldn’t consider to be mechanistic interpretability. There was, for a long time, a lot of work on saliency maps, where you would take an image and you’d try to say, “The model thinks this image is a dog. What part of the image made it think that it’s a dog?” And that tells you maybe something about the model if you can come up with a principled version of that, but it doesn’t really tell you what algorithms are running in the model, how is the model actually making that decision? Maybe it’s telling you something about what was important to it, if you can make that method work, but it isn’t telling you what are the algorithms that are running? How is it that the system’s able to do this thing that no one knew how to do?
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s right. So, maybe to give an example of the kind of thing that has been done that I wouldn’t consider to be mechanistic interpretability. There was, for a long time, a lot of work on saliency maps, where you would take an image and you’d try to say, “The model thinks this image is a dog. What part of the image made it think that it’s a dog?” And that tells you maybe something about the model if you can come up with a principled version of that, but it doesn’t really tell you what algorithms are running in the model, how is the model actually making that decision? Maybe it’s telling you something about what was important to it, if you can make that method work, but it isn’t telling you what are the algorithms that are running? How is it that the system’s able to do this thing that no one knew how to do?
And so I guess we started using the term mechanistic interpretability to try to draw that divide or to distinguish ourselves in the work that we were doing in some ways from some of these other things. And I think since then, it’s become this sort of umbrella term for a pretty wide variety of work. But I’d say that the things that are kind of distinctive are, I think, A, this focus on, we really want to get at the mechanisms. We want to get at algorithms. If you think of neural networks as being like a computer program, then the weights are kind of like a binary computer program. And we’d like to reverse engineer those weights and figure out what algorithms are running.
So okay, I think one way you might think of trying to understand a neural network is that it’s kind of like we have this compiled computer program, and the weights of the neural network are the binary. And when the neural network runs, that’s the activations. And our goal is ultimately to go and understand these weights. And so the project of mechanistic interpretability is to somehow figure out how do these weights correspond to algorithms? And in order to do that, you also have to understand the activations because the activations are like the memory. And if you imagine reverse engineering a computer program, and you have the binary instructions, in order to understand what a particular instruction means, you need to know what is stored in the memory that it’s operating on. And so those two things are very intertwined. So, mechanistic interpretability tends to be interested in both of those things.
Now, there’s a lot of work that’s interested in those things, especially there’s all this work on probing, which you might see as part of being mechanistic interpretability, although, again, it’s just a broad term, and not everyone who does that work would identify as doing mech interp. I think a thing that is maybe a little bit distinctive to the vibe of mech interp is I think people working in this space tend to think of neural networks as… Well, maybe one way to say it is the gradient descent is smarter than you. That gradient descent is actually really great.
The whole reason that we’re understanding these models is because we didn’t know how to write them in the first place. The gradient descent comes up with better solutions than us. And so I think that maybe another thing about mech interp is having almost a kind of humility, that we won’t guess a priori what’s going on inside the model. We have to have this sort of bottom up approach where we don’t assume that we should look for a particular thing, and that will be there, and that’s how it works. But instead, we look for the bottom up and discover what happens to exist in these models and study them that way.
Features, Circuits, Universality
Lex Fridman
But the very fact that it’s possible to do, and as you and others have shown over time, things like universality, that the wisdom of the gradient descent creates features and circuits, creates things universally across different kinds of networks that are useful, and that makes the whole field possible.
But the very fact that it’s possible to do, and as you and others have shown over time, things like universality, that the wisdom of the gradient descent creates features and circuits, creates things universally across different kinds of networks that are useful, and that makes the whole field possible.
Chris Olah
Yeah. So this, actually, is indeed a really remarkable and exciting thing, where it does seem like, at least to some extent, the same elements, the same features and circuits, form again and again. You can look at every vision model, and you’ll find curve detectors, and you’ll find high-low-frequency detectors. And in fact, there’s some reason to think that the same things form across biological neural networks and artificial neural networks. So, a famous example is vision models in the early layers. They have Gabor filters, and Gabor filters are something that neuroscientists are interested in and have thought a lot about. We find curve detectors in these models. Curve detectors are also found in monkeys. We discover these high-low-frequency detectors, and then some follow-up work went and discovered them in rats or mice. So, they were found first in artificial neural networks and then found in biological neural networks.
Yeah. So this, actually, is indeed a really remarkable and exciting thing, where it does seem like, at least to some extent, the same elements, the same features and circuits, form again and again. You can look at every vision model, and you’ll find curve detectors, and you’ll find high-low-frequency detectors. And in fact, there’s some reason to think that the same things form across biological neural networks and artificial neural networks. So, a famous example is vision models in the early layers. They have Gabor filters, and Gabor filters are something that neuroscientists are interested in and have thought a lot about. We find curve detectors in these models. Curve detectors are also found in monkeys. We discover these high-low-frequency detectors, and then some follow-up work went and discovered them in rats or mice. So, they were found first in artificial neural networks and then found in biological neural networks.
There’s this really famous result on grandmother neurons or the Halle Berry neuron from Quiroga et al. And we found very similar things in vision models, where this is while I was still at OpenAI, and I was looking at their clip model, and you find these neurons that respond to the same entities in images. And also, to give a concrete example there, we found that there was a Donald Trump neuron. For some reason, I guess everyone likes to talk about Donald Trump. And Donald Trump was very prominent, was a very hot topic at that time. So, every neural network we looked at, we would find a dedicated neuron for Donald Trump. That was the only person who had always had a dedicated neuron. Sometimes you’d have an Obama neuron, sometimes you’d have a Clinton neuron, but Trump always had a dedicated neuron. So, it responds to pictures of his face and the word Trump, all of these things, right? And so it’s not responding to a particular example, or it’s not just responding to his face, it’s abstracting over this general concept. So in any case, that’s very similar to these Quiroga et al results.
So, this evidence that this phenomenon of universality, the same things form across both artificial and natural neural networks, that’s a pretty amazing thing if that’s true. Well, I think the thing that suggests is that gradient descent is finding the right ways to cut things apart, in some sense, that many systems converge on and many different neural networks architectures converge on. Now there’s some set of abstractions that are a very natural way to cut apart the problem and that a lot of systems are going to converge on. I don’t know anything about neuroscience. This is just my wild speculation from what we’ve seen.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. That would be beautiful if it’s sort of agnostic to the medium of the model that’s used to form the representation.
Yeah. That would be beautiful if it’s sort of agnostic to the medium of the model that’s used to form the representation.
Chris Olah
Yeah, yeah. And it’s kind of a wild speculation-based… We only have a few data points that’s just this, but it does seem like there’s some sense in which the same things form again and again both certainly in natural neural networks and also artificially, or in biology.
Yeah, yeah. And it’s kind of a wild speculation-based… We only have a few data points that’s just this, but it does seem like there’s some sense in which the same things form again and again both certainly in natural neural networks and also artificially, or in biology.
Lex Fridman
And the intuition behind that would be that in order to be useful in understanding the real world, you need all the same kind of stuff.
And the intuition behind that would be that in order to be useful in understanding the real world, you need all the same kind of stuff.
Chris Olah
Yeah. Well, if we pick, I don’t know, the idea of a dog, right? There’s some sense in which the idea of a dog is like a natural category in the universe, or something like this. There’s some reason. It’s not just a weird quirk of how humans think about the world that we have this concept of a dog. Or if you have the idea of a line. Look around us. There are lines. It’s the simplest way to understand this room, in some sense, is to have the idea of a line. And so I think that that would be my instinct for why this happens.
Yeah. Well, if we pick, I don’t know, the idea of a dog, right? There’s some sense in which the idea of a dog is like a natural category in the universe, or something like this. There’s some reason. It’s not just a weird quirk of how humans think about the world that we have this concept of a dog. Or if you have the idea of a line. Look around us. There are lines. It’s the simplest way to understand this room, in some sense, is to have the idea of a line. And so I think that that would be my instinct for why this happens.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You need a curved line to understand a circle, and you need all those shapes to understand bigger things. And it’s a hierarchy of concepts that are formed. Yeah.
Yeah. You need a curved line to understand a circle, and you need all those shapes to understand bigger things. And it’s a hierarchy of concepts that are formed. Yeah.
Chris Olah
And maybe there are ways to go and describe images without reference to those things, right? But they’re not the simplest way, or the most economical way, or something like this. And so systems converge to these strategies would be my wild hypothesis.
And maybe there are ways to go and describe images without reference to those things, right? But they’re not the simplest way, or the most economical way, or something like this. And so systems converge to these strategies would be my wild hypothesis.
Lex Fridman
Can you talk through some of the building blocks that we’ve been referencing of features and circuits? So, I think you first described them in a 2020 paper, Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits.
Can you talk through some of the building blocks that we’ve been referencing of features and circuits? So, I think you first described them in a 2020 paper, Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits.
Chris Olah
Absolutely. So, maybe I’ll start by just describing some phenomena, and then we can build to the idea of features and circuits.
Absolutely. So, maybe I’ll start by just describing some phenomena, and then we can build to the idea of features and circuits.
Lex Fridman
Wonderful.
Wonderful.
Chris Olah
So, if you spent quite a few years, maybe five years, to some extent, with other things, studying this one particular model, Inception V1, which is this one vision model… It was state-of-the-art in 2015, and very much not state-of-the-art anymore. And it has maybe about 10,000 neurons in it. I spent a lot of time looking at the 10,000 neurons, odd neurons of Inception V1. One of the interesting things is there are lots of neurons that don’t have some obvious interpretable meaning, but there’s a lot of neurons in Inception V1 that do have really clean interpretable meanings. So, you find neurons that just really do seem to detect curves, and you find neurons that really do seem to detect cars, and car wheels, and car windows, and floppy ears of dogs, and dogs with long snouts facing to the right, and dogs with long snouts facing to the left, and different kinds of fur.
So, if you spent quite a few years, maybe five years, to some extent, with other things, studying this one particular model, Inception V1, which is this one vision model… It was state-of-the-art in 2015, and very much not state-of-the-art anymore. And it has maybe about 10,000 neurons in it. I spent a lot of time looking at the 10,000 neurons, odd neurons of Inception V1. One of the interesting things is there are lots of neurons that don’t have some obvious interpretable meaning, but there’s a lot of neurons in Inception V1 that do have really clean interpretable meanings. So, you find neurons that just really do seem to detect curves, and you find neurons that really do seem to detect cars, and car wheels, and car windows, and floppy ears of dogs, and dogs with long snouts facing to the right, and dogs with long snouts facing to the left, and different kinds of fur.
And there’s this whole beautiful edge detectors, line detectors, color contrast detectors, these beautiful things we call high-low-frequency detectors. I think looking at it, I sort of felt like a biologist. You’re looking at this sort of new world of proteins, and you’re discovering all these different proteins that interact. So, one way you could try to understand these models is in terms of neurons. You could try to be like, “Oh, there’s a dog detecting neuron, and here’s a car detecting neuron.” And it turns out you can actually ask how those connect together. So, you can go say, “Oh, I have this car detecting neuron. How was it built?” And it turns out, in the previous layer, it’s connected really strongly to a window detector, and a wheel detector, and a car body detector. And it looks for the window above the car, and the wheels below, and the car chrome in the middle, sort of everywhere, but especially on the lower part. And that’s sort of a recipe for a car, right?
Earlier, we said the thing we wanted from mech interp was to get algorithms to go and get, ask, “What is the algorithm that runs?” Well, here we’re just looking at the weights of the neural network and we’re reading off this recipe for detecting cars. It’s a very simple, crude recipe, but it’s there. And so we call that a circuit, this connection. Well, okay, so the problem is that not all of the neurons are interpretable. And there’s reason to think, we can get into this more later, that there’s this superposition hypothesis, there’s reason to think that sometimes the right unit to analyze things is combinations of neurons. So, sometimes it’s not that there’s a single neuron that represents, say, a car, but it actually turns out after you detect the car, the model hides a little bit of the car in the following layer, in a bunch of dog detectors.
Why is it doing that? Well, maybe it just doesn’t want to do that much work on cars at that point, and it’s storing it away to go and… So, it turns out, then, that this sort of subtle pattern of… There’s all these neurons that you think are dog detectors, and maybe they’re primarily that, but they all a little bit contribute to representing a car in that next layer. Okay? So, now we can’t really think… There might still be something, I don’t know, you could call it a car concept or something, but it no longer corresponds to a neuron. So, we need some term for these kind of neuron-like entities, these things that we would have liked the neurons to be, these idealized neurons. The things that are the nice neurons, but also maybe there’s more of them somehow hidden. And we call those features.
Lex Fridman
And then what are circuits?
And then what are circuits?
Chris Olah
So, circuits are these connections of features, right? So, when we have the car detector and it’s connected to a window detector and a wheel detector, and it looks for the wheels below and the windows on top, that’s a circuit. So, circuits are just collections of features connected by weights, and they implement algorithms. So, they tell us how are features used, how are they built, how do they connect together?
So, circuits are these connections of features, right? So, when we have the car detector and it’s connected to a window detector and a wheel detector, and it looks for the wheels below and the windows on top, that’s a circuit. So, circuits are just collections of features connected by weights, and they implement algorithms. So, they tell us how are features used, how are they built, how do they connect together?
So, maybe it’s worth trying to pin down what really is the core hypothesis here? And I think the core hypothesis is something we call the linear representation hypothesis. So, if we think about the car detector, the more it fires, the more we think of that as meaning, “Oh, the model is more and more confident that a car is present.” Or if it’s some combination of neurons that represent a car, the more that combination fires, the more we think the model thinks there’s a car present. This doesn’t have to be the case, right? You could imagine something where you have this car detector neuron and you think, “Ah, if it fires between one and two, that means one thing, but it means something totally different if it’s between three and four.” That would be a nonlinear representation. And in principle, models could do that. I think it’s sort of inefficient for them to do. If you try to think about how you’d implement computation like that, it’s kind of an annoying thing to do. But in principle, models can do that.
So, one way to think about the features and circuits sort of framework for thinking about things is that we’re thinking about things as being linear. We’re thinking about that if a neuron or a combination of neurons fires more, that means more of a particular thing being detected. And then that gives weight, a very clean interpretation as these edges between these entities that these features, and that that edge then has a meaning. So that’s, in some ways, the core thing. It’s like we can talk about this outside the context of neurons. Are you familiar with the Word2Vec results?
Lex Fridman
Mm- hmm.
Mm- hmm.
Chris Olah
You have king – man + woman = queen. Well, the reason you can do that kind of arithmetic is because you have a linear representation.
You have king – man + woman = queen. Well, the reason you can do that kind of arithmetic is because you have a linear representation.
Lex Fridman
Can you actually explain that representation a little bit? So first off, the feature is a direction of activation.
Can you actually explain that representation a little bit? So first off, the feature is a direction of activation.
Chris Olah
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman
You can do it that way. Can you do the – men + women, that, the Word2Vec stuff? Can you explain what that is, that work?
You can do it that way. Can you do the – men + women, that, the Word2Vec stuff? Can you explain what that is, that work?
Chris Olah
Yeah. So, there’s this very-
Yeah. So, there’s this very-
Lex Fridman
It’s such a simple, clean explanation of what we’re talking about.
It’s such a simple, clean explanation of what we’re talking about.
Chris Olah
Exactly. Yeah. So, there’s this very famous result, Word2Vec, by Tomas Mikolov et al, and there’s been tons of follow-up work exploring this. So, sometimes we create these word embeddings where we map every word to a vector. I mean, that in itself, by the way, is kind of a crazy thing if you haven’t thought about it before, right?
Exactly. Yeah. So, there’s this very famous result, Word2Vec, by Tomas Mikolov et al, and there’s been tons of follow-up work exploring this. So, sometimes we create these word embeddings where we map every word to a vector. I mean, that in itself, by the way, is kind of a crazy thing if you haven’t thought about it before, right?
Lex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Chris Olah
If you just learned about vectors in physics class, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to actually turn every word in the dictionary into a vector,” that’s kind of a crazy idea. Okay. But you could imagine all kinds of ways in which you might map words to vectors. But it seems like when we train neural networks, they like to go and map words to vectors such that there’s sort of linear structure in a particular sense, which is that directions have meaning. So, for instance, there will be some direction that seems to sort of correspond to gender, and male words will be far in one direction, and female words will be in another direction.
If you just learned about vectors in physics class, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to actually turn every word in the dictionary into a vector,” that’s kind of a crazy idea. Okay. But you could imagine all kinds of ways in which you might map words to vectors. But it seems like when we train neural networks, they like to go and map words to vectors such that there’s sort of linear structure in a particular sense, which is that directions have meaning. So, for instance, there will be some direction that seems to sort of correspond to gender, and male words will be far in one direction, and female words will be in another direction.
And the linear representation hypothesis is, you could think of it roughly as saying that that’s actually the fundamental thing that’s going on, that everything is just different directions have meanings, and adding different direction vectors together can represent concepts. And the Mikolov paper took that idea seriously, and one consequence of it is that you can do this game of playing arithmetic with words. So, you can do king and you can subtract off the word man and add the word woman. And so you’re sort of going and trying to switch the gender. And indeed, if you do that, the result will sort of be close to the word queen. And you can do other things like you can do sushi – Japan + Italy and get pizza, or different things like this, right?
So this is, in some sense, the core of the linear representation hypothesis. You can describe it just as a purely abstract thing about vector spaces. You can describe it as a statement about the activations of neurons, but it’s really about this property of directions having meaning. And in some ways, it’s even a little subtler than… It’s really, I think, mostly about this property of being able to add things together, that you can independently modify, say gender and royalty, or cuisine type, or country, and the concept of food by adding them.
Lex Fridman
Do you think the linear hypothesis holds-
Do you think the linear hypothesis holds-
Chris Olah
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
… that carries scales?
… that carries scales?
Chris Olah
So far, I think everything I have seen is consistent with this hypothesis, and it doesn’t have to be that way, right? You can write down neural networks where you write weights such that they don’t have linear representations, where the right way to understand them is not in terms of linear representations. But I think every natural neural network I’ve seen has this property. There’s been one paper recently that there’s been some sort of pushing around the edge. So, I think there’s been some work recently studying multidimensional features where rather than a single direction, it’s more like a manifold of directions. This, to me, still seems like a linear representation.
So far, I think everything I have seen is consistent with this hypothesis, and it doesn’t have to be that way, right? You can write down neural networks where you write weights such that they don’t have linear representations, where the right way to understand them is not in terms of linear representations. But I think every natural neural network I’ve seen has this property. There’s been one paper recently that there’s been some sort of pushing around the edge. So, I think there’s been some work recently studying multidimensional features where rather than a single direction, it’s more like a manifold of directions. This, to me, still seems like a linear representation.
And then there’s been some other papers suggesting that maybe in very small models you get non-linear representations. I think that the jury’s still out on that. But I think everything that we’ve seen so far has been consistent with the linear representation hypothesis, and that’s wild. It doesn’t have to be that way. And yet I think that there’s a lot of evidence that certainly at least this is very, very widespread, and so far the evidence is consistent with that. And I think one thing you might say is you might say, “Well, Christopher, that’s a lot to go and to ride on. If we don’t know for sure this is true, and you’re investing it in neural networks as though it is true, isn’t that dangerous?”
But I think, actually, there’s a virtue in taking hypotheses seriously and pushing them as far as they can go. So, it might be that someday we discover something that isn’t consistent with a linear representation hypothesis, but science is full of hypotheses and theories that were wrong, and we learned a lot by working under them as an assumption and then going and pushing them as far as we can. I guess this is the heart of what Kuhn would call normal science. I don’t know. If you want, we can talk a lot about-
Lex Fridman
Kuhn.
Kuhn.
Chris Olah
… philosophy of science and-
… philosophy of science and-
Lex Fridman
That leads to the paradigm shift. So yeah, I love it, taking the hypothesis seriously, and take it to a natural conclusion.
That leads to the paradigm shift. So yeah, I love it, taking the hypothesis seriously, and take it to a natural conclusion.
Chris Olah
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Same with the scaling hypothesis. Same-
Same with the scaling hypothesis. Same-
Chris Olah
Exactly. Exactly. And-
Exactly. Exactly. And-
Lex Fridman
I love it.
I love it.
Chris Olah
One of my colleagues, Tom Henighan, who is a former physicist, made this really nice analogy to me of caloric theory where once upon a time, we thought that heat was actually this thing called caloric. And the reason hot objects would warm up cool objects is the caloric is flowing through them. And because we’re so used to thinking about heat in terms of the modern theory, that seems kind of silly. But it’s actually very hard to construct an experiment that disproves the caloric hypothesis. And you can actually do a lot of really useful work believing in caloric. For example, it turns out that the original combustion engines were developed by people who believed in the caloric theory. So, I think there’s a virtue in taking hypotheses seriously even when they might be wrong.
One of my colleagues, Tom Henighan, who is a former physicist, made this really nice analogy to me of caloric theory where once upon a time, we thought that heat was actually this thing called caloric. And the reason hot objects would warm up cool objects is the caloric is flowing through them. And because we’re so used to thinking about heat in terms of the modern theory, that seems kind of silly. But it’s actually very hard to construct an experiment that disproves the caloric hypothesis. And you can actually do a lot of really useful work believing in caloric. For example, it turns out that the original combustion engines were developed by people who believed in the caloric theory. So, I think there’s a virtue in taking hypotheses seriously even when they might be wrong.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there’s a deep philosophical truth to that. That’s kind of how I feel about space travel, like colonizing Mars. There’s a lot of people that criticize that. I think if you just assume we have to colonize Mars in order to have a backup for human civilization, even if that’s not true, that’s going to produce some interesting engineering and even scientific breakthroughs, I think.
Yeah, there’s a deep philosophical truth to that. That’s kind of how I feel about space travel, like colonizing Mars. There’s a lot of people that criticize that. I think if you just assume we have to colonize Mars in order to have a backup for human civilization, even if that’s not true, that’s going to produce some interesting engineering and even scientific breakthroughs, I think.
Chris Olah
Yeah. Actually, this is another thing that I think is really interesting. So, there’s a way in which I think it can be really useful for society to have people almost irrationally dedicated to investigating particular hypotheses because, well, it takes a lot to maintain scientific morale and really push on something when most scientific hypotheses end up being wrong. A lot of science doesn’t work out, and yet it’s very useful to… There’s a joke about Geoff Hinton, which is that Geoff Hinton has discovered how the brain works every year for the last 50 years. But I say that with really deep respect because, in fact, actually, that led to him doing some really great work.
Yeah. Actually, this is another thing that I think is really interesting. So, there’s a way in which I think it can be really useful for society to have people almost irrationally dedicated to investigating particular hypotheses because, well, it takes a lot to maintain scientific morale and really push on something when most scientific hypotheses end up being wrong. A lot of science doesn’t work out, and yet it’s very useful to… There’s a joke about Geoff Hinton, which is that Geoff Hinton has discovered how the brain works every year for the last 50 years. But I say that with really deep respect because, in fact, actually, that led to him doing some really great work.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, he won the Nobel Prize now. Who’s laughing now?
Yeah, he won the Nobel Prize now. Who’s laughing now?
Chris Olah
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I think one wants to be able to pop up and recognize the appropriate level of confidence. But I think there’s also a lot of value in just being like, “I’m going to essentially assume, I’m going to condition on this problem being possible or this being broadly the right approach. And I’m just going to go and assume that for a while and go and work within that, and push really hard on it.” And if society has lots of people doing that for different things, that’s actually really useful in terms of going and-
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I think one wants to be able to pop up and recognize the appropriate level of confidence. But I think there’s also a lot of value in just being like, “I’m going to essentially assume, I’m going to condition on this problem being possible or this being broadly the right approach. And I’m just going to go and assume that for a while and go and work within that, and push really hard on it.” And if society has lots of people doing that for different things, that’s actually really useful in terms of going and-
Chris Olah
… things that’s actually really useful in terms of going and either really ruling things out. We can be like, “Well, that didn’t work and we know that somebody tried hard.” Or going and getting to something that does teach us something about the world.
… things that’s actually really useful in terms of going and either really ruling things out. We can be like, “Well, that didn’t work and we know that somebody tried hard.” Or going and getting to something that does teach us something about the world.
Superposition
Lex Fridman
So another interesting hypothesis is the super superposition hypothesis. Can you describe what superposition is?
So another interesting hypothesis is the super superposition hypothesis. Can you describe what superposition is?
Chris Olah
Yeah. So earlier we were talking about word defect, right? And we were talking about how maybe you have one direction that corresponds to gender and maybe another that corresponds to royalty and another one that corresponds to Italy and another one that corresponds to food and all of these things. Well, oftentimes maybe these word embeddings, they might be 500 dimensions, a thousand dimensions. And so if you believe that all of those directions were orthogonal, then you could only have 500 concepts. And I love pizza. But if I was going to go and give the 500 most important concepts in the English language, probably Italy wouldn’t be… it’s not obvious, at least that Italy would be one of them, right? Because you have to have things like plural and singular and verb and noun and adjective. And there’s a lot of things we have to get to before we get to Italy and Japan, and there’s a lot of countries in the world.
Yeah. So earlier we were talking about word defect, right? And we were talking about how maybe you have one direction that corresponds to gender and maybe another that corresponds to royalty and another one that corresponds to Italy and another one that corresponds to food and all of these things. Well, oftentimes maybe these word embeddings, they might be 500 dimensions, a thousand dimensions. And so if you believe that all of those directions were orthogonal, then you could only have 500 concepts. And I love pizza. But if I was going to go and give the 500 most important concepts in the English language, probably Italy wouldn’t be… it’s not obvious, at least that Italy would be one of them, right? Because you have to have things like plural and singular and verb and noun and adjective. And there’s a lot of things we have to get to before we get to Italy and Japan, and there’s a lot of countries in the world.
And so how might it be that models could simultaneously have the linear representation hypothesis be true and also represent more things than they have directions? So what does that mean? Well, okay, so if linear representation hypothesis is true, something interesting has to be going on. Now, I’ll tell you one more interesting thing before we go, and we do that, which is earlier we were talking about all these polysemantic neurons, these neurons that when we were looking at inception V1, these nice neurons that the car detector and the curve detector and so on that respond to lots of very coherent things. But it’s lots of neurons that respond to a bunch of unrelated things. And that’s also an interesting phenomenon. And it turns out as well that even these neurons that are really, really clean, if you look at the weak activations, so if you look at the activations where it’s activating 5% of the maximum activation, it’s really not the core thing that it’s expecting.
So if you look at a curve detector for instance, and you look at the places where it’s 5% active, you could interpret it just as noise or it could be that it’s doing something else there. Okay? So how could that be? Well, there’s this amazing thing in mathematics called compressed sensing, and it’s actually this very surprising fact where if you have a high dimensional space and you project it into a low dimensional space, ordinarily you can’t go and sort of un-projected and get back your high dimensional vector, you threw information away. This is like you can’t invert a rectangular matrix. You can only invert square matrices. But it turns out that that’s actually not quite true. If I tell you that the high-dimensional vector was sparse, so it’s mostly zeros, then it turns out that you can often go and find back the high-dimensional vector with very high probability.
So that’s a surprising fact, right? It says that you can have this high-dimensional vector space, and as long as things are sparse, you can project it down, you can have a lower-dimensional projection of it, and that works. So the superstition hypothesis is saying that that’s what’s going on in neural networks, for instance, that’s what’s going on in word embeddings. The word embeddings are able to simultaneously have directions be the meaningful thing, and by exploiting the fact that they’re operating on a fairly high-dimensional space, they’re actually… and the fact that these concepts are sparse, you usually aren’t talking about Japan and Italy at the same time. Most of those concepts, in most instances, Japan and Italy are both zero. They’re not present at all. And if that’s true, then you can go and have it be the case that you can have many more of these sort of directions that are meaningful, these features than you have dimensions.
And similarly, when we’re talking about neurons, you can have many more concepts than you have neurons. So that’s at a high level, the superstition hypothesis. Now it has this even wilder implication, which is to go and say that neural networks, it may not just be the case that the representations are like this, but the computation may also be like this. The connections between all of them. And so in some sense, neural networks may be shadows of much larger sparser neural networks. And what we see are these projections. And the strongest version of superstition hypothesis would be to take that really seriously and sort of say there actually is in some sense this upstairs model where the neurons are really sparse and all interpleural, and the weights between them are these really sparse circuits. And that’s what we’re studying. And the thing that we’re observing is the shadow of evidence. We need to find the original object.
Lex Fridman
And the process of learning is trying to construct a compression of the upstairs model that doesn’t lose too much information in the projection.
And the process of learning is trying to construct a compression of the upstairs model that doesn’t lose too much information in the projection.
Chris Olah
Yeah, it’s finding how to fit it efficiently or something like this. The gradient descent is doing this and in fact, so this sort of says that gradient descent, it could just represent a dense neural network, but it sort of says that gradient descent is implicitly searching over the space of extremely sparse models that could be projected into this low-dimensional space. And this large body of work of people going and trying to study sparse neural networks where you go and you have… you could design neural networks where the edges are sparse and the activations are sparse.
Yeah, it’s finding how to fit it efficiently or something like this. The gradient descent is doing this and in fact, so this sort of says that gradient descent, it could just represent a dense neural network, but it sort of says that gradient descent is implicitly searching over the space of extremely sparse models that could be projected into this low-dimensional space. And this large body of work of people going and trying to study sparse neural networks where you go and you have… you could design neural networks where the edges are sparse and the activations are sparse.
And my sense is that work has generally, it feels very principled, it makes so much sense, and yet that work hasn’t really panned out that well, is my impression broadly. And I think that a potential answer for that is that actually the neural network is already sparse in some sense. You were trying to go and do this. Gradient descent was actually behind the scenes going and searching more efficiently than you could through the space of sparse models and going and learning whatever sparse model was most efficient. And then figuring out how to fold it down nicely to go and run conveniently on your GPU, which does as nice dense matrix multiplies. And that you just can’t beat that.
Lex Fridman
How many concepts do you think can be shoved into a neural network?
How many concepts do you think can be shoved into a neural network?
Chris Olah
Depends on how sparse they are. So there’s probably an upper bound from the number of parameters because you still have to have print weights that go and connect them together. So that’s one upper bound. There are in fact all these lovely results from compressed sensing and the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma and things like this that they basically tell you that if you have a vector space and you want to have almost orthogonal vectors, which is sort of probably the thing that you want here. So you’re going to say, “Well, I’m going to give up on having my concepts, my features be strictly orthogonal, but I’d like them to not interfere that much. I’m going to have to ask them to be almost orthogonal.”
Depends on how sparse they are. So there’s probably an upper bound from the number of parameters because you still have to have print weights that go and connect them together. So that’s one upper bound. There are in fact all these lovely results from compressed sensing and the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma and things like this that they basically tell you that if you have a vector space and you want to have almost orthogonal vectors, which is sort of probably the thing that you want here. So you’re going to say, “Well, I’m going to give up on having my concepts, my features be strictly orthogonal, but I’d like them to not interfere that much. I’m going to have to ask them to be almost orthogonal.”
Then this would say that it’s actually for, once you set a threshold for what you’re willing to accept in terms of how much cosine similarity there is, that’s actually exponential in the number of neurons that you have. So at some point, that’s not going to even be the limiting factor, but there’s some beautiful results there. And in fact, it’s probably even better than that in some sense because that’s sort of for saying that any random set of features could be active. But in fact the features have sort of a correlational structure where some features are more likely to co-occur and other ones are less likely to co-occur. And so neural networks, my guest would be, could do very well in terms of going and packing things to the point that’s probably not the limiting factor.
Lex Fridman
How does the problem of polysemanticity enter the picture here?
How does the problem of polysemanticity enter the picture here?
Chris Olah
Polysemanticity is this phenomenon we observe where you look at many neurons and the neuron doesn’t just sort of represent one concept, it’s not a clean feature. It responds to a bunch of unrelated things. And superstition you can think of as being a hypothesis that explains the observation of polysemanticity. So polysemanticity is this observed phenomenon and superstition is a hypothesis that would explain it along with some other things.
Polysemanticity is this phenomenon we observe where you look at many neurons and the neuron doesn’t just sort of represent one concept, it’s not a clean feature. It responds to a bunch of unrelated things. And superstition you can think of as being a hypothesis that explains the observation of polysemanticity. So polysemanticity is this observed phenomenon and superstition is a hypothesis that would explain it along with some other things.
Lex Fridman
So that makes Mechinterp more difficult.
So that makes Mechinterp more difficult.
Chris Olah
Right. So if you’re trying to understand things in terms of individual neurons and you have polysemantic neurons, you’re in an awful lot of trouble. The easiest answer is like, “Okay, well you’re looking at the neurons, you’re trying to understand them. This one responds for a lot of things. It doesn’t have a nice meaning. Okay, that’s bad.” Another thing you could ask is ultimately we want to understand the weights. And if you have two polysemantic neurons and each one responds to three things and then the other neuron responds to three things and you have a wait between them, what does that mean? Does it mean that all three, there’s these nine interactions going on?
Right. So if you’re trying to understand things in terms of individual neurons and you have polysemantic neurons, you’re in an awful lot of trouble. The easiest answer is like, “Okay, well you’re looking at the neurons, you’re trying to understand them. This one responds for a lot of things. It doesn’t have a nice meaning. Okay, that’s bad.” Another thing you could ask is ultimately we want to understand the weights. And if you have two polysemantic neurons and each one responds to three things and then the other neuron responds to three things and you have a wait between them, what does that mean? Does it mean that all three, there’s these nine interactions going on?
It’s a very weird thing, but there’s also a deeper reason, which is related to the fact that neural networks operate on really high dimensional spaces. So I said that our goal was to understand neural networks and understand the mechanisms. And one thing you might say is, “Well, it’s just a mathematical function. Why not just look at it, right?” One of the earliest projects I did studied these neural networks that mapped two-dimensional spaces to two-dimensional spaces, and you can sort of interpret them in this beautiful way is like bending manifolds. Why can’t we do that? Well, as you have a higher dimensional space, the volume of that space in some sense is exponential in the number of inputs you have. And so you can’t just go and visualize it.
So we somehow need to break that apart. We need to somehow break that exponential space into a bunch of things, some non-exponential number of things that we can reason about independently. And the independence is crucial because it’s the independence that allows you to not have to think about all the exponential combinations of things. And things being monosomatic, things only having one meaning, things having a meaning, that is the key thing that allows you to think about them independently. And so I think if you want the deepest reason why we want to have interpretable monosomatic features, I think that’s really the deep reason.
Lex Fridman
And so the goal here as your recent work has been aiming at is how do we extract the monosomatic features from a neural net that has polysemantic features and all this mess.
And so the goal here as your recent work has been aiming at is how do we extract the monosomatic features from a neural net that has polysemantic features and all this mess.
Chris Olah
Yes, we observe these polysemantic neurons, we hypothesize that’s what’s going on is superposition. And if superposition is what’s going on, there’s actually a sort of well-established technique that is sort of the principled thing to do, which is dictionary learning. And it turns out if you do dictionary learning in particular, if you do sort of a nice efficient way that in some sense sort of nicely regularizes that as well called a sparse auto encoder. If you train a sparse auto encoder, these beautiful interpretable features start to just fall out where there weren’t any beforehand. So that’s not a thing that you would necessarily predict, but it turns out that works very, very well. To me, that seems like some non-trivial validation of linear representations and superposition.
Yes, we observe these polysemantic neurons, we hypothesize that’s what’s going on is superposition. And if superposition is what’s going on, there’s actually a sort of well-established technique that is sort of the principled thing to do, which is dictionary learning. And it turns out if you do dictionary learning in particular, if you do sort of a nice efficient way that in some sense sort of nicely regularizes that as well called a sparse auto encoder. If you train a sparse auto encoder, these beautiful interpretable features start to just fall out where there weren’t any beforehand. So that’s not a thing that you would necessarily predict, but it turns out that works very, very well. To me, that seems like some non-trivial validation of linear representations and superposition.
Lex Fridman
So with dictionary learning, you’re not looking for particular kind of categories. You don’t know what they are, they just emerge.
So with dictionary learning, you’re not looking for particular kind of categories. You don’t know what they are, they just emerge.
Chris Olah
Exactly. And this gets back to our earlier point when we’re not making assumptions. Gradient descent is smarter than us, so we’re not making assumptions about what’s there. I mean, one certainly could do that, right? One could assume that there’s a PHP feature and go and search for it, but we’re not doing that. We’re saying we don’t know what’s going to be there. Instead, we’re just going to go and let the sparse auto encoder discover the things that are there.
Exactly. And this gets back to our earlier point when we’re not making assumptions. Gradient descent is smarter than us, so we’re not making assumptions about what’s there. I mean, one certainly could do that, right? One could assume that there’s a PHP feature and go and search for it, but we’re not doing that. We’re saying we don’t know what’s going to be there. Instead, we’re just going to go and let the sparse auto encoder discover the things that are there.
Monosemanticity
Lex Fridman
So can you talk toward monosematicity paper from October last year? I heard a lot of nice breakthrough results.
So can you talk toward monosematicity paper from October last year? I heard a lot of nice breakthrough results.
Chris Olah
That’s very kind of you to describe it that way. Yeah, I mean, this was our first real success using sparse autoencoders. So we took a one-layer model, and it turns out if you go and you do dictionary learning on it, you find all these really nice interpretable features. So the Arabic feature, the Hebrew feature, the Base64 features were some examples that we studied in a lot of depth and really showed that they were what we thought they were. Turns out if you train a model twice as well and train two different models and do dictionary learning, you find analogous features in both of them. So that’s fun. You find all kinds of different features. So that was really just showing that this works. And I should mention that there was this Cunningham and all that had very similar results around the same time.
That’s very kind of you to describe it that way. Yeah, I mean, this was our first real success using sparse autoencoders. So we took a one-layer model, and it turns out if you go and you do dictionary learning on it, you find all these really nice interpretable features. So the Arabic feature, the Hebrew feature, the Base64 features were some examples that we studied in a lot of depth and really showed that they were what we thought they were. Turns out if you train a model twice as well and train two different models and do dictionary learning, you find analogous features in both of them. So that’s fun. You find all kinds of different features. So that was really just showing that this works. And I should mention that there was this Cunningham and all that had very similar results around the same time.
Lex Fridman
There’s something fun about doing these kinds of small scale experiments and finding that it’s actually working.
There’s something fun about doing these kinds of small scale experiments and finding that it’s actually working.
Chris Olah
Yeah, well, and that there’s so much structure here. So maybe stepping back, for a while I thought that maybe all this mechanistic interpolate work, the end result was going to be that I would have an explanation for why it was sort of very hard and not going to be tractable. We’d be like, “Well, there’s this problem with supersession and it turns out supersession is really hard and we’re kind of screwed, but that’s not what happened. In fact, a very natural simple technique just works. And so then that’s actually a very good situation. I think this is a sort of hard research problem and it’s got a lot of research risk and it might still very well fail, but I think that some very significant amount of research risk was put behind us when that started to work.
Yeah, well, and that there’s so much structure here. So maybe stepping back, for a while I thought that maybe all this mechanistic interpolate work, the end result was going to be that I would have an explanation for why it was sort of very hard and not going to be tractable. We’d be like, “Well, there’s this problem with supersession and it turns out supersession is really hard and we’re kind of screwed, but that’s not what happened. In fact, a very natural simple technique just works. And so then that’s actually a very good situation. I think this is a sort of hard research problem and it’s got a lot of research risk and it might still very well fail, but I think that some very significant amount of research risk was put behind us when that started to work.
Lex Fridman
Can you describe what kind of features can be extracted in this way?
Can you describe what kind of features can be extracted in this way?
Chris Olah
Well, so it depends on the model that you’re studying. So the larger the model, the more sophisticated they’re going to be. And we’ll probably talk about follow up work in a minute. But in these one layer models, so some very common things I think were languages, both programming languages and natural languages. There were a lot of features that were specific words in specific contexts, so the. And I think really the way to think about this is that the is likely about to be followed by a noun. So you could think of this as the feature, but you could also think of this as protecting a specific noun feature. And there would be these features that would fire for the in the context of say, a legal document or a mathematical document or something like this. And so maybe in the context of math, you’re like the, and then predict vector or matrix, all these mathematical words, whereas in other contexts you would predict other things, that was common.
Well, so it depends on the model that you’re studying. So the larger the model, the more sophisticated they’re going to be. And we’ll probably talk about follow up work in a minute. But in these one layer models, so some very common things I think were languages, both programming languages and natural languages. There were a lot of features that were specific words in specific contexts, so the. And I think really the way to think about this is that the is likely about to be followed by a noun. So you could think of this as the feature, but you could also think of this as protecting a specific noun feature. And there would be these features that would fire for the in the context of say, a legal document or a mathematical document or something like this. And so maybe in the context of math, you’re like the, and then predict vector or matrix, all these mathematical words, whereas in other contexts you would predict other things, that was common.
Lex Fridman
And basically we need clever humans to assign labels to what we’re seeing.
And basically we need clever humans to assign labels to what we’re seeing.
Chris Olah
Yes. So the only thing this is doing is that sort of unfolding things for you. So if everything was sort of folded over top of it, serialization folded everything on top of itself and you can’t really see it, this is unfolding it. But now you still have a very complex thing to try to understand. So then you have to do a bunch of work understanding what these are, and some are really subtle. There’s some really cool things even in this one layer model about Unicode, where of course some languages are in Unicode, and the tokenizer won’t necessarily have a dedicated token for every Unicode character. So instead, what you’ll have is you’ll have these patterns of alternating token or alternating tokens that each represent half of a Unicode character.
Yes. So the only thing this is doing is that sort of unfolding things for you. So if everything was sort of folded over top of it, serialization folded everything on top of itself and you can’t really see it, this is unfolding it. But now you still have a very complex thing to try to understand. So then you have to do a bunch of work understanding what these are, and some are really subtle. There’s some really cool things even in this one layer model about Unicode, where of course some languages are in Unicode, and the tokenizer won’t necessarily have a dedicated token for every Unicode character. So instead, what you’ll have is you’ll have these patterns of alternating token or alternating tokens that each represent half of a Unicode character.
And you have a different feature that goes and activates on the opposing ones to be like, “Okay, I just finished a character, go and predict next prefix. Then okay, I’m on the prefix, predict a reasonable suffix.” And you have to alternate back and forth. So these swap layer models are really interesting. And I mean there’s another thing that you might think, “Okay, there would just be one Base64 feature, but it turns out there’s actually a bunch of Base64 features because you can have English text encoded as Base64, and that has a very different distribution of Base64 tokens than regular. And there’s some things about tokenization as well that it can exploit. And I don’t know, there’s all kinds of fun stuff.
Lex Fridman
How difficult is the task of assigning labels to what’s going on? Can this be automated by AI?
How difficult is the task of assigning labels to what’s going on? Can this be automated by AI?
Chris Olah
Well, I think it depends on the feature, and it also depends on how much you trust your AI. So there’s a lot of work doing automated interoperability. I think that’s a really exciting direction, and we do a fair amount of automated interoperability and have Claude go and label our features.
Well, I think it depends on the feature, and it also depends on how much you trust your AI. So there’s a lot of work doing automated interoperability. I think that’s a really exciting direction, and we do a fair amount of automated interoperability and have Claude go and label our features.
Lex Fridman
Is there some fun moments where it’s totally right or it’s totally wrong?
Is there some fun moments where it’s totally right or it’s totally wrong?
Chris Olah
Yeah, well, I think it’s very common that it says something very general, which is true in some sense, but not really picking up on the specific of what’s going on. So I think that’s a pretty common situation. You don’t know that I have a particularly amusing one.
Yeah, well, I think it’s very common that it says something very general, which is true in some sense, but not really picking up on the specific of what’s going on. So I think that’s a pretty common situation. You don’t know that I have a particularly amusing one.
Lex Fridman
That’s interesting. That little gap between it is true, but it doesn’t quite get to the deep nuance of a thing. That’s a general challenge, it’s already an incredible caution that can say a true thing, but it’s missing the depth sometimes. And in this context, it’s like the ARC challenge, the sort of IQ type of tests. It feels like figuring out what a feature represents is a little puzzle you have to solve.
That’s interesting. That little gap between it is true, but it doesn’t quite get to the deep nuance of a thing. That’s a general challenge, it’s already an incredible caution that can say a true thing, but it’s missing the depth sometimes. And in this context, it’s like the ARC challenge, the sort of IQ type of tests. It feels like figuring out what a feature represents is a little puzzle you have to solve.
Chris Olah
Yeah. And I think that sometimes they’re easier and sometimes they’re harder as well. Yeah, I think that’s tricky. There’s another thing which I don’t know, maybe in some ways this is my aesthetic coming in, but I’ll try to give you a rationalization. I’m actually a little suspicious of automated interoperability, and I think that partly just that I want humans to understand neural networks. And if the neural network is understanding it for me, I don’t quite like that, but I do have a bit of… In some ways, I’m sort of like the mathematicians who are like, “If there’s a computer automated proof, it doesn’t count.” They won’t understand it. But I do also think that there is this kind of reflections on trusting trust type issue where there’s this famous talk about when you’re writing a computer program, you have to trust your compiler.
Yeah. And I think that sometimes they’re easier and sometimes they’re harder as well. Yeah, I think that’s tricky. There’s another thing which I don’t know, maybe in some ways this is my aesthetic coming in, but I’ll try to give you a rationalization. I’m actually a little suspicious of automated interoperability, and I think that partly just that I want humans to understand neural networks. And if the neural network is understanding it for me, I don’t quite like that, but I do have a bit of… In some ways, I’m sort of like the mathematicians who are like, “If there’s a computer automated proof, it doesn’t count.” They won’t understand it. But I do also think that there is this kind of reflections on trusting trust type issue where there’s this famous talk about when you’re writing a computer program, you have to trust your compiler.
And if there was malware in your compiler, then it could go and inject malware into the next compiler and you’d be kind of in trouble, right? Well, if you’re using neural networks to go and verify that your neural networks are safe, the hypothesis that you’re trusting for is like, “Okay, well the neural network maybe isn’t safe and you have to worry about is there some way that it could be screwing with you? I think that’s not a big concern now, but I do wonder in the long run, if we have to use really powerful AI systems to go and audit our AI systems, is that actually something we can trust? But maybe I’m just rationalizing because I just want us to have to get to a point where humans understand everything.
Scaling Monosemanticity
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean that’s hilarious, especially as we talk about AI safety and looking for features that would be relevant to AI safety, like deception and so on. So let’s talk about the Scaling Monosematicity paper in May 2024. Okay. So what did it take to scale this, to apply to Claude 3 Sonnet?
Yeah, I mean that’s hilarious, especially as we talk about AI safety and looking for features that would be relevant to AI safety, like deception and so on. So let’s talk about the Scaling Monosematicity paper in May 2024. Okay. So what did it take to scale this, to apply to Claude 3 Sonnet?
Chris Olah
Well, a lot of GPUs.
Well, a lot of GPUs.
Lex Fridman
A lot more GPUs. Got it.
A lot more GPUs. Got it.
Chris Olah
But one of my teammates, Tom Henighan was involved in the original scaling laws work, and something that he was sort of interested in from very early on is are there scaling laws for interoperability? And so something he immediately did when this work started to succeed, and we started to have sparse autoencoders work, was he became very interested in what are the scaling laws for making sparse autoencoders larger and how does that relate to making the base model larger? And so it turns out this works really well and you can use it to sort of project, if you train a sparse autoencoder of a given size, how many tokens should you train on and so on. This was actually a very big help to us in scaling up this work, and made it a lot easier for us to go and train really large sparse autoencoders where it’s not training the big models, but it’s starting to get to a point where it’s actually expensive to go and train the really big ones.
But one of my teammates, Tom Henighan was involved in the original scaling laws work, and something that he was sort of interested in from very early on is are there scaling laws for interoperability? And so something he immediately did when this work started to succeed, and we started to have sparse autoencoders work, was he became very interested in what are the scaling laws for making sparse autoencoders larger and how does that relate to making the base model larger? And so it turns out this works really well and you can use it to sort of project, if you train a sparse autoencoder of a given size, how many tokens should you train on and so on. This was actually a very big help to us in scaling up this work, and made it a lot easier for us to go and train really large sparse autoencoders where it’s not training the big models, but it’s starting to get to a point where it’s actually expensive to go and train the really big ones.
Lex Fridman
I mean, you have to do all this stuff of splitting it across large CPUs-
I mean, you have to do all this stuff of splitting it across large CPUs-
Chris Olah
Oh, yeah. No, I mean there’s a huge engineering challenge here too, right? Yeah. So there’s a scientific question of how do you scale things effectively? And then there’s an enormous amount of engineering to go and scale this up. You have to chart it, you have to think very carefully about a lot of things. I’m lucky to work with a bunch of great engineers because I am definitely not a great engineer.
Oh, yeah. No, I mean there’s a huge engineering challenge here too, right? Yeah. So there’s a scientific question of how do you scale things effectively? And then there’s an enormous amount of engineering to go and scale this up. You have to chart it, you have to think very carefully about a lot of things. I’m lucky to work with a bunch of great engineers because I am definitely not a great engineer.
Lex Fridman
And the infrastructure especially. Yeah, for sure. So it turns out TLDR, it worked.
And the infrastructure especially. Yeah, for sure. So it turns out TLDR, it worked.
Chris Olah
It worked. Yeah. And I think this is important because you could have imagined a world where you set after towards monospecificity. Chris, this is great. It works on a one-layer model, but one-layer models are really idiosyncratic. Maybe that’s just something, maybe the linear representation hypothesis and superposition hypothesis is the right way to understand a one-layer model, but it’s not the right way to understand larger models. So I think, I mean, first of all, the Cunningham and all paper sort of cut through that a little bit and sort of suggested that this wasn’t the case.
It worked. Yeah. And I think this is important because you could have imagined a world where you set after towards monospecificity. Chris, this is great. It works on a one-layer model, but one-layer models are really idiosyncratic. Maybe that’s just something, maybe the linear representation hypothesis and superposition hypothesis is the right way to understand a one-layer model, but it’s not the right way to understand larger models. So I think, I mean, first of all, the Cunningham and all paper sort of cut through that a little bit and sort of suggested that this wasn’t the case.
But Scaling Monospecificity sort of I think was significant evidence that even for very large models, and we did it on Claude 3 Sonnet, which at that point was one of our production models. Even these models seemed to be substantially explained, at least by linear features. And doing dictionary learning on them works, and as you learn more features, you go and you explain more and more. So that’s, I think, quite a promising sign. And you find now really fascinating abstract features, and the features are also multimodal. They respond to images and texts for the same concept, which is fun.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Can you explain that? I mean, backdoor, there’s just a lot of examples that you can-
Yeah. Can you explain that? I mean, backdoor, there’s just a lot of examples that you can-
Chris Olah
Yeah. So maybe let’s start with that. One example to start, which is we found some features around security vulnerabilities and backdoorsing code. So turns out those are actually two different features. So there’s a security vulnerability feature, and if you force it active, Claude it will start to go and write security vulnerabilities like buffer overflows into code. And also fires for all kinds of things, some of the top data set examples where things like dash dash, disable SSL or something like this, which are sort of obviously really insecure.
Yeah. So maybe let’s start with that. One example to start, which is we found some features around security vulnerabilities and backdoorsing code. So turns out those are actually two different features. So there’s a security vulnerability feature, and if you force it active, Claude it will start to go and write security vulnerabilities like buffer overflows into code. And also fires for all kinds of things, some of the top data set examples where things like dash dash, disable SSL or something like this, which are sort of obviously really insecure.
Lex Fridman
So at this point, maybe it’s just because the examples are presented that way, it’s kind of surface a little bit more obvious examples. I guess the idea is that down the line it might be able to detect more nuance like deception or bugs or that kind of stuff.
So at this point, maybe it’s just because the examples are presented that way, it’s kind of surface a little bit more obvious examples. I guess the idea is that down the line it might be able to detect more nuance like deception or bugs or that kind of stuff.
Chris Olah
Yeah. Well, maybe I want to distinguish two things. So one is the complexity of the feature or the concept, right? And the other is the nuance of how subtle the examples we’re looking at, right?. So when we show the top data set examples, those are the most extreme examples that cause that feature to activate. And so it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t fire for more subtle things. So that insecure code feature, the stuff that it fires most strongly for are these really obvious disable the security type things, but it also fires for buffer overflows and more subtle security vulnerabilities in code. These features are all multimodal. You could ask it like, “What images activate this feature?” And it turns out that the security vulnerability feature activates for images of people clicking on Chrome to go past this website, the SSL certificate might be wrong or something like this.
Yeah. Well, maybe I want to distinguish two things. So one is the complexity of the feature or the concept, right? And the other is the nuance of how subtle the examples we’re looking at, right?. So when we show the top data set examples, those are the most extreme examples that cause that feature to activate. And so it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t fire for more subtle things. So that insecure code feature, the stuff that it fires most strongly for are these really obvious disable the security type things, but it also fires for buffer overflows and more subtle security vulnerabilities in code. These features are all multimodal. You could ask it like, “What images activate this feature?” And it turns out that the security vulnerability feature activates for images of people clicking on Chrome to go past this website, the SSL certificate might be wrong or something like this.
Another thing that’s very entertaining is there’s backdoors in code feature, like you activate it, it goes and Claude writes a backdoor that will go and dump your data to port or something. But you can ask, “Okay, what images activate the backdoor feature?” It was devices with hidden cameras in them. So there’s a whole apparently genre of people going and selling devices that look innocuous that have hidden cameras, and they have ads that has this hidden camera in it? And I guess that is the physical version of a backdoor. And so it sort of shows you how abstract these concepts are, and I just thought that was… I’m sort of sad that there’s a whole market of people selling devices like that, but I was kind of delighted that that was the thing that it came up with as the top image examples for the feature.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s nice. It’s multimodal. It’s multi almost context. It’s broad, strong definition of a singular concept. It’s nice.
Yeah, it’s nice. It’s multimodal. It’s multi almost context. It’s broad, strong definition of a singular concept. It’s nice.
Chris Olah
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
To me, one of the really interesting features, especially for AI safety, is deception and lying. And the possibility that these kinds of methods could detect lying in a model, especially get smarter and smarter and smarter. Presumably that’s a big threat over super intelligent model that it can deceive the people operating it as to its intentions or any of that kind of stuff. So what have you learned from detecting lying inside models?
To me, one of the really interesting features, especially for AI safety, is deception and lying. And the possibility that these kinds of methods could detect lying in a model, especially get smarter and smarter and smarter. Presumably that’s a big threat over super intelligent model that it can deceive the people operating it as to its intentions or any of that kind of stuff. So what have you learned from detecting lying inside models?
Chris Olah
Yeah, so I think we’re in some ways in early days for that, we find quite a few features related to deception and lying. There’s one feature where it fires for people lying and being deceptive, and you force it active and Claude starts lying to you. So we have a deception feature. I mean, there’s all kinds of other features about withholding information and not answering questions, features about power seeking and coups and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of features that are kind of related to spooky things, and if you force them active Claude will behave in ways that are… they’re not the kinds of behaviors you want.
Yeah, so I think we’re in some ways in early days for that, we find quite a few features related to deception and lying. There’s one feature where it fires for people lying and being deceptive, and you force it active and Claude starts lying to you. So we have a deception feature. I mean, there’s all kinds of other features about withholding information and not answering questions, features about power seeking and coups and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of features that are kind of related to spooky things, and if you force them active Claude will behave in ways that are… they’re not the kinds of behaviors you want.
Lex Fridman
What are possible next exciting directions to you in the space of Mechinterp?
What are possible next exciting directions to you in the space of Mechinterp?
Chris Olah
Well, there’s a lot of things. So for one thing, I would really like to get to a point where we have shortcuts where we can really understand not just the features, but then use that to understand the computation of models. That relief for me is the ultimate goal of this. And there’s been some work, we put out a few things. There’s a paper from Sam Marks that does some stuff like this, and there’s been, I’d say some work around the edges here. But I think there’s a lot more to do, and I think that will be a very exciting thing that’s related to a challenge we call interference weights. Where due to superstition, if you just sort of naively look at what features are connected together, there may be some weights that don’t exist in the upstairs model, but are just sort of artifacts of superstition. So that’s a technical challenge Related to that, I think another exciting direction is just you might think of sparse autoencoders as being kind of like a telescope. They allow us to look out and see all these features that are out there, and as we build better and better sparse autoencoders, we better and better at dictionary learning, we see more and more stars. And we zoom in on smaller and smaller stars. There’s a lot of evidence that we’re only still seeing a very small fraction of the stars. There’s a lot of matter in our neural network universe that we can’t observe yet. And it may be that we’ll never be able to have fine enough instruments to observe it, and maybe some of it just isn’t possible, isn’t computationally tractable to observe. So it’s sort of a kind of dark matter in not in maybe the sense of modern astronomy of early astronomy when we didn’t know what this unexplained matter is. And so I think a lot about that dark matter and whether we’ll ever observe it and what that means for safety if we can’t observe it, if some significant fraction of neural networks are not accessible to us.
Well, there’s a lot of things. So for one thing, I would really like to get to a point where we have shortcuts where we can really understand not just the features, but then use that to understand the computation of models. That relief for me is the ultimate goal of this. And there’s been some work, we put out a few things. There’s a paper from Sam Marks that does some stuff like this, and there’s been, I’d say some work around the edges here. But I think there’s a lot more to do, and I think that will be a very exciting thing that’s related to a challenge we call interference weights. Where due to superstition, if you just sort of naively look at what features are connected together, there may be some weights that don’t exist in the upstairs model, but are just sort of artifacts of superstition. So that’s a technical challenge Related to that, I think another exciting direction is just you might think of sparse autoencoders as being kind of like a telescope. They allow us to look out and see all these features that are out there, and as we build better and better sparse autoencoders, we better and better at dictionary learning, we see more and more stars. And we zoom in on smaller and smaller stars. There’s a lot of evidence that we’re only still seeing a very small fraction of the stars. There’s a lot of matter in our neural network universe that we can’t observe yet. And it may be that we’ll never be able to have fine enough instruments to observe it, and maybe some of it just isn’t possible, isn’t computationally tractable to observe. So it’s sort of a kind of dark matter in not in maybe the sense of modern astronomy of early astronomy when we didn’t know what this unexplained matter is. And so I think a lot about that dark matter and whether we’ll ever observe it and what that means for safety if we can’t observe it, if some significant fraction of neural networks are not accessible to us.
Macroscopic behavior of neural networks
Another question that I think a lot about is at the end of the day, mechanistic interpolation is this very microscopic approach to interpolation. It’s trying to understand things in a very fine-grained way, but a lot of the questions we care about are very macroscopic. We care about these questions about neural network behavior, and I think that’s the thing that I care most about. But there’s lots of other sort of larger-scale questions you might care about. And the nice thing about having a very microscopic approach is it’s maybe easier to ask, is this true? But the downside is its much further from the things we care about. And so we now have this ladder to climb. And I think there’s a question of will we be able to find, are there larger-scale abstractions that we can use to understand neural networks that can we get up from this very microscopic approach?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You’ve written about this as kind of organs question.
Yeah. You’ve written about this as kind of organs question.
Chris Olah
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman
If we think of interpretability as a kind of anatomy of neural networks, most of the circus threads involve studying tiny little veins looking at the small scale and individual neurons and how they connect. However, there are many natural questions that the small-scale approach doesn’t address. In contrast, the most prominent abstractions and biological anatomy involve larger-scale structures like individual organs, like the heart or entire organ systems like the respiratory system. And so we wonder, is there a respiratory system or heart or brain region of an artificial neural network?
If we think of interpretability as a kind of anatomy of neural networks, most of the circus threads involve studying tiny little veins looking at the small scale and individual neurons and how they connect. However, there are many natural questions that the small-scale approach doesn’t address. In contrast, the most prominent abstractions and biological anatomy involve larger-scale structures like individual organs, like the heart or entire organ systems like the respiratory system. And so we wonder, is there a respiratory system or heart or brain region of an artificial neural network?
Chris Olah
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, if you think about science, right? A lot of scientific fields investigate things at many level of abstraction. In biology, you have molecular biology studying proteins and molecules and so on, and they have cellular biology, and then you have histology studying tissues, and then you have anatomy, and then you have zoology, and then you have ecology. And so you have many, many levels of abstraction or physics, maybe you have a physics of individual particles, and then statistical physics gives you thermodynamics and things like this. And so you often have different levels of abstraction.
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, if you think about science, right? A lot of scientific fields investigate things at many level of abstraction. In biology, you have molecular biology studying proteins and molecules and so on, and they have cellular biology, and then you have histology studying tissues, and then you have anatomy, and then you have zoology, and then you have ecology. And so you have many, many levels of abstraction or physics, maybe you have a physics of individual particles, and then statistical physics gives you thermodynamics and things like this. And so you often have different levels of abstraction.
And I think that right now we have mechanistic interpretability, if it succeeds, is sort of like a microbiology of neural networks, but we want something more like anatomy. And a question you might ask is, “Why can’t you just go there directly?” And I think the answer is superstition, at least in significant part. It’s that it’s actually very hard to see this macroscopic structure without first sort of breaking down the microscopic structure in the right way and then studying how it connects together. But I’m hopeful that there is going to be something much larger than features and circuits and that we’re going to be able to have a story that involves much bigger things. And then you can sort of study in detail the parts you care about.
Lex Fridman
I suppose, in your biology, like a psychologist or a psychiatrist of a neural network.
I suppose, in your biology, like a psychologist or a psychiatrist of a neural network.
Chris Olah
And I think that the beautiful thing would be if we could go and rather than having disparate fields for those two things, if you could build a bridge between them, such that you could go and have all of your higher level distractions be grounded very firmly in this very solid, more rigorous, ideally foundation.
And I think that the beautiful thing would be if we could go and rather than having disparate fields for those two things, if you could build a bridge between them, such that you could go and have all of your higher level distractions be grounded very firmly in this very solid, more rigorous, ideally foundation.
Lex Fridman
What do you think is the difference between the human brain, the biological neural network and the artificial neural network?
What do you think is the difference between the human brain, the biological neural network and the artificial neural network?
Chris Olah
Well, the neuroscientists have a much harder job than us. Sometimes I just count my blessings by how much easier my job is than the neuroscientists. So we can record from all the neurons. We can do that on arbitrary amounts of data. The neurons don’t change while you’re doing that, by the way. You can go and ablate neurons, you can edit the connections and so on, and then you can undo those changes. That’s pretty great. You can intervene on any neuron and force it active and see what happens. You know which neurons are connected to everything. Neuroscientists want to get the connectome, we have the connectome and we have it for much bigger than C. elegans. And then not only do we have the connectome, we know which neurons excite or inhibit each other, right? It’s not just that we know the binary mask, we know the weights. We can take gradients, we know computationally what each neuron does. I don’t know. The list goes on and on. We just have so many advantages over neuroscientists. And then despite having all those advantages, it’s really hard. And so one thing I do sometimes think is like, “Gosh, if it’s this hard for us, it seems impossible under the constraints of neuroscience or near impossible.” I don’t know. Maybe part of me is I’ve got a few neuroscientists on my team, maybe I’m sort of like, “Ah, the neuroscientists. Maybe some of them would like to have an easier problem that’s still very hard, and they could come and work on neural networks. And then after we figure out things in sort of the easy little pond of trying to understand neural networks, which is still very hard, then we could go back to biological neuroscience.”
Well, the neuroscientists have a much harder job than us. Sometimes I just count my blessings by how much easier my job is than the neuroscientists. So we can record from all the neurons. We can do that on arbitrary amounts of data. The neurons don’t change while you’re doing that, by the way. You can go and ablate neurons, you can edit the connections and so on, and then you can undo those changes. That’s pretty great. You can intervene on any neuron and force it active and see what happens. You know which neurons are connected to everything. Neuroscientists want to get the connectome, we have the connectome and we have it for much bigger than C. elegans. And then not only do we have the connectome, we know which neurons excite or inhibit each other, right? It’s not just that we know the binary mask, we know the weights. We can take gradients, we know computationally what each neuron does. I don’t know. The list goes on and on. We just have so many advantages over neuroscientists. And then despite having all those advantages, it’s really hard. And so one thing I do sometimes think is like, “Gosh, if it’s this hard for us, it seems impossible under the constraints of neuroscience or near impossible.” I don’t know. Maybe part of me is I’ve got a few neuroscientists on my team, maybe I’m sort of like, “Ah, the neuroscientists. Maybe some of them would like to have an easier problem that’s still very hard, and they could come and work on neural networks. And then after we figure out things in sort of the easy little pond of trying to understand neural networks, which is still very hard, then we could go back to biological neuroscience.”
Beauty of neural networks
Lex Fridman
I love what you’ve written about the goal of MechInterp research as two goals, safety and beauty. So can you talk about the beauty side of things?
I love what you’ve written about the goal of MechInterp research as two goals, safety and beauty. So can you talk about the beauty side of things?
Chris Olah
Yeah. So there’s this funny thing where I think some people are kind of disappointed by neural networks, I think, where they’re like, “Ah, neural networks, it’s just these simple rules. Then you just do a bunch of engineering to scale it up and it works really well. And where’s the complex ideas? This isn’t a very nice, beautiful scientific result.” And I sometimes think when people say that, I picture them being like, “Evolution is so boring. It’s just a bunch of simple rules. And you run evolution for a long time and you get biology. What a sucky way for biology to have turned out. Where’s the complex rules?” But the beauty is that the simplicity generates complexity.
Yeah. So there’s this funny thing where I think some people are kind of disappointed by neural networks, I think, where they’re like, “Ah, neural networks, it’s just these simple rules. Then you just do a bunch of engineering to scale it up and it works really well. And where’s the complex ideas? This isn’t a very nice, beautiful scientific result.” And I sometimes think when people say that, I picture them being like, “Evolution is so boring. It’s just a bunch of simple rules. And you run evolution for a long time and you get biology. What a sucky way for biology to have turned out. Where’s the complex rules?” But the beauty is that the simplicity generates complexity.
Biology has these simple rules and it gives rise to all the life and ecosystems that we see around us. All the beauty of nature, that all just comes from evolution and from something very simple in evolution. And similarly, I think that neural networks build, create enormous complexity and beauty inside and structure inside themselves that people generally don’t look at and don’t try to understand because it’s hard to understand. But I think that there is an incredibly rich structure to be discovered inside neural networks, a lot of very deep beauty if we’re just willing to take the time to go and see it and understand it.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I love Mechinterp. The feeling like we are understanding or getting glimpses of understanding the magic that’s going on inside is really wonderful.
Yeah, I love Mechinterp. The feeling like we are understanding or getting glimpses of understanding the magic that’s going on inside is really wonderful.
Chris Olah
It feels to me like one of the questions that’s just calling out to be asked, and I’m sort of, I mean a lot of people are thinking about this, but I’m often surprised that not more are is how is it that we don’t know how to create computer systems that can do these things? And yet we have these amazing systems that we don’t know how to directly create computer programs that can do these things, but these neural networks can do all these amazing things. And it just feels like that is obviously the question that is calling out to be answered. If you have any degree of curiosity, it’s like, “How is it that humanity now has these artifacts that can do these things that we don’t know how to do?”
It feels to me like one of the questions that’s just calling out to be asked, and I’m sort of, I mean a lot of people are thinking about this, but I’m often surprised that not more are is how is it that we don’t know how to create computer systems that can do these things? And yet we have these amazing systems that we don’t know how to directly create computer programs that can do these things, but these neural networks can do all these amazing things. And it just feels like that is obviously the question that is calling out to be answered. If you have any degree of curiosity, it’s like, “How is it that humanity now has these artifacts that can do these things that we don’t know how to do?”
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I love the image of the circus reaching towards the light of the objective function.
Yeah. I love the image of the circus reaching towards the light of the objective function.
Chris Olah
Yeah, it’s this organic thing that we’ve grown and we have no idea what we’ve grown.
Yeah, it’s this organic thing that we’ve grown and we have no idea what we’ve grown.
Lex Fridman
Well, thank you for working on safety, and thank you for appreciating the beauty of the things you discover. And thank you for talking today, Chris, this was wonderful.
Well, thank you for working on safety, and thank you for appreciating the beauty of the things you discover. And thank you for talking today, Chris, this was wonderful.
Chris Olah
Thank you for taking the time to chat as well.
Thank you for taking the time to chat as well.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Ola and before that, with Dario Amodei and Amanda Askell. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Alan Watts. “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Ola and before that, with Dario Amodei and Amanda Askell. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Alan Watts. “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies | Lex Fridman Podcast #451
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #451 with Rick Spence.
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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?
So what I mean by that is that if you’re looking at the modern SVR or FSB, which are just two different organizations that used to be part of the one big KGB or the KGB or its predecessors, the Checka, you’re really going back to the late 19th century and the Imperial Russian Intelligence Security Service, generally known as the Okhrana or Okhrana.
It’s really the Department of Police, the special Corps of Gendarmes. Their primary job was protecting the imperial regime and protecting it against imperial or other interior enemies, Revolutionaries for the most part. They got very, very good at that by co-opting people within those movements, infiltrating and recruiting informers, [inaudible 00:02:41] provocateurs. In fact, they excelled at the [inaudible 00:02:45] provocateur.
Person who placed aside an organization to cause trouble, usually maneuver them into a position of leadership, and they provoke actions that can then allow you to crack down on that is many sort of lure or bring the target organization into any legal or open status that it can be more effectively suppressed. They were very good at that. So good that by the early 20th century in the years preceding the Russian Revolution in 1917, they had effectively infiltrated every radical party, Bolsheviks, Menchaviks, SRs, great and small, and placed people in positions of influence and leadership to the point that arguably that is, you can debate this, that I think in the whole, they could largely dictate what those parties did.
Nothing was discussed at any central committee meeting of any revolutionary group that the Okhrana wasn’t immediately aware of, and they often had people in positions to influence what those decisions were. Of course, that raises an interesting question, is that if they were that good and they had infiltrated and effectively controlled most of the opposition, then how did the regime get overthrown by revolutionaries? The answer to that is that it wasn’t overthrown by revolutionaries, it was overthrown by politicians. That would then take us into a detour into Russian history. But I’ll just leave it with this. If you look at 1917 and you look closely, this is one of the things I’d always tell my students is that there are two Russian revolutions in 1917. There’s the first one in March or February, depending on your calendar, that overthrows Nicholas II. Revolutionaries are really not involved with that.
Bolsheviks are nowhere to be seen. Trotsky and Lenin are nowhere to be seen. They have nothing to do with that. That has to do effectively with a political conspiracy within the Russian parliament, the Duma. To unseat and emperor, they thought was bungling the war and was essentially a loser to begin with. It was a coup d’etat, a parliamentary coup d’etat. The temporary or provisional government that that revolution put in power was the one overthrown by Lenin eight months later. That government was essentially one dominated by moderate socialists. It was a government that very quickly sort of turned to the left. The guy we associate with that is Alexander Kerensky. Alexander Kerensky was a Russian socialist, a politician. He was the quasi-dictator of that regime. He’s the person, not the Tsar, who’s overthrown by Lenin. So the revolutionaries then did not prove to be the fatal threat to the Tsarist regime.
It was the Tsarist political system itself that did that. What then transpired was that the Okhrana and its method, and many of its agents then immediately segued over into the new Soviet Security Service. So one of the first things that Lenin did in December of 1917, within a month of seizing power since the hold on power was tenuous at best, was that while you were going to need some kind of organization to infiltrate and suppress those pesky counter-revolutionaries and foreign imperialists and all of the other enemies that we have. So the extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-revolution and sabotage the Cheka was formed. You put a veteran Bolshevik, Felix Dzerzhinsky at the head of that someone you could politically rely upon, but Dzerzhinsky built his organization essentially out of the Okhrana. There were all of these informers sitting around with nothing to do, and they were employed in the early twenties. The kind of rank-and-file of the Cheka might’ve been 80 to 90% former Imperial officials. Those were gradually decreased over time.
So why would they do that? Well, they were professionals. They also needed to eat and things were somewhat precarious. So if your job is to be an agent provocateur, if your job is to infiltrate targeted organizations and lead them astray, you do that for whoever pays you. That’s part of the professionalism, which goes in. Under the Soviets, the Soviet Intelligence Services are also very good at that. They’re very good at infiltrating people into opposing organizations. I guess the one example I would give to demonstrate that at the Cambridge five, the British traders from the Soviet standpoint, heroes who were recruited, most notably Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald McClain, Anthony Blunt, and there may have been, well more than five, but that wasn’t bad out of just Cambridge.
Then placing those people in high positions, the ultimate goal, of course, is to get your people into positions of leadership and influence in the opposing intelligence service. So they did. Of course, it all fell apart and they ended up in …Philby ended up living the last part of his life in exile in Moscow, but they got their money’s worth out of him. You can also find this in KGB infiltration, the CIA, the FBI, the Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanson cases. Of course, we were infiltrating. By we, I mean the Americans in the West managed to infiltrate our moles as well. But if it came down, someone could dispute this. But I would think if you were going to come down to kind of like who had the most moles Super Bowl, probably the Soviets would come somewhat ahead of that.
Once you have the state, then you induce socialism from above. Whereas the majority of the people, the so-called Mensheviks, the minority-ites who are oddly-enough, the vast majority of the party, that’s one of the first things. How do you lose that argument? How does the minority get to grab the name? But Lenin did that. So what Lenin wanted was a conspiratorial party of committed revolutionaries that would plot and scheme and undermine and eventually seize control of the state and induce socialism from above. There were other Russian Marxists who thought that that sounded vaguely totalitarian and not really democratic and not even terribly socialist. They opposed that ineffectively from the beginning, outmaneuvered every step of the way. The Mensheviks are a case study in failure of a political organization. That too will be heresy to some people.
But look, they lost. So what Lenin managed to do starting around 1903, continuing under this, is he managed to divide, to take what had been a single Marxist party and split it into angry contending factions because he and his Bolsheviks run one side advocating a much more militant conspiratorial policy. The discombobulated Mensheviks were over on the other. And in between were a lot of people who really didn’t know where they stood on this. Sometimes they kind of agreed he seems to be making sense today. No, no, I don’t think he’s making sense in that day. But he managed to completely disunify this organization. Now, who could possibly have seen benefit in that the Okhrana. Now, whether or not they put him up to it, whether or not in some way they helped move him into a position of leadership or encouraged it or encouraged it through people around him, whether he was a witting or unwitting agent of the Tsar’s Secret Police, he certainly accomplished exactly what it was that they had wanted.
I find that suspicious. It’s one of those things that it’s so convenient in a way, is that I’m not necessarily sure that was an accident. There’s also this whole question to me as to what was going on within the Okhrana itself. Now, this is one of these questions we may come to later about how intelligence agencies interact or serve the governments to which they are theoretically subordinate. They do tend to acquire a great deal of influence and power. After all, their main job is to collect information. That information could be about all kinds of things, including people within the government structure itself.
They also know how to leverage that information in a way to get people to do what you want them to do. So an argument can be made, again, an argument, not a fact, merely an opinion, which is mostly what history is made out of opinions is that at some point between about 1900 and 1917, people within the Okhrana were playing their own game. That game took them in a direction, which meant that continued loyalty to the emperor, specifically to Nicholas II, was no longer part of that.
To me, in a way, it seems almost during the events of 1917, that one, you had an organization that was very effective that suddenly just becomes ineffective. It doesn’t really disappear. These things don’t go away because it will reappear as the O’Chacka basically fairly quickly. But it raises the question to me as to what degree there were people within the organization who allowed events to take the course they wished.
But the Minister of the Interior had no real effective control over this at all. To the point was that at one point early on, they actually organized the assassination of their own boss. They have their agents among the revolutionaries kill the Minister of the Interior. He’ll just replaced by another one. He’s an Imperial bureaucrat. He’s not really part of their organization. It’s like a director of an intelligence agency appointed by the president. Maybe he’s part of the organization, maybe he isn’t. Maybe he is not one of us. So you’ve got different levels, different compartments within it. Who’s actually running the show, if anyone is, I don’t know. That’s never supposed to be apparent.
That’s kind of an interesting method of intimidation in that regard. But the suspicion is nonetheless there, Dzerzhinsk was the grand inquisitor. He was seemingly firmly in control of the organization. Of course, maybe he wasn’t. My guess would be is that if Dzerzhinsky’s death was not natural causes, that he was probably eliminated by someone within his own organization. Then you look at the people who take over his immediate successor is Vyacheslav Menzhinsky who’s really not really a secret policeman, more a kind of intellectual dilettante. But if you look behind him, is the fellow Genrikh Yagoda, and Yagoda will really manage things from behind the scenes until Menzhinsky dies in 1930.
Then Yagoda will hold on until he’s the victim of the purges, I think in 37 or 38. Yagoda is ambitious, murderous, and if I was going to point the finger to anybody who possibly had Dzerzhinsky whacked, it would be him. For the purposes simply of advancement. The person to look out at any kind of corporate organization is your immediate subordinate, the person who could move into your job, because more than likely, that’s exactly what they’re planning to do.
But ideology was just so convenient, and those people would just work for you so well. You could get them to do anything, betray their grandmother. They would go ahead and do that for the greater good. So ideology can be a motivation, and that can be someone who is a devoted Marxist-Leninist. It can also be someone who’s a disgruntled communist because there’s no anti-communist like an ex-communist.
Those who lose the faith can become very, very useful. For instance, if you look in the case of American intelligence, the people who essentially temporarily destroyed much of the KGB organization in the US post-World War II, where people like Whitaker Chambers, Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley, all of those people had been Communist party members. They had all been part of the Red Faithful. They all, for one reason or another, became disillusioned and turned rat or patriot, whichever case you may want to put in that regard.
If you don’t work for us, we will spread the rumor through our agents already in your organization that you are. Then what will your comrades do? How long are you going to live? So you see, you have no choice. You’re ours, and you’re going to cooperate with us. The way that that effectiveness will be ensured is that you have multiple agents within the same organization who don’t know who each other are. That’s very important. They’ll all be filing reports. So let’s say you have three agents inside the central committee of the SR party, and there’s a committee meeting, and you’re going to look at the reports they file. They all better agree with each other. If one person doesn’t report what the other two do, then perhaps they’re not entirely doing their job and they can be liquidated at any time. All you do is drop the dime on them.
This was done periodically. In fact, in some cases, you would betray your own agents just to completely discombobulate to the organization. This happened in one particular case around 1908, the fellow who was the head of the chief revolutionary terrorist organization, which wasn’t Bolshevik, but the so-called socialist revolutionaries. Actually the biggest revolutionary party, the SRs, who aren’t even actually Marxists more anarchists, but they went all in for the propaganda, the deed. They really like blowing people up and carried out quite a campaign of terrorism. The fellow who was the head of that terrorist organization was a fellow by name of Yevno Azef. Yevno Azef was, guess what? An Okhrana agent. Everything he did, every assassination that he planned, he did in consultation with his control. So he’d kind of run out his string. There was increasing suspicion of him.
He was also asking for a lot more money. So the Okhrana itself arranged to have him ride it out. What did that do? Well, what do you do in your party when you find out the chief of your terrorist brigade was a secret police agent. It’s consternation and mistrust. Nobody in the party would ever trust, and you couldn’t tell who you were sitting around. I know that a fellow I wrote a biography on Boris Sevenkov who was a Russian revolutionary and the second in command within the terrorist organization. By the way, the guy that wanted Azef’s job so bad he could taste it, well, on the one level, he expressed absolute horror that his boss was a police agent, and well, he should, because Sevenkov was a police agent too. See, they already had the number two waiting in the wings to take over, but he was legitimately shocked. He didn’t really suspect that.
So it’s a way of manipulating this. Then finally, we come to the E. That I think is the most important, ego. Sometimes people spy or betray because of the egotistical satisfaction that they receive, the sheer kind of Machiavellian joy in deceit. An example of that would be Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge five. Now, Philby was a communist, and he would argue that he always saw himself as serving the communist cause. But he also made this statement, I think it’s in the preface to his autobiography, and he says, one never looks twice at the offer of service in elite force. He’s talking about his recruitment by the NKVD in the 1930s, and he was absolutely chuffed by that.
The mere fact that they would want him, what he considered to be a first-rate organization would want him, satisfied his ego. If I was to take a guess as to whether it was ideological motivation, whether it was the romance of communism or whether it was the appeal of ego that was the most important in his career of treason, I’d go with ego. I think that figures into a lot. Someone doesn’t get the promotions that they wanted. Again, if you look at something like Aldrich Ames career in particular, you’ve got these … his career in the CIA was hit or miss.
He didn’t get the postings or promotions that he wanted his evaluation. He never felt that he got credit for doing that. That’s the type of thing that tends to stick in someone’s craw and can lead for egotistical reasons an added incentive to betray.
They can’t run around in the country carrying guns to use on people. They can’t arrest you. They can’t interrogate you, they can’t jail you. They have no police or judicial powers. Now, that means they have to get that from someone else. That doesn’t mean that other agencies can’t be brought in or local police officials, corn or whatever you need you can eventually acquire. But they can’t do that directly. So you’ve got this division between foreign intelligence and domestic counterintelligence often split between hostile organizations. The relationship between the FBI and the CIA, I think it’s fair to say, is not chummy, never has been. There’s always been a certain amount of rivalry and contention between the two. It’s not to say that something like that didn’t exist between the domestic counterintelligence and foreign intelligence components of the KGB, but there would be less of that to a degree, because there was a single organization.
They’re all answerable to the same people. So that gives you a certain greater amount, I think, of leeway and power because you’re controlling both of those ends. I remember somebody telling me once that, and he was a retired KGB officer. There you go, retired. One of the things that he found amusing was that in his role, one of the things that he could be is that he could be anywhere at any time in any dress, which meant that he could be in or out of uniform and any place at any time. He was authorized to do that.
One of the things it certainly teaches you never trust foreigners. Every foreign government anywhere, any country on your border is a real or potential enemy. They will all, at some point, if given the chance, invade you. Therefore, they must always be treated with great suspicion. It goes back to something that I think the British observed was that countries don’t have friends, they have interests, and those interests can change over time.
And killing also is generally frowned upon. Put people in prison for that, they’re otherwise executed. But in certain circumstances, killing is one of those things that you need to be able to do. So what he felt he was being told in that case is that once you enter this realm, the same sort of moral rules that apply in general British society do not apply. And if you’re squeamish about it, you won’t fit in. You have to be able to do those things.
So subsequently, the person which that personality inhabited was captured and interrogated, tortured, had their fingernails torn out, they would have no memory of it. They couldn’t give any kind of secret away because it was embedded in some part of their brain where there was a completely different person. You can just imagine the possibilities that you can dream up. And again, it’s not, I think, the question is to whether that is possible or whether it was done, although I suspect that both of those are true, but that you would try to do it. Then imagine the mischief that comes out of that. And one of the big complaints from a legal standpoint about MKUltra and the rest is that you were having medical experiments essentially being carried out on people without their knowledge and against their will, which is a no-no.
So in Epstein’s case, he is a procurer of young girls to wealthy men largely. And many of those events were recorded. Now, even if it wasn’t his intention to use them for blackmail, think of what someone else could do it because people know about this. So you could raise a question Epstein is just kind of a greedy pervert, but through his greedy perversion, he’s now collecting information that could be useful. Who could that be useful to? Who would like dirt on Prince Andrew? Think of all the people who were there and there were important people who went to Lolita Island. So if it isn’t Epstein directly, he might have been being, I’m not trying to let him off the hook because they have anything for him, he was either running his own blackmail business or someone was using him as a front for that. I think we’re kidding ourselves if we’re trying to pretend that’s not what was going on.
The question comes down with the rituals as how seriously do you take them? How important is this to the people who carry them out? And the interesting answer to that is that for some people it’s just boring. There are probably people standing around the owl who think this is ridiculous and can’t wait for it to get over with. There are the people that are kind of excited about it, get caught up into it, but other people can take it very seriously. It’s all the matter of the intention that you have about what the ritual means. And I don’t mean to suggest by that that there’s anything necessarily sinister about what’s going on, but it is clearly a ritual carried out for some kind of group reinforcing purpose. And you’re absolutely right. You don’t have to do it that way. I’ve gone to summer camps and we never carried out mock sacrifices in front of an owl. We did all those other things. We didn’t even have any robes either. So it goes beyond merely a rich guy summer camp, although that’s an aspect of it.
But it also I think often obscures, focusing on Bohemian Grove at the getaway of the club, ignores that the club is around all the time. That’s what’s at the center of this, it is the club and its members. So despite all the talk about no weaving spiders coming around here, one of the other features of the summer meeting are things called lakeside talks. And this, often people are invited to go there. And one of the people who was invited, I think around 1968, was Richard Nixon who was making his political comeback. And he was invited to give a talk where very important people are listening. And Nixon in his memoirs, realized what was going on. He was being auditioned as to whether or not he was going to be [inaudible 00:57:19], he recognized that that was really the beginning of his second presidential campaign. He was being vetted.
So one of the main theories, call it a conspiracy theory or not, about the Bohemian Club and the gatherings, is that people of wealth and influence gather together and whether or not it’s part of the agenda or not, inevitably you’re going to talk about things of interest. But to me, the mere fact that you invite people in, political leaders, to give lakeside talks means that there are weaving spiders which are going on and it is a perfect private venue to vet people for political office.
So you’re going to start a foundation and you’re going to start backing all the things that you like. I think there’s an element of ego that comes in with it as well. And again, it may not be so much what the rich person with a huge amount of money at their disposal and a lot of fuzzy ideas about what to do with it can be influenced by others. It’s always that question as to who is actually manipulating these events? What’s going on in that regard? In some way, they can be a very useful sucker. Find somebody with a lot of money and get them to finance the things that you want them to do.
The Bohemian Club is I don’t think in and of itself inherently evil or sinister, but it means that there are lots of different people in it who have different agendas. It goes back to what I said about how somebody feels about the cremation of care ritual. This is either just a waste of time, it’s just some sort of silly thing that we’re doing or it’s something of great importance. Perhaps even mystical or religious importance. Because that’s ostensibly what it’s pretending to be. There’s always this question as to what degree you begin to play and the play becomes serious. That tends to happen a lot.
Now, we all know magic, it’s a guy standing on stage performing a trick. But the interesting thing about a stage magician is that a stage magician is we know when we’re watching it that it’s a trick, yet we can’t really figure out, if he does it well, how that trick is being accomplished because it seems to defy physical laws. And that’s fascinating about it. So even though it’s a trick, if you can’t figure it out, it has this kind of power of fascination. But it’s mimicking something. Stage magic is mimicking real magic. So what’s real magic. Well, let’s go back to Aleister Crowley because he always has to come. I knew he was going to come up at some point in this, earlier than not, because he always does.
So it’s this effort to make things occur in a particular way, maybe just to sort of nudge reality in one little way or another. And that’s where things like rituals come in. Rituals are a way of focusing will and intention. We’re all there. We’re all thinking about the same thing. And you have to imagine just how the pervasiveness of what could be called that kind of magical thinking every day is everywhere. So let me give you an example. You ever attended a high school football pep rally? Think of what’s going on there. Okay, your team is going to battle the other team. You’ve now assembled everyone in the gymnasium. You’ve got people who are dancing around in animal totem costumes. And what are you chanting? Everyone is supposed to chant that the other team dies, that you’ll be horribly defeated and that our team will be victorious.
That is a magic ritual. The idea is it becomes into this idea that’s very popular today about visualizing things, visualizing, manifesting. I love this term. You need to manifest your success. Well, that’s just magic. That is trying to cause change in conformity with will. So these things can happen without you being even consciously aware of what’s going on. And you don’t need to be because if you’re all a part of a mob, which is there in the gymnasium and you get into this and you get worked up and a cultist would argue what you’re doing is you’re creating a huge amount of energy. All of these people are putting energy into something and that energy goes somewhere. And maybe you can. Maybe, just maybe, you actually can slightly increase the chances of your team’s victory. Of course, your opponents are having their own ritual at the same time. So whoever has the bigger mojo will apparently win on the team.
And then, of course, working for free upon different cult-owned business enterprises, of which there were several. And there was a person I knew who became a devoted follower of this, and all I could think of at one point was ask them, “What the hell is the matter with you? I mean, have you lost your mind? What is it that this person can possibly be providing that you essentially are going to become a slave to them?” Which is what they were doing. And I actually give that credit in a way of sparking my whole interest in things like secret societies. And here, again, as a disclaimer, I am not now, nor have I ever been the member of any fraternal organization, secret society, or cult that I know of. And that’s what interests me about them, because I’m just always trying to figure out why people do these things. Like I said, why the robes and the owl? Why?
So, I have this real thing about vague, mysterious characters who show up and do things, and trying to figure out who these people are. So we’re working up the years prior to the first World War. So, the decade or so prior to World War I, he spends a lot of time in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey. There was none in the Ottoman Empire, which was a fairly tumultuous place, because in 1908 and 1909, there was the Young Turk Revolution. And, you had a military coup, which effectively overthrew the Ottoman Sultan and installed a military junta, which would go on during the first World War to make its greatest achievement in the Armenian Genocide. Eventually, it created a genocidal military regime which would lead the country into a disastrous first world war, which would destroy the Ottoman Empire, out of which modern Turkey emerges. Yada, yada, yada.
But, that wasn’t necessarily the intention. But, von Sebottendorff is a German businessman who’s working in this period. And the whole point here is that the Ottoman Empire in this period is a hotbed of political intrigue and all kinds of interesting things about it. The Young Turk Revolution is essentially a military coup, but it is plotted in Masonic lodges. Okay? I know, technically Masonic lodges are never supposed to be involved in politics, but they are. Or, the lodge meeting breaks up, and then you plot the revolution. So, same group of people, but it’s not technically. But yes. And there’s the Macedonia Resorcia Lodge in Thessaloniki was ground zero for plotting this military coup that was supposed to improve the Empire. Sebottendorff is, in one way or another, mixed up in all of this, or at least he’s an observer. Plus, he’s initiated into the Masonic lodges.
And interestingly enough, the fellow initiates him into one of these eastern lodges is a Jewish merchant by the name of Termoodi, and who’s also a Kabbalist. And, Sebottendorff is very, very interested in the occult. He’s initiated into eastern Masonic lodges and a period when those same lodges are being used as a center for political intrigue. He also apparently is involved in gunrunning, which in revolutionary periods is there’s a lot of money to be made off of that. So he’s connected to various dark businesses in a tumultuous time with connections to politicized freemasonry and the occult. Now, in the course of the first World War, he returns to Germany. He just shows up. And, it would be my operative suspicion or theory that Sebottendorff was working for someone. I don’t think he just pops up in Munich on his own accord. Why does he leave the Ottoman Empire and return to that place? Who’s behind him? Now, maybe no one, but maybe someone, because he does seem to have money at his disposal. And he comes into Munich and he basically takes over this small occult study group.
Now, the interesting thing is that The Thule Society is really just a branch of another existing, what’s called, an Areosophist order, a thing called the German order, or the Germanic order, which is centered in Berlin. But for some reason, he doesn’t want his group to be connected by name with the Germanic order. So, Thule Society, Thule in this case, is a reference to supposedly a mythical Arctic homeland of the Aryan race. Apparently, they were all snow people who wander out of the snow at some point. It’s a frozen Atlantis. So I mentioned these people, the Areosophists, which, you have to practice saying that. So, what are they? Well, they’re a racist Germanic offshoot of Theosophy. And, I know I’m explaining one thing to explain something, but there’s no other way to do this.
So, Theosophy was 19th century very popular and widely modeled occult belief that was founded by a Russian woman by the name of Helena Blavatsky. She was a medium psychic, supposedly got channelings from the ascended masters. The basic story there, they’re all of the ascended masters, which are mystical beings that may or may not have once been human. They live inside the Himalayas or they float among them on a cloud, and they guide the spiritual evolution of humanity. What Blavatsky did was to take Western esotericism and blend it with Hindu and Buddhist esotericism, which became very, very sexy in the West, still is. Buddhism attracts a lot of people, because, well, it’s Buddhism, it’s different, see? So, the Mahatmas, the ascended masters were sending her messages, despite the fact that she was later proven pretty much to be a fraud and writing the letters herself. Nevertheless, people still went along with this doctrine, and it’s been widely modified and copied since then. So, an idea in Theosophy was that human spiritual evolution was tied to physical evolution.
In the case of Blavatsky, Blavatsky never said that Aryans, white people, anything out this superior. She talked about the different root races, but their version of it’s just gobbledygook that seems to include everyone in. I’d defy you to make much sense out of it. But, in the early 20th century, there were different… One of the things that became fashionable, not terribly popular, these are small movements, was the idea that, well, Germany is a new upcoming country, and part of this I think was really trying to define who the Germans were, because remember, the German Empire, Germany as a political state, doesn’t come until existence until 1871. Prior to that, Germany was a geographic expression, a vaguen, which described a large area in Central Europe where a lot of people who wore leather shorts or something like that and spoke similar German dialects were nominally Germans, but they might be Prussians or Bavarians. They came in all sorts of varieties in religion. There was no German identity.
Something very similar happened in Italy in this same period. I mean, there weren’t Italians, there were Sardinians, and there were Romans, and there were Sicilians. Umbrians spoke, again, dialects of a similar language, but had never lived, not since the Roman Empire under a single state and really didn’t think of themselves as the same. So you have to create this artificial thing. You have to create Germans. “There is now a Germany with an emperor. And so, we’re all going to be Germans.” Well, exactly what is that? Much of it is an artificial creation. You have to decide upon some standard dialect. Okay, we’ll decide what that is. Often dialect that only a few people actually speak, and then they will be drilled into children’s heads through state schooling programs. So I think this is the milieu that it comes out of. People were trying to figure out what on earth Germans actually were. And, the need for some common identity. And, that leads to everything like Wagnerian Opera. Richard Wagner wanted to create a German mythical music. So he went back and strip mined old German myths and cobbled them together into a lot of people standing on stage singing. And, that was his purpose. He was a nationalist. He was in many ways a racialist nationalist. And this was his idea of trying to create out of bits and pieces of the past, a newfangled form of German identity.
So, on the more mystical end of this, you had the ideas that, well, Germany must have been created for some special purpose, because the Germans must be very special people and we must have some particular destiny. And then, out of this, the direction this is heading, well, we’re all part of some master race with some ties to some great civilization in the past, call it Thule, call it whatever you want to be. They basically just invent things and try to attach those to the past. And so, Areosophy was the Areonized version of Theosophy. And what this did was to take the idea that spiritual and physical evolution had led to the most advanced form of human beings, which were the Aryans, and the most advanced group of them were, of course, the Germans. And, this attracted appeal.
Keep in mind, again, this was not a mass movement. This was very much a fringe movement. Most people weren’t aware of it and weren’t particularly interested in it, but it had an appeal for those who already had a esoteric bent in some form or another. And, this is where things like the Germanin order or the German order and their other groups, it was only one of many, grew out of. And, what it was that the Thule Society as a branch, The Thule Gesellschaft was supposed to do, was to study this. It was an esoteric study group. And so, people would get together and they’d talk about things, probably make more stuff up and all work around this idea of German Aryans as the most advanced human beings, and all the wonderful things that the future would hold.
And the fact that this was in the midst of a war in which Germany was, again, fighting, as they saw it, for its existence, heightened those tensions as well. So, my suspicion, again, is that Sebottendorff, in terms of who was behind him, that he was essentially called back to Germany to work either for the Prussian political police or for some aspect of German intelligence or security to try to mobilize occultism or esotericism for the war effort, because again, this is 1918, the war, it’s gone on way too long. Within a few months, Germany will collapse, and it will collapse simply from the psychological exhaustion of the population.
So, that was why Marxism, particularly in the form of Bolsheism, was seen as unpatriotic. And of course, was opposed to the war as a whole, the idea that parroting Lenin was that the war was an imperialist war. And the only thing that was good that was going to come out of it is that the imperialist war, through all of the crises it was creating, would eventually lead to a class war. And that would be good, because that would reconcile all of these things. But, think of the two very different versions of this, the Bolshevist version, or let’s just call it, the Marxist version of Germany, was going to be a class society in which we’re going to have to have some civil upheaval, which will have Germans fighting Germans.
Whereas, the mystical nationalism, the almost religious nationalism that Sebottendorff from The Thule Society had hitched its wagon to held that Germans are all part of a single racial family, and that’s what must be the most important thing. And that these can be different ways of trying to influence people. It comes down to a matter of political influence. So in a sense, I think that what Sebottendorff and The Thule Society was trying to do, at least within Munich, was to use this idea of mystical nationalism as a potential rallying point for some part of the population to oppose these other forces to keep people fighting. The war is lost though in November, the Kaiser abdicates, and essentially, the socialists do take over Germany. Things come very, very close to following the Russian model. And, you even get the Russian version or take on the Bolsheviks, which are the Spartacists who try and fail to seize power early on. But you do essentially end up with a socialist Germany.
And, that then leaves in the aftermath of the war. The Thule Society is sort of the odd man out, although they’re still very closely connected to the army. And here’s one of the things that I find interesting. When you get into 1919, who is it that’s paying Sebottendorff’s bills? It’s the army. The one thing the German army is absolutely determined to do is to preserve its social position and power. And they’re perfectly willing to dump the Kaiser to do that. This deal, which is made in November of 1918, Kaiser’s abdication, the proclamation of a German Republic, which, you just had this guy declare it. It wasn’t really planned. There’s the Ebert-Groner Pact. Groner is the chief of general staff at this point. Ebert is the chief socialist politician basically, and they make an agreement. And the agreement basically is that the Army will support Ebert’s government if Ebert supports the Army. And particularly that means the continuation of the Officer Corps and the general staff in one form or another. So a deal is made. And that of course, is what will eventually help defeat the Spartacist uprising.
So, Parvis or Alexander Helpant to give his actual name, comes to them and he goes, “Look, there’s a lot of revolutionaries in Russia and there’s a lot of mistrust with the regime. We think that the war will increase the contradictions in Russian society. And, if you give me a lot of marks, I can finance this revolutionary activity. And through subversion, I can take Russia out of the war.” Well, the Germans are facing a two-front war. That sounds great. “We’ll use money in order to…” But notice what they’re doing. The German general staff, a very conservative organization, not a bunch of revolutionaries, are going to finance revolution in an opposing country. They’re going to finance revolutionary subversion to take Russia out of the war, which basically works. So that gives you another idea as to what the German military is willing to do. They’re not revolutionaries, but they’ll pay revolutionaries to subvert another regime. Now, you’ve got the problem, is that, the revolutionary regime that your money helped bring to power is now threatening to extend into your country.
So, the whole question for the Army and for others in Germany in 1919 is how to keep Germany from going Bolshevik from, in a sense, being hoist by your own petard. So The Thule Society, I don’t think is a huge part of this program, but it is a part of it, and it’s all an effort to try to keep control. And that’s why the army is financing them. That’s even why the Army at some point then supplies them with its own propagandists. So, The Thule Society begins to create under Sebottendorff leadership, what he called, the Rings of Thule. And these are satellite organizations that aren’t the society as though, but they’re controlled and inspired by it. And one of those is a thing called the German Workers Party.
And the German Workers Party, again, is local. It’s not large, it’s not terribly influential, but what does it aspire to be? It aspires to be a party that will bring German workers away from the seductive influence of the Bolsheviks and into a more patriotic position. And, the way that I describe this is that it’s not an anti-communist organization, it’s a counter-communist organization. So you don’t create something which completely opposes it, you create something which mimics it, which is ultimately what the German Workers Party will become, is the National Socialist German Workers Party, known as that term, socialist. And that is, in my view, what Nazism is from the beginning. It is a counter-communist movement.
He seems to have had flexible interests in this case. So, once order is restored, so to speak, the army comes in and decide that, “Well, one of the things we need? We need to have people who can lecture soldiers on patriotic topics.” And so, there is a particular captain by the name of Karl Mayer who spots Hitler. He later describes him as a stray dog looking for a master. Hitler has a knack for public speaking. Other soldiers will listen to him. Some people can do that, some people can’t. Mayer decides that he’s a good candidate for further training. And so, yes, they bring him in. They turn him into a, what’s called, a [foreign language 01:43:56], a liaison man. He’s an army propagandist.
And then, you’ve got this little outfit called the German Workers Party. And essentially what happens is that Hitler is sent in to take over leadership of that, which is what happens. He shows up, he attends a meeting, there are 50 people there. By the way, the topic of the first meeting he’s at, is how and why capitalism should be abolished, which is not what you might, well, expect. Because remember, the German Workers Party is trying to cast itself as a counter Bolshevism. So it’s not saying that capitalism is great, which is important. No, capitalism is evil. We agree upon that. We just agree it has to be destroyed from a nationalist point of view, as opposed from some strange internationalist point of view. So Hitler is essentially, as I see it, sent in by the Army as their trained man to assume leadership within this small party and to use it-
Okay. What do you want to call yourself a Jew-hater or an anti-Semite? See, anti-Semitism, it’s got that ism part of the end of it, which means it’s a system of belief. Anything that has an ism must somehow be scientific and important. It’s all part of the 19th century obsession with trying to bring science into something, one or the other. So we’re going to get rid of Jew-hate, and we’re going to turn it into anti-Semitism. And we’re only going to be talking about Jews, but we’ll never actually say that. And somehow the invention of a Jew-hater to disguise the fact that he’s a Jew-hater, even though he’s partly Jewish by inventing the term anti-Semitism worked because everybody has bought it and repeated it ever since. So I don’t know, maybe just because anti-Jewism would just be, is it too direct in some way? Do we have difficulty confronting actually what it is that we’re talking about?
That changes when you get to the 19th century and with what’s called Jewish emancipation. And that means that between about 1800 and 1850, most European countries drop the various legal or social restrictions against Jews. They are assimilated into the general society. So ideally, you stop being a German Jew and you become a Jewish German. Those are two very different important concepts. And what that does, of course, is that it opens up the professions, business world, elsewhere. So Jews move who had been largely within those realms to begin with, they already had a good deal of experience in banking business, and they move into those areas and professions and become quite visible.
And that’s what then creates anti-Semitism because in some way that is seen as part of the changes that have taken place. And there are a lot of things going on here. Part of it has to do with the kind of wrenching social and economic changes that took place with industrialization. So one of the things to keep in mind is that in the process of industrialization, just like today, whole classes of people were made extinct economically, craftsmen, for instance. So when factories came along and began to produce things with machines, all the craftspeople who had made those things previously are now unemployed or go to work as wage labor in factories. So there are winners and losers in industrialization. And what people saw in Germany and elsewhere is that among this new sort of rising capitalist elite among these new professions, among the bureaucrats that are coming out of these burgeoning states, they were visibly a fair number of Jews.
So in some way, the rise of Jews in the minds of many people were connected to all of the other bad things that were going on. The world was changing in a way we don’t like. And seemingly the Jews are prospering while I am not, and that was true in Germany and elsewhere, Jews because highly visible in the professions, they became very visible in banking. They became visible in legal profession. They became visible in the medical profession. And those are people that a lot of people would come in contact with, bankers, lawyers, and doctors. They were not the majority there, but vastly overrepresented in terms of the general population and especially within the cities. So in that sense, the roots of anti-Semitism to me is that Jews in Germany and Elsewhere and not just in Germany by any means, France, Britain, everywhere else became identified with the bad changes that were taking place.
But you also found that Jews were not only prominent among capitalists, they were also prominent in the socialist movement as well. So one of the things you could look around if we returned to Germany in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I, and you look around in Bavaria or elsewhere, you tend to find that there are a lot of Jews in visible positions on the German left. Rosa Luxemburg is but one example of that, Eugen Levine, some of them came in from Russia. When the Soviets send a representative to Germany in this period, it’s Karl Radek, a Jew. So it wasn’t difficult to exploit that, to argue that just as the ranks of capitalism was full of Jews, the ranks of Bolshevism or of the revolutionary left, were full of Jews. Because you could easily go around and distinguish a great many of them.
Again, they don’t have to be the majority, they just have to be numerous, prominent, and visible, which they were. So this provided you a, in the case of the propaganda of the German army, the type of stuff that Hitler was spewed out. They could put all the anti-capitalist rhetoric in there, wanted to. The army was never going to overthrow capitalism, and the capitalists knew they weren’t going to do it. So go ahead, talk shit about us. We don’t really care. That’s not going to, because we know that the army would prevent that from happening. The way to then undermine the real enemy, it was a scene. The revolutionary left was to point out the Jewish influence there. I mean, look at Russia. Well, Lenin is up, Trotsky, there he is. Look, there’s a Jew. There’s one. Radek is a Jew. It wasn’t hard to find them in that regard.
And none of that is really true. I mean, the first part about it is that at the time this supposedly took place, Rachkovsky wasn’t working for the Okhrana, he had been fired and he wasn’t in Paris. And the whole situation, which is described couldn’t have taken place because the people who did it weren’t there. It’s a story, but it provides a kind of explanation for it. So the protocols emerge, so you always have to go back. This is one of the things that I have found always useful in research, is go back to the beginning, find the first place this is mentioned, or the first version, or the first iteration. Where does it start?
So you go back to Saint Petersburg, Russia around 1903. There is a small right wing anti-Semitic newspaper published there called Znamya, banner. And it publishes in a kind of serial form a work doesn’t credit with any original author. And this is the first version of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. But what it’s actually describing is a Judeo-Masonic plot to rule the world. Those two terms are always combined together. And I think in the earlier version, there’s far more mentions of Freemasons than there are Jews.
And the publisher of Znamya is closely connected to a thing called the Union of Russian People. The Union Russian Men, which was ostensibly existed to defend the empire against subversion and particularly against what it thought was Jewish subversion when they also argued that the prominence of Jews in revolutionary movements somehow proved that this was in some way a Jewish revolution. But again, this is not a mainstream newspaper. It’s not appealing to a mainstream population. Very few people saw it, but this is where it appears. Now keep in mind that’s two or three years before it’s usually said to have been written, or the other version is that there’s this crazy priest by the name of Sergei Nilus, and he wrote it or actually appended it as an appendix to his work in 1905. Now it was around before that. So Nilus didn’t create it. It wasn’t drafted in Paris in 1904 and 1905. It was serialized in an obscure right wing Russian newspaper, 1903.
But the other thing he does, which was fascinating to me, is that he takes this whole sort of initial text and in bold type he indicates the paragraphs, but more often sentences or phrases that appear to be identical from the Joly work and they’re just scattered throughout it. There’s no particular rhyme or reason to it. You don’t plagiarize that way. I mean, who does that? It’s sentence here, sentence there, which has led to a peculiar theory of mine, which of course I will have to expound upon, which is that I think that the original author of the protocols was the same Maurice Joly. I think what someone stumbled across was a work which he wrote and never published, and which he just drew. It’s exactly what someone would do working from your own kind of material, because I’ve written things and then taken what I’ve written and then sort of repackaged that into something else.
So the Taxil hoax was the work of this guy. His real name was I think Jogand-Pages. He was kind of a French journalist. I don’t know. He started out writing porn. So I mean, he wrote things like Sex Lives of the Popes and the Erotic Bible and various things of that kind. He was a Catholic, broke with the Catholic Church, wrote bad stuff about the Popes, and apparently became a Freemason for a while, and then supposedly recanted his evil ways, went back to the church. And then under the name Leo Taxil began writing these whole series of articles, basically arguing that there was a Masonic-Satanic conspiracy run, by the way, by an American, Albert Pike. And this also included child sacrifice. It’s got Pizzagate and it is as well by a high priestess Diana Vaughan.
And so there’s like child sacrifice, weird Robie, Bohemian Grove stuff, and the Freemasons or devil worshipers going back to the Knights Templars. And so there’s a thing called the Devil in the 19th Century and the Secrets of Freemasonry, and this became a bestseller in France. So France is just obsessed with all these kinds of conspiracies. So evil, Satanic, Freemasons, evil, Jewish financiers, Dreyfus. This, this is the brew where all of this come. So want to figure out how Freemasons and Jews get connected together? France is the place where this happens.
Now, Taxil or Jogand-Pages eventually pulls another interesting thing in this around 1897, critics argue that he’s making this stuff up and demand that he present Diana Vaughan, suppose Satanic, high priestess toddler killer. And he says, oh, we’re going to have a press conference. She’ll appear and say all of this stuff as she returns to the church and possibly becomes a nun. And so people show up, high figures in the Catholic Church shows up, and he does. No Diana Vaughan and Jogand-Pages goes, it’s all a hoax. I made it up. You’re all a bunch of idiots for believing it. Okay. You, you members of the church, especially just what gullible morons you are, and that’s it. He confesses.
To this day however, you will find people who will insist that it’s actually true because they desperately want it to be true. But this is, I think the milieu that, I like that word apparently that this comes out of, and this is this whole kind of unhealthy mix. So France to me is the only place that in the decade preceding it, that something like this would be concocted. So it was either created by some sort of unknown person there. But I still think that even though he dies in like 1879, that in Maurice Joly’s troubled career, he went from being an opponent of French Emperor, Napoleon III, which is what the whole dialogues was written against.
And then he was for a time, a close political ally of a French politician by the name of Adolphe Cremieux. So Adolphe Cremieux, well, what’s he got going for him? Well, he was kind of a radical politician. He was an opponent of Napoleon III. He was a Freemason. Oh, and he was Jewish. In fact, at one point, I think he was actually the head, both of the Scottish right in France, and an important figure in the Alliance Israélite, the Jewish organization in France. So he was publicly very prominently Jewish and Masonic. So someone else who would’ve linked them together.
Joly, as he did with virtually everyone, this was a guy whose life largely consisted of dual threats and fistfights. So he gets angry at Cremieux, and it’s exactly the type of thing that he might write to vent his spleen about it. But he died, probably a suicide, that’s kind of difficult to tell in obscurity. His son seems to have inherited most of his literary works, and his son became a journalist, worked for newspapers in France in the 1890s, but was also associated with some people on the fringes of the Okhrana or the Russian press in France. So one of the little things that had happened by this time is that France and Russia had become allies, even though their political systems were completely incompatible.
And so the Russians were using money to subsidize French newspapers that were championing the alliance between the two. Russian meddling. Okay. Now they’re just paying to have the right kind of newspapers come out. So there’s this whole connection between the kind of Russian journalistic world and the French journalistic world and all of these scandals which are going on, and Joly’s son and then 10 years down the road, this thing pops up in a newspaper in Saint Petersburg. That’s where I think the origins lay.
I mean, you could leave Jews out of it entirely and just turn it into a Masonic plot to rule the world, but let’s just throw them in as well since the two things are already being combined elsewhere. It doesn’t become a big deal until really after the first World War because the initial versions of it are all in Russian. And let’s face it, well, that’s widely read in Russia. It’s not much read anywhere else. It’s a different alphabet. Nobody can even see what it means. So it has no particular influence outside of Russia. But then you get to 1919 and you get all these different versions of it. So suddenly you get two English versions in the US, another English version in Britain, a German edition, a French edition, a Dutch edition. Everybody is coming up with these things. So it’s not until in the immediate aftermath of the first World War that this metastasizes and it begins to show up in all of these different foreign editions.
And I think that it just has to do with the changes that have taken place during the war. One of the things that people began looking for was that why was there a war? And we’ve just had this whole disastrous war and the world has been turned upside down. So there has to be some kind of explanation for that. I don’t know. And one of the things this offered to, see there’s this evil plan, there’s this evil plan that has been put into motion, and this could possibly explain what’s taking place. The reason with the protocols were, I think widely bought then and why they still are in many ways is the same reason that the Taxil hoax I was talking about was. Because it told a story that people wanted to believe.
So in France in the 1890s, there was widespread suspicion of Freemasons. It was seen as a somewhat sinister, secretive organization, certainly secretive. And there was also the same sort of generalized prejudices about Jews, clannish distinct, too much influence, all of the things that went on. So it was sort of easy to combined those two things together. And even though Taxil admits it was a hoax, there were those who argued that this is just too, it’s too accurate. It describes things to completely to be a hoax. And that you get the same arguments, in fact, I’ve heard the same arguments with the protocol. I don’t even buy this as an example of plagiarism, because you can’t actually prove what’s being plagiarized in any sense. To me, the protocols are a prime example of what I call a turd on a plate. These things crop up. I have to explain that now.
During the Roman period, you not only have the Judean Rebellion in 70 A.D., but you have a couple of other uprisings in North Africa, and they were very bloody affairs. And in some cases, Jews began massacring other people around them. They start killing the Greeks and the Greeks start killing them. So there was a fair amount of, from that periodonic, a certain amount of bad blood of mutual contempt between Greeks or between Hellenes, between the people who became Hellenized as the Romans would be and the Jews. And the Romans also seems to have developed much of that idea. They considered Judea as being a horrible place to have to govern, inhabited by a stubborn, obnoxious people, not well-liked.
So that’s really where you see the earliest version of that. And the reasons for it would be complicated, but you could say is that going back to Manetho and to the Roman period, Jews, Judeans frequently experienced difficulties, conflicts with other people living around them. And part of that probably had to do with the diaspora, which was the movement. Well, you get the idea. The Romans came in and kicked everybody out, which they didn’t. Jews had been leaving Judea since it was a poor limited area. And moving into areas like North Africa, Egypt, Cyrenaica, all the way into Southern France. They moved widely around the Roman Empire. So that sense of both distinctness and hostility existed since ancient times.
So it wasn’t just, the attitude of the church towards Jews was mixed by… Well, one of the ideas, of course, is that at the end of time, just before the second coming, one of the signs, how are we going to know that Jesus is going to return and the world is going to end? Well, the Jews will all convert. There will be a mass conversion. They’ll sort of see the light. Now, so there have to be Jews around to do that, or we won’t. It’s like a canary in a coal mine. You have to have them there to tip it off. So that was one of the arguments as to why, within the church as to why Jews would not be forcibly converted beyond the fact that it’s just kind of bad policy to forcibly convert people because you don’t know whether it’s sincere, but they need to be preserved as a kind of artifact, which will then redeem itself at the end of time. It’s not something which is encouraged. It predates Christianity, and then Christianity, of course, in its own way, just sort of…
One of the essential points that seems to me in antisemitism, anti-Jew-ism is that all the Jews are in this together. Isn’t that one of the things? Okay. They’re always talking about as if they’re collective. Jews this, Jews that as if it’s a single, undifferentiated mass of people who all move and speak in the same way. From my personal experience, not being Jewish, it’s incredibly diverse in many ways, really. One of the things that anti-Semitism proposes is a continuity or a singularity of Jewish identity that never existed.
Maybe if you can just zoom out, what do you, from this particular discussion, learn about human nature that we pick the other in this way? We divide each other up in groups and then construct stories. And we like constructing those stories, and they become really viral and sexy to us. And then we use those stories to channel our hatred towards the other.
I don’t know. What does that tell you about human nature? Well, okay, in 70 odd years, what have I learned about my fellow creatures? One, I don’t actually understand them any better than I ever did. In fact, less so. I would say this, when I was 17, I thought I had the world much more figured out than I do now. Completely deluded. But it seemed to make much more sense, and I could categorize things. Basic take upon human beings, most people, most of the time are polite, cooperative and kind until they’re not. And the exact tipping point and moment in which they go from one to the other is unpredictable.
So the first thing that could tell you that something odd is going on is he gets out of prison in LA County and he’s on parole. Parolees are supposed to have a job, not supposed to leave the jurisdiction of their parole. He heads straight for the Bay Area, violates parole right off the bat. Two weeks later, he drifts into the parole office in the Bay Area, whereupon he should have been arrested and sent back to Terminal Island, but instead they just assign him a [inaudible 02:30:57]. I don’t know, maybe things were easier then in some way. So he gets assigned a parole officer, Michael Smith. Michael Smith is initially handling a number of parolees. But after a while, once he takes on Manson, he only has one parolee he’s supervising, Charlie Manson, which is odd. Then you also find out that Michael Smith, in addition to being a parole officer, is a graduate student at the University of California studying group dynamics, especially the influence of drugs on gangs in groups. He’s also connected to the Hayett Ashbury Free Clinic, which is a place where the influence of… Because Hayett Ashbury had lots of drugs and lots of groups. So Charlie Manson never gets a regular job, hangs around with young girls, ex-cons, engages in criminal activity. He is repeatedly arrested, but nothing ever sticks for the next couple of years.
Who gets that type of thing? Who gets a get out of jail free card? Informants. So here is what? Again, this is speculation, but Manson at some point after he got out of prison is getting this treatment because he is recruited as a confidential informant.
So that’s part of it. He’s an informant in the movement of drugs basically within the film and music industries. And he’s given pretty much a free rein at that point. What then happens in August of 1969 is that there are these murders. First, Sharon Tate and her friends in Cielo Drive. I think everybody has probably pretty much heard that story before. And of course, the question is why Cielo Drive? Why Sharon, Tate, Frykowski and the rest of them? Manson was familiar with the place. He had been there before. Members of the family had been there before, so he knew where it was. It wasn’t an easy place to find. The original house is no longer there, but the same property and a house is built there. And if you didn’t know where it was… It’s not some place, “Let’s just go for a drive in the Hollywood Hills and murder people in a house.” Well, that isn’t the one that you would come across. There are lots of connections there. Wojciech Frykowski was one of the people killed at the Cielo Drive house, was involved in drug dealing. That’s a possible connection between the two, probably a fairly likely one. Probably not unfortunate Sharon Tate at all. She was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her husband might’ve been, you never know.
And then the next night after the slaughter there… Which by the way, Manson is not at. So this is one of the interesting things about it is, Charles Manson doesn’t kill any of these people. His crime is supposedly ordering the killings to be done. He supposedly thought that the killings at the Tate house were sloppy, and he was going to give everybody a crash course in how you apparently commit seemingly random murders. So the next night he takes a group of people over to the LaBianca’s house in a different section of LA. You’ve got Leno, Rosemary LaBianca, the guy is a grocer. His wife runs a dress shop, upper middle class, and they’re bound and gagged and hacked to death. As at the Tate residence, various things like piggy are written, various messages in blood, things that are supposed to look like cat’s paws. Because one of the groups trying to be framed for this was the idea was the Black Panthers.
So the general story that comes out in the subsequent trial is that this was all a part of something called Helter Skelter, which supposedly was an idea that… That sounds like a Beatles song. That’s where he got it from. He thought the Beatles were talking to him through their music and that there was going to be an apocalyptic race war, and this was all part of a plan to set this off. So this is why the Black Panthers were trying to be implicated in this. Although, how it was supposed to do that is never really explained.
Here is what I think was really happening, what really happened and how I think it fits together. Before Sharon Tate and her friends or the LaBiancas were killed, there was a murder by members of the family of some of the same people involved in the later killings of a musician, drug manufacturer by the name of Gary Hinman. So Manson, again was involved in the drug trade, and Hinman made them. He was a cook, basically, and he brewed them up in his basement, sold the drugs to Manson, who sold them to biker gangs like the Straight Satans, which was one of the groups that he used, and they distributed them elsewhere. Well, one day, the Straight Satans show up and complain that the last batch of meth or whatever it was that they got from Manson, had made some of their brothers very, very ill, and they were quite unhappy about that, and they wanted their $2,000 back. Manson had gotten those drugs from Gary Hinman. So he is unhappy, and he sends Bobby Beausoleil, and a couple of the girls over to Hinman’s place to get the money from him. As the story is later relayed, I think by Susan Atkins, Hinman denied that there was anything wrong with his drugs and refused to pay up, which led to a interrogation torture session in which he was killed.
And the idea was here, what are we going to do with that? Well, one of the other groups that Hinman had sold drugs to were, guess what? People associated with the Black Panthers. So we’ll leave these things up and they will do it. So it’s Bobby Beausoleil who then takes Hinman’s car and decides to drive it up the coast, by the way, with a bloody knife with Hinman’s blood and hair on it, and blood on the seats in the car, and then he pulls it off the road and decides to sleep it off, and he gets busted. So, find Hinman’s body, find Beausoleil in Hinman’s car with a bloody knife with him. He gets arrested. So Beausoleil was very popular with some of the girls. There’s consternation in the family that Bobby has been arrested. So how can we possibly get Bobby out of jail? Copycat killings. So if we go kill more people and we make it look the same, then see, Bobby couldn’t possibly have done it. Now, see, he just borrowed the car. Okay, he stole the car, but the knife was already in… He didn’t have anything to do with this. So that to me makes the most sense out of what followed.
So what he supposedly did to inspire all of these killings, and I think that’s probably beginning with the Hinman killing, he told him to go over there and get the money one way or the other. I don’t know whether he told him, “If you don’t get the money, kill him.” But, Hinman’s dead. And then he might also have seen the value in terms of having copycat killings as a way of throwing off any other blame. The other story you get is that one of the people who had lived at the Cielo house where Sharon Tate was before, was a record producer by the name of Terry Melcher. Melcher supposedly, as the general story goes, had welched on a deal with Manson in terms of a record contract. He screwed over Manson in some sort of a record deal, and Manson wanted to get revenge and sent them to kill everybody in the house, which again, doesn’t make much sense. One, Manson knew that Melcher wasn’t living there anymore. He probably knew where Melcher was living. If he wanted to get Melcher, he could have found him. It wasn’t that difficult to do.
And so it’s not revenge on Terry Melcher that drew him there. He was familiar with the house. So if the idea was to simply commit random killings that would muddy the whole waters with the Hinman killing, then you might pick some place you knew of. He knew the place was [inaudible 02:44:23]. There would be someone there, and you really didn’t care, in the same way that the LaBiancas seemed to have been. Manson was familiar with that because it supposedly had been the scene of creepy crawling. This is little interesting things that the family would be taught to do. Creepy crawling is when you sneak into somebody’s house at night while they’re there asleep, or when they’re not there, and you move things around. So when they get up in the morning or they come home, they’ll suddenly notice that someone has been in their house, which will freak them out, which is the whole point of that.
So Reeve Whitson, later in his career at least, is CIA. What was he in 1969? What is he doing in this? The other thing about it is he appears to have been the person who called… There’s a little question of when the bodies at Cielo Drive are discovered. So the general story is that Sharon Tate’s housekeeper shows up around 8:30 in the morning, finds the bloody scene and goes screaming next door. But there was another fellow who knew… I think the owner of the house is a photographer. Last name may be Hatami. He gets a call earlier in the morning saying that there’d been murders there, and the person he recalls calling him is Reeve Whitson. So someone had been at the house before the bodies were discovered, and they had not called the police. So I don’t know what’s going on there, but it’s a curious situation.
And Manson in a lot of ways, self-immolates himself. I mean, his behavior at the trial is bizarre. It’s threatening, it’s disruptive. He’s got his girls out on the street carving X’s in their forehead, carrying knives. One of the attorneys, initially, his attorney, Ron Hughes, becomes Van Houten’s attorney. And he figures out that the three girls, supposedly on Charlie’s insistence, are going to confess. They’ll confess that it was all their idea and Charlie had nothing to do with it. Hughes doesn’t like this because his defense for her is that she was under his influence and therefore not responsible for her own actions. He was having psychic control, so he refuses to go along with it. There’s a break in the trial. He goes camping up in the mountains with some friends, disappears during a rainstorm, and then some months later, his decomposed remains are found.
Rumors, always the rumors. What would history be without rumors? Members of the family, they were off at Ron Hughes because he messed up Charlie’s idea to get him off and so they killed him. Maybe they did. Maybe he drowned. That’s absolutely impossible to say. You’ve got that story. There’s a guy named Juan Flynn, who was an employee at the Spahn Ranch, didn’t like Manson, held Manson responsible for the murder of his boss. He would testify that Manson told him that he had ordered all the killings, and that Manson also admitted that he had killed 35 people. Maybe he did. On the other hand, Juan Flynn didn’t like him, and other than his word had no real proof of what he was saying.
So please understand me in this case, is that unlike some people who argue that Charles Manson got a raw deal, I don’t think that’s the case. I think that he influenced tremendous influence over the people there through drugs. Sex was another frequent component in it. He had a real whammy over a lot of these people’s minds. I’m not sure how. That still puzzles me. He was a scrawny guy and he wasn’t physically intimidating. I mean, even a lot of women wouldn’t be physically intimidated by him. But he nevertheless had this real psychological power. And if you look around him, the male followers he had were fairly big guys. So he could get people to do what he wanted. And again, to me, the simplest explanation for this is that it began with the Hinman killing, and probably on Manson’s instigation the others were copycat killings to throw off what was going on. If I was a cop, that’s what I would focus on because that seems to make the most sense.
And the first killings are all of couples. It’s very clear that they… I remember in my examination of it, one of the things I was looking at specific, what else is there to say about this zodiac killings? What I was going to look at is that there are all of these accusations that there was an occult aspect to it, that there was some sort of ritualistic aspect. So I looked at different things, locations, victims, phases of the moon. That’s always worth looking at. I didn’t find much correspondence in any of those. In one of the killings, I think the one in Lake Berryessa, he does appear in this kind of weird hooded costume. He’s got his symbol that sort of compass or aiming reticle circle with a cross through it. It can mean a variety of things. He used guns and he used knives, but he certainly had to think for couples. Except in the last of the killings, which is of a cab driver in downtown San Francisco, who he shoots in full view of witnesses, which is completely atypical.
It’s Wheel of Fortune, but with different forms of grisly death on it. And all of the things that he mentioned are shown on the cover of this. So whoever put together that card saw that comic book. Well, that’s kind of an interesting clue. So does that mean he’s a comic book collector? When would he have… I mean, that one and also where he got the idea from, and so he’s incorporating these things from. Then there are of course his codes, which people have, which aren’t all that difficult to decipher probably because they weren’t meant to be. The other thing that you find often with serial or psychopathic killers is they’re toying with the press. I mean, this goes all the way back to Jack the Ripper. They get attention, and then he just disappears.
The symbol of the order was an owl, which interestingly enough is almost identical to the owl which is the emblem of the Bohemian Club.
So Weishaupt himself lives, I think until 1830, dies in Gotha, which was ruled by an Illuminati prince. And so nothing ever happens to these. No Illuminati is ever put to death or arrested in prison for any period of time. What happens is that their plan… Well, what was his plan? His plan was to essentially replace all existing religions and governments in the world with a one world order governed by the Illuminati. So to do this, you had to subvert and destroy all the existing order. And he argued the purpose for this is we wish to make men happy and free, but first we must make them good.
So he talks about these things fairly openly, and this is where you get this idea of some sort of a new world order, which is to be based upon the destruction of the existing order. So there are those who argue that there is a trail of descent that leads from Weishaupt’s Illuminati to the Communist manifesto, and in fact, communism itself, that Marxism was simply a further restating of this idea. And you can draw some sort of, I mean, the idea never entirely goes away. The Bavarian government gets a hold of the order’s, inner texts. So the story is they’re delivered to them. I think that Weishaupt gave them to him. I think he engineered the exposure of his order because it gave him publicity. By being exposed in Bavaria, you gained great renown. And they continued to recruit after this, and the Bavarian government actually bans the Illuminati four different times. Why? Because apparently the first three times didn’t work. So the fourth one does. You can notice that it’s like Papal bans on Freemasonry. They just go on and on and on because this clearly isn’t working.
So the method is very much the same. And also this idea of creating a kind of insular group. The organization is us, and everyone else is outside of that. We are guardians of special knowledge. See, this is the type of thing that would generally happen if you question whatever any kind of intelligence agency did. Well, we know things that you don’t. Why? Because we’re the organization that knows things. We collect information, we know the secrets, we guard the secrets. Therefore, if we tell you, you must believe us.
All right, take your pick. But Retinger is the moving hand behind the whole thing, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out who Retinger is. So the idea is that, well, you get like influential people in media, business, politics, and you bring them together just to talk, to try to find common answers or common questions. It’s all very much sort of Western Anglo-European. It’s all very closely sort of connected to NATO, the whole concept of a kind of Atlanticist world, which is essentially the Anglo-American combine combined with Western Europe. But you got a bunch of these things. I mean, the Council on Foreign Relations is very similar to that and the Bilderbergers, and there’s an overlap with the Bohemian Club. And then you’ve got the Pinay Cercle or Le Cercle, which is more military, but also linked to the so-called secret Gladio. The idea of the Soviets over around Western Europe, there would be a stay behind organization called Gladio. There’d be these freedom fighters.
So the question I have about that is that how many secret organizations do you need? I mean, why all these separate groups which often seem to have the same people into them?
Well, I hate to go back to them again because what you’re bringing up, you go back to the Nazis. They had their whole idea about a new world order, and they only had 12 years to do it. And look what a mess they made. I mean, look at the damage, the physical damage that can be done by an idea inspiring a relatively small group of people controlling a nation based upon some sort of racial or ideological fantasy that has no real basis in reality and yet guides their actions. It’s this differentiation that I always make. And I would try to get across to students between always be clear about what you know and what you believe. You don’t know many things.
You know your name, you know when you were born, you probably know who your father is, but that’s not absolute unless you’ve had a DNA test and only if you trust DNA tests. So you know who your mother is. You believe this man is your father. Why? Because your mother told you he was. So you believe things generally because someone has told you this is to be true, but you don’t really know for sure.
Well, because we know so little, we tend to go by beliefs. So we believe in this. We believe in that. You believe that your cult leader is the answer to everything. And it seems to be very, very easy to get people to believe things. And then what happens is that whether or not those beliefs have any real basis in reality, they begin to influence your actions. So here again, regrettably in some ways to bring it back to the Nazis, what were the Nazis convinced of? They were convinced that Jews were basically evil aliens. That’s what it comes down to. They weren’t really humans. There’s some sort of evil contamination which we must eradicate. And they set out to do that.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 0:37 – KGB and CIA
- 14:54 – Okhrana, Cheka, NKVD
- 30:26 – CIA spies vs KGB spies
- 37:02 – Assassinations and mind control
- 43:56 – Jeffrey Epstein
- 50:48 – Bohemian Grove
- 1:02:42 – Occultism
- 1:13:53 – Nazi party and Thule society
- 1:54:11 – Protocols of the Elders of Zion
- 2:27:16 – Charles Manson
- 2:54:03 – Zodiac Killer
- 3:04:57 – Illuminati
- 3:12:21 – Secret societies
Introduction
Rick Spence
Most people, most of the time are polite, cooperative, and kind until they’re not.
Most people, most of the time are polite, cooperative, and kind until they’re not.
Lex Fridman
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. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here’s Rick Spence.
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. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here’s Rick Spence.
KGB and CIA
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?
Rick Spence
The most powerful intelligence agency in history. It’s an interesting question. I’d say probably in terms of historical longevity and consistency of performance that the Russian Intelligence Services. Notice I didn’t say the KGB specifically, but the Russian Intelligence Services, going back to the Czarist period are consistently pretty good. Not infallible, none of them are. Of course, there’s a common Western way of looking at anything Russian. Very often, I think it’s still the case Russians are viewed in one or two ways. Either they are Bumbling idiots or they’re diabolically clever, no sort of middle ground. You can find both of those examples in this.
The most powerful intelligence agency in history. It’s an interesting question. I’d say probably in terms of historical longevity and consistency of performance that the Russian Intelligence Services. Notice I didn’t say the KGB specifically, but the Russian Intelligence Services, going back to the Czarist period are consistently pretty good. Not infallible, none of them are. Of course, there’s a common Western way of looking at anything Russian. Very often, I think it’s still the case Russians are viewed in one or two ways. Either they are Bumbling idiots or they’re diabolically clever, no sort of middle ground. You can find both of those examples in this.
So what I mean by that is that if you’re looking at the modern SVR or FSB, which are just two different organizations that used to be part of the one big KGB or the KGB or its predecessors, the Checka, you’re really going back to the late 19th century and the Imperial Russian Intelligence Security Service, generally known as the Okhrana or Okhrana.
It’s really the Department of Police, the special Corps of Gendarmes. Their primary job was protecting the imperial regime and protecting it against imperial or other interior enemies, Revolutionaries for the most part. They got very, very good at that by co-opting people within those movements, infiltrating and recruiting informers, [inaudible 00:02:41] provocateurs. In fact, they excelled at the [inaudible 00:02:45] provocateur.
Person who placed aside an organization to cause trouble, usually maneuver them into a position of leadership, and they provoke actions that can then allow you to crack down on that is many sort of lure or bring the target organization into any legal or open status that it can be more effectively suppressed. They were very good at that. So good that by the early 20th century in the years preceding the Russian Revolution in 1917, they had effectively infiltrated every radical party, Bolsheviks, Menchaviks, SRs, great and small, and placed people in positions of influence and leadership to the point that arguably that is, you can debate this, that I think in the whole, they could largely dictate what those parties did.
Nothing was discussed at any central committee meeting of any revolutionary group that the Okhrana wasn’t immediately aware of, and they often had people in positions to influence what those decisions were. Of course, that raises an interesting question, is that if they were that good and they had infiltrated and effectively controlled most of the opposition, then how did the regime get overthrown by revolutionaries? The answer to that is that it wasn’t overthrown by revolutionaries, it was overthrown by politicians. That would then take us into a detour into Russian history. But I’ll just leave it with this. If you look at 1917 and you look closely, this is one of the things I’d always tell my students is that there are two Russian revolutions in 1917. There’s the first one in March or February, depending on your calendar, that overthrows Nicholas II. Revolutionaries are really not involved with that.
Bolsheviks are nowhere to be seen. Trotsky and Lenin are nowhere to be seen. They have nothing to do with that. That has to do effectively with a political conspiracy within the Russian parliament, the Duma. To unseat and emperor, they thought was bungling the war and was essentially a loser to begin with. It was a coup d’etat, a parliamentary coup d’etat. The temporary or provisional government that that revolution put in power was the one overthrown by Lenin eight months later. That government was essentially one dominated by moderate socialists. It was a government that very quickly sort of turned to the left. The guy we associate with that is Alexander Kerensky. Alexander Kerensky was a Russian socialist, a politician. He was the quasi-dictator of that regime. He’s the person, not the Tsar, who’s overthrown by Lenin. So the revolutionaries then did not prove to be the fatal threat to the Tsarist regime.
It was the Tsarist political system itself that did that. What then transpired was that the Okhrana and its method, and many of its agents then immediately segued over into the new Soviet Security Service. So one of the first things that Lenin did in December of 1917, within a month of seizing power since the hold on power was tenuous at best, was that while you were going to need some kind of organization to infiltrate and suppress those pesky counter-revolutionaries and foreign imperialists and all of the other enemies that we have. So the extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-revolution and sabotage the Cheka was formed. You put a veteran Bolshevik, Felix Dzerzhinsky at the head of that someone you could politically rely upon, but Dzerzhinsky built his organization essentially out of the Okhrana. There were all of these informers sitting around with nothing to do, and they were employed in the early twenties. The kind of rank-and-file of the Cheka might’ve been 80 to 90% former Imperial officials. Those were gradually decreased over time.
So why would they do that? Well, they were professionals. They also needed to eat and things were somewhat precarious. So if your job is to be an agent provocateur, if your job is to infiltrate targeted organizations and lead them astray, you do that for whoever pays you. That’s part of the professionalism, which goes in. Under the Soviets, the Soviet Intelligence Services are also very good at that. They’re very good at infiltrating people into opposing organizations. I guess the one example I would give to demonstrate that at the Cambridge five, the British traders from the Soviet standpoint, heroes who were recruited, most notably Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald McClain, Anthony Blunt, and there may have been, well more than five, but that wasn’t bad out of just Cambridge.
Then placing those people in high positions, the ultimate goal, of course, is to get your people into positions of leadership and influence in the opposing intelligence service. So they did. Of course, it all fell apart and they ended up in …Philby ended up living the last part of his life in exile in Moscow, but they got their money’s worth out of him. You can also find this in KGB infiltration, the CIA, the FBI, the Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanson cases. Of course, we were infiltrating. By we, I mean the Americans in the West managed to infiltrate our moles as well. But if it came down, someone could dispute this. But I would think if you were going to come down to kind of like who had the most moles Super Bowl, probably the Soviets would come somewhat ahead of that.
Lex Fridman
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?
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?
Rick Spence
Well, there’s an interesting question for me. There are all kinds of questions about this. One of the questions is whether or not Lenin was an Okhrana agent. Okay, I’ve just said heresy. I’ll do that quite often. I am a heretic and proud of it.
Well, there’s an interesting question for me. There are all kinds of questions about this. One of the questions is whether or not Lenin was an Okhrana agent. Okay, I’ve just said heresy. I’ll do that quite often. I am a heretic and proud of it.
Lex Fridman
Great.
Great.
Rick Spence
Why would you possibly say that Lenin could have been an Okhrana agent? Well, let’s look what he managed to do. So you had, coming into the 20th century, nominally, a single Marxist movement, the Russian social Democratic Labor Party, and Bolsheviks and Mensheviks majority- ites and minority-ites are merely factions of that party. They always agreed that they were all Marxists. We all believe in dialectical materialism and the rise of were all socialists comrade. The difference was the tactical means by which one would attain this. What Lenin wanted was a militant small-scale Vanguard party. Wanted a revolution, wanted to seize power, seize control of the state.
Why would you possibly say that Lenin could have been an Okhrana agent? Well, let’s look what he managed to do. So you had, coming into the 20th century, nominally, a single Marxist movement, the Russian social Democratic Labor Party, and Bolsheviks and Mensheviks majority- ites and minority-ites are merely factions of that party. They always agreed that they were all Marxists. We all believe in dialectical materialism and the rise of were all socialists comrade. The difference was the tactical means by which one would attain this. What Lenin wanted was a militant small-scale Vanguard party. Wanted a revolution, wanted to seize power, seize control of the state.
Once you have the state, then you induce socialism from above. Whereas the majority of the people, the so-called Mensheviks, the minority-ites who are oddly-enough, the vast majority of the party, that’s one of the first things. How do you lose that argument? How does the minority get to grab the name? But Lenin did that. So what Lenin wanted was a conspiratorial party of committed revolutionaries that would plot and scheme and undermine and eventually seize control of the state and induce socialism from above. There were other Russian Marxists who thought that that sounded vaguely totalitarian and not really democratic and not even terribly socialist. They opposed that ineffectively from the beginning, outmaneuvered every step of the way. The Mensheviks are a case study in failure of a political organization. That too will be heresy to some people.
But look, they lost. So what Lenin managed to do starting around 1903, continuing under this, is he managed to divide, to take what had been a single Marxist party and split it into angry contending factions because he and his Bolsheviks run one side advocating a much more militant conspiratorial policy. The discombobulated Mensheviks were over on the other. And in between were a lot of people who really didn’t know where they stood on this. Sometimes they kind of agreed he seems to be making sense today. No, no, I don’t think he’s making sense in that day. But he managed to completely disunify this organization. Now, who could possibly have seen benefit in that the Okhrana. Now, whether or not they put him up to it, whether or not in some way they helped move him into a position of leadership or encouraged it or encouraged it through people around him, whether he was a witting or unwitting agent of the Tsar’s Secret Police, he certainly accomplished exactly what it was that they had wanted.
I find that suspicious. It’s one of those things that it’s so convenient in a way, is that I’m not necessarily sure that was an accident. There’s also this whole question to me as to what was going on within the Okhrana itself. Now, this is one of these questions we may come to later about how intelligence agencies interact or serve the governments to which they are theoretically subordinate. They do tend to acquire a great deal of influence and power. After all, their main job is to collect information. That information could be about all kinds of things, including people within the government structure itself.
They also know how to leverage that information in a way to get people to do what you want them to do. So an argument can be made, again, an argument, not a fact, merely an opinion, which is mostly what history is made out of opinions is that at some point between about 1900 and 1917, people within the Okhrana were playing their own game. That game took them in a direction, which meant that continued loyalty to the emperor, specifically to Nicholas II, was no longer part of that.
To me, in a way, it seems almost during the events of 1917, that one, you had an organization that was very effective that suddenly just becomes ineffective. It doesn’t really disappear. These things don’t go away because it will reappear as the O’Chacka basically fairly quickly. But it raises the question to me as to what degree there were people within the organization who allowed events to take the course they wished.
Okhrana, Cheka, NKVD
Lex Fridman
I always wonder how much deliberate planning there is within an organization like Okhrana or if there’s kind of a distributed intelligence that happens.
I always wonder how much deliberate planning there is within an organization like Okhrana or if there’s kind of a distributed intelligence that happens.
Rick Spence
Well, one of the key elements that any kind of intelligence organization or operation is compartmentalization need to know. So rarely do you have an occasion where everybody in an executive position are all brought into a big corporate meeting and we discuss all of the secret operations that are going on. No, no, you never do that. Only a very limited number of people should know about that. If you have a person who is a case officer, is controlling agency, he’s the only one that should know who those people are, possibly his immediate superiors. But no way do you want that to be common knowledge. So information within the organization itself is compartmentalized. So you don’t need everybody to be in on it. You don’t even need necessarily the people who are nominally at the top. Versus the Okhrana, the real boss of the Okhrana was the Imperial ministry of the Interior, the Minister of the Interior, in fact.
Well, one of the key elements that any kind of intelligence organization or operation is compartmentalization need to know. So rarely do you have an occasion where everybody in an executive position are all brought into a big corporate meeting and we discuss all of the secret operations that are going on. No, no, you never do that. Only a very limited number of people should know about that. If you have a person who is a case officer, is controlling agency, he’s the only one that should know who those people are, possibly his immediate superiors. But no way do you want that to be common knowledge. So information within the organization itself is compartmentalized. So you don’t need everybody to be in on it. You don’t even need necessarily the people who are nominally at the top. Versus the Okhrana, the real boss of the Okhrana was the Imperial ministry of the Interior, the Minister of the Interior, in fact.
But the Minister of the Interior had no real effective control over this at all. To the point was that at one point early on, they actually organized the assassination of their own boss. They have their agents among the revolutionaries kill the Minister of the Interior. He’ll just replaced by another one. He’s an Imperial bureaucrat. He’s not really part of their organization. It’s like a director of an intelligence agency appointed by the president. Maybe he’s part of the organization, maybe he isn’t. Maybe he is not one of us. So you’ve got different levels, different compartments within it. Who’s actually running the show, if anyone is, I don’t know. That’s never supposed to be apparent.
Lex Fridman
Well, that’s a fascinating question. 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-called compartmentalized, where’s the power? Where’s the center of power? 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.
Well, that’s a fascinating question. 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-called compartmentalized, where’s the power? Where’s the center of power? 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.
Rick Spence
Well, if we go back again to the founder of Soviet Secret Police, Felix Dzerzhinsky dies in 1926, keels over after giving a heated speech to a party meeting. Now, the common view, what you usually read, which was key for the time, is that clearly Stalin had him whacked because anytime someone died, it was almost always that. I think a lot of times he did. But in some cases, Stalin’s probably getting blamed for things that he didn’t actually do. Dzerchinsky wasn’t even opposed to Stalin. So it’s not clear why he … but Stalin died. Obviously, he was poisoned. Something happened. It was an unnatural death. Somebody goes in for an operation, it gets a little too much anesthesia. Stalin killed them. Somebody tips over in a canoe in upstate New York, Stalin killed them. There’s actually a case about that. So that itself can be kind of useful, where every time someone dies, they think you killed them.
Well, if we go back again to the founder of Soviet Secret Police, Felix Dzerzhinsky dies in 1926, keels over after giving a heated speech to a party meeting. Now, the common view, what you usually read, which was key for the time, is that clearly Stalin had him whacked because anytime someone died, it was almost always that. I think a lot of times he did. But in some cases, Stalin’s probably getting blamed for things that he didn’t actually do. Dzerchinsky wasn’t even opposed to Stalin. So it’s not clear why he … but Stalin died. Obviously, he was poisoned. Something happened. It was an unnatural death. Somebody goes in for an operation, it gets a little too much anesthesia. Stalin killed them. Somebody tips over in a canoe in upstate New York, Stalin killed them. There’s actually a case about that. So that itself can be kind of useful, where every time someone dies, they think you killed them.
That’s kind of an interesting method of intimidation in that regard. But the suspicion is nonetheless there, Dzerzhinsk was the grand inquisitor. He was seemingly firmly in control of the organization. Of course, maybe he wasn’t. My guess would be is that if Dzerzhinsky’s death was not natural causes, that he was probably eliminated by someone within his own organization. Then you look at the people who take over his immediate successor is Vyacheslav Menzhinsky who’s really not really a secret policeman, more a kind of intellectual dilettante. But if you look behind him, is the fellow Genrikh Yagoda, and Yagoda will really manage things from behind the scenes until Menzhinsky dies in 1930.
Then Yagoda will hold on until he’s the victim of the purges, I think in 37 or 38. Yagoda is ambitious, murderous, and if I was going to point the finger to anybody who possibly had Dzerzhinsky whacked, it would be him. For the purposes simply of advancement. The person to look out at any kind of corporate organization is your immediate subordinate, the person who could move into your job, because more than likely, that’s exactly what they’re planning to do.
Lex Fridman
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?
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?
Rick Spence
Well, there’s an interesting little acronym called MICE, M-I-C-E. It’s generally used, and it’s just the way in which you would acquire. How do you get people to work for you? Well, M stands for money. You pay them. People are greedy. They want money. If you look at Aldrich Ames, he had a very, very expensive wife with expensive tastes. So he wanted money. I is for ideology. So during, particularly in the 1920s and the 1930s, the Soviets were very effective in exploiting communists, people who wanted to serve the great cause, even though that’s initially not really what they wanted to do. Because the idea was that if you recruit agents from among, let’s say, American communists, you compromise the party because exactly what your enemies are going to say is that all communists are Soviet spies. They’re all traitors in some way. So you would really want to keep those two things separate.
Well, there’s an interesting little acronym called MICE, M-I-C-E. It’s generally used, and it’s just the way in which you would acquire. How do you get people to work for you? Well, M stands for money. You pay them. People are greedy. They want money. If you look at Aldrich Ames, he had a very, very expensive wife with expensive tastes. So he wanted money. I is for ideology. So during, particularly in the 1920s and the 1930s, the Soviets were very effective in exploiting communists, people who wanted to serve the great cause, even though that’s initially not really what they wanted to do. Because the idea was that if you recruit agents from among, let’s say, American communists, you compromise the party because exactly what your enemies are going to say is that all communists are Soviet spies. They’re all traitors in some way. So you would really want to keep those two things separate.
But ideology was just so convenient, and those people would just work for you so well. You could get them to do anything, betray their grandmother. They would go ahead and do that for the greater good. So ideology can be a motivation, and that can be someone who is a devoted Marxist-Leninist. It can also be someone who’s a disgruntled communist because there’s no anti-communist like an ex-communist.
Those who lose the faith can become very, very useful. For instance, if you look in the case of American intelligence, the people who essentially temporarily destroyed much of the KGB organization in the US post-World War II, where people like Whitaker Chambers, Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley, all of those people had been Communist party members. They had all been part of the Red Faithful. They all, for one reason or another, became disillusioned and turned rat or patriot, whichever case you may want to put in that regard.
Lex Fridman
What does the C in the E stand for?
What does the C in the E stand for?
Rick Spence
The C is for coercion. That’s where you have to persuade someone to work for you. You have to pressure them. So usually you blackmail them. That could be they have a gambling habit. In the old days, it’s very often they were gay. Get them in a decision where they can be compromised and you can get them to do your bidding. Those people usually have a certain amount of control. Here’s an interesting example of how the Okhrana tended to handle this, and I think it’s still largely used. You’d round up a bunch of revolutionaries on some charge or another distributing revolutionary literature, running any illegal printing press. You bring a guy into the room and you say, okay, you’re going to work for us. Of course, we refuse to do so. They go, well, if you refuse, we’ll keep the rest of your comrades in jail for a while, maybe beat them with a rubber truncheon or so, and then we’re just going to let you go. We’re just going to put you back out on the street.
The C is for coercion. That’s where you have to persuade someone to work for you. You have to pressure them. So usually you blackmail them. That could be they have a gambling habit. In the old days, it’s very often they were gay. Get them in a decision where they can be compromised and you can get them to do your bidding. Those people usually have a certain amount of control. Here’s an interesting example of how the Okhrana tended to handle this, and I think it’s still largely used. You’d round up a bunch of revolutionaries on some charge or another distributing revolutionary literature, running any illegal printing press. You bring a guy into the room and you say, okay, you’re going to work for us. Of course, we refuse to do so. They go, well, if you refuse, we’ll keep the rest of your comrades in jail for a while, maybe beat them with a rubber truncheon or so, and then we’re just going to let you go. We’re just going to put you back out on the street.
If you don’t work for us, we will spread the rumor through our agents already in your organization that you are. Then what will your comrades do? How long are you going to live? So you see, you have no choice. You’re ours, and you’re going to cooperate with us. The way that that effectiveness will be ensured is that you have multiple agents within the same organization who don’t know who each other are. That’s very important. They’ll all be filing reports. So let’s say you have three agents inside the central committee of the SR party, and there’s a committee meeting, and you’re going to look at the reports they file. They all better agree with each other. If one person doesn’t report what the other two do, then perhaps they’re not entirely doing their job and they can be liquidated at any time. All you do is drop the dime on them.
This was done periodically. In fact, in some cases, you would betray your own agents just to completely discombobulate to the organization. This happened in one particular case around 1908, the fellow who was the head of the chief revolutionary terrorist organization, which wasn’t Bolshevik, but the so-called socialist revolutionaries. Actually the biggest revolutionary party, the SRs, who aren’t even actually Marxists more anarchists, but they went all in for the propaganda, the deed. They really like blowing people up and carried out quite a campaign of terrorism. The fellow who was the head of that terrorist organization was a fellow by name of Yevno Azef. Yevno Azef was, guess what? An Okhrana agent. Everything he did, every assassination that he planned, he did in consultation with his control. So he’d kind of run out his string. There was increasing suspicion of him.
He was also asking for a lot more money. So the Okhrana itself arranged to have him ride it out. What did that do? Well, what do you do in your party when you find out the chief of your terrorist brigade was a secret police agent. It’s consternation and mistrust. Nobody in the party would ever trust, and you couldn’t tell who you were sitting around. I know that a fellow I wrote a biography on Boris Sevenkov who was a Russian revolutionary and the second in command within the terrorist organization. By the way, the guy that wanted Azef’s job so bad he could taste it, well, on the one level, he expressed absolute horror that his boss was a police agent, and well, he should, because Sevenkov was a police agent too. See, they already had the number two waiting in the wings to take over, but he was legitimately shocked. He didn’t really suspect that.
So it’s a way of manipulating this. Then finally, we come to the E. That I think is the most important, ego. Sometimes people spy or betray because of the egotistical satisfaction that they receive, the sheer kind of Machiavellian joy in deceit. An example of that would be Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge five. Now, Philby was a communist, and he would argue that he always saw himself as serving the communist cause. But he also made this statement, I think it’s in the preface to his autobiography, and he says, one never looks twice at the offer of service in elite force. He’s talking about his recruitment by the NKVD in the 1930s, and he was absolutely chuffed by that.
The mere fact that they would want him, what he considered to be a first-rate organization would want him, satisfied his ego. If I was to take a guess as to whether it was ideological motivation, whether it was the romance of communism or whether it was the appeal of ego that was the most important in his career of treason, I’d go with ego. I think that figures into a lot. Someone doesn’t get the promotions that they wanted. Again, if you look at something like Aldrich Ames career in particular, you’ve got these … his career in the CIA was hit or miss.
He didn’t get the postings or promotions that he wanted his evaluation. He never felt that he got credit for doing that. That’s the type of thing that tends to stick in someone’s craw and can lead for egotistical reasons an added incentive to betray.
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Rick Spence
You’re the only one that knows this. You’re only the only one that knows that the person who is sitting across from you to which you have sworn your loyalty, you’re simultaneously betraying. What a rush that must be for some people.
You’re the only one that knows this. You’re only the only one that knows that the person who is sitting across from you to which you have sworn your loyalty, you’re simultaneously betraying. What a rush that must be for some people.
Lex Fridman
I wonder how many people are susceptible to this. I would like to believe that the people, a lot of people have the integrity to at least withstand the money and the ideology, the pull of that and the ego.
I wonder how many people are susceptible to this. I would like to believe that the people, a lot of people have the integrity to at least withstand the money and the ideology, the pull of that and the ego.
Rick Spence
It can also be a combination of the two. You can create a recipe of these things, certain amount of money, ego and a little push of coercion that if you don’t, we’ll rat you out. You’ll be exposed.
It can also be a combination of the two. You can create a recipe of these things, certain amount of money, ego and a little push of coercion that if you don’t, we’ll rat you out. You’ll be exposed.
CIA spies vs KGB spies
Lex Fridman
What are some differences to you as we look at the history of the 20th century between the Russian intelligence and the American intelligence in the CIA?
What are some differences to you as we look at the history of the 20th century between the Russian intelligence and the American intelligence in the CIA?
Rick Spence
If you look at both the Okhrana and the KGB, one of the things that you find consistent is that a single organization handled foreign intelligence that is spying upon enemy or hostile governments and also internal security. So that’s all part of it. Whereas if you look at the US models that evolved, you eventually have the FBI under Hoover, who insists that he’s going to be the counterintelligence force. If there are commie spies running around America, it’s the FBI who’s supposed to ferret them out. The CIA is not supposed to be involved in that. The Charter, the basic agreement in 1947, did not give the CIA any … It’s often said they were barred from spying on Americans, which isn’t quite true. You can always find a way to do that. What they don’t have is they don’t have any police or judicial powers.
If you look at both the Okhrana and the KGB, one of the things that you find consistent is that a single organization handled foreign intelligence that is spying upon enemy or hostile governments and also internal security. So that’s all part of it. Whereas if you look at the US models that evolved, you eventually have the FBI under Hoover, who insists that he’s going to be the counterintelligence force. If there are commie spies running around America, it’s the FBI who’s supposed to ferret them out. The CIA is not supposed to be involved in that. The Charter, the basic agreement in 1947, did not give the CIA any … It’s often said they were barred from spying on Americans, which isn’t quite true. You can always find a way to do that. What they don’t have is they don’t have any police or judicial powers.
They can’t run around in the country carrying guns to use on people. They can’t arrest you. They can’t interrogate you, they can’t jail you. They have no police or judicial powers. Now, that means they have to get that from someone else. That doesn’t mean that other agencies can’t be brought in or local police officials, corn or whatever you need you can eventually acquire. But they can’t do that directly. So you’ve got this division between foreign intelligence and domestic counterintelligence often split between hostile organizations. The relationship between the FBI and the CIA, I think it’s fair to say, is not chummy, never has been. There’s always been a certain amount of rivalry and contention between the two. It’s not to say that something like that didn’t exist between the domestic counterintelligence and foreign intelligence components of the KGB, but there would be less of that to a degree, because there was a single organization.
They’re all answerable to the same people. So that gives you a certain greater amount, I think, of leeway and power because you’re controlling both of those ends. I remember somebody telling me once that, and he was a retired KGB officer. There you go, retired. One of the things that he found amusing was that in his role, one of the things that he could be is that he could be anywhere at any time in any dress, which meant that he could be in or out of uniform and any place at any time. He was authorized to do that.
Lex Fridman
So more freedom, more power.
So more freedom, more power.
Rick Spence
I think one of the things that you would often view is that, well, the Russians are simply naturally meaner. There’s less respect for human rights. There’s a greater tendency to abuse power that one might have. Frankly, they’re all pretty good at that. It is fair to say that there’s probably some degree of cultural differences that are not necessarily for institutional reasons, but cultural reasons. There could well be things that Americans might balk at doing more than you would find on the Russian or Soviet side of the equations. The other aspect of that is that Russian history is long and contentious and bloody.
I think one of the things that you would often view is that, well, the Russians are simply naturally meaner. There’s less respect for human rights. There’s a greater tendency to abuse power that one might have. Frankly, they’re all pretty good at that. It is fair to say that there’s probably some degree of cultural differences that are not necessarily for institutional reasons, but cultural reasons. There could well be things that Americans might balk at doing more than you would find on the Russian or Soviet side of the equations. The other aspect of that is that Russian history is long and contentious and bloody.
One of the things it certainly teaches you never trust foreigners. Every foreign government anywhere, any country on your border is a real or potential enemy. They will all, at some point, if given the chance, invade you. Therefore, they must always be treated with great suspicion. It goes back to something that I think the British observed was that countries don’t have friends, they have interests, and those interests can change over time.
Lex Fridman
Well, the CIA is probably equally suspicious of all other nations.
Well, the CIA is probably equally suspicious of all other nations.
Rick Spence
That’s your job. You’re supposed to be suspicious. Your job is not to be trusting. Yeah, the basic job of an intelligence-
That’s your job. You’re supposed to be suspicious. Your job is not to be trusting. Yeah, the basic job of an intelligence-
Rick Spence
… your job is not to be trusting. Yeah. The basic job of an intelligence agency is to safeguard your secrets and steal the other guys’ and then hide those away.
… your job is not to be trusting. Yeah. The basic job of an intelligence agency is to safeguard your secrets and steal the other guys’ and then hide those away.
Lex Fridman
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?
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?
Rick Spence
Well, I think John le Carre, give his pen name, was talking about his early recruitment into British intelligence. And one of the things he remembered being told up front was, “If you do this, you have to be willing to lie and you have to be willing to kill.” Now, those are things that in ordinary human interactions are bad things. Generally, we don’t like it when people lie to us. We expect that people will act honestly towards us, whether that’s being a businessman you’re involved with, your employers. We’re often disappointed in that because people do lie all the time for a variety of reasons, but honesty is generally considered to be. But in a realm where deception is a rule, dishonesty is a virtue. To be good at that, to be able to lie convincingly is good. It’s one of the things you need to do.
Well, I think John le Carre, give his pen name, was talking about his early recruitment into British intelligence. And one of the things he remembered being told up front was, “If you do this, you have to be willing to lie and you have to be willing to kill.” Now, those are things that in ordinary human interactions are bad things. Generally, we don’t like it when people lie to us. We expect that people will act honestly towards us, whether that’s being a businessman you’re involved with, your employers. We’re often disappointed in that because people do lie all the time for a variety of reasons, but honesty is generally considered to be. But in a realm where deception is a rule, dishonesty is a virtue. To be good at that, to be able to lie convincingly is good. It’s one of the things you need to do.
And killing also is generally frowned upon. Put people in prison for that, they’re otherwise executed. But in certain circumstances, killing is one of those things that you need to be able to do. So what he felt he was being told in that case is that once you enter this realm, the same sort of moral rules that apply in general British society do not apply. And if you’re squeamish about it, you won’t fit in. You have to be able to do those things.
Assassinations and mind control
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Rick Spence
Let’s take an example from American intelligence, from the CIA 1950s, 1960s into the 1970s, MKUltra. That is a secret program which was involved with what is generally categorized as mind control, which really means messing with people’s heads. And what was the goal of that? Well, there seemed to have been lots of goals. But there was an FBI memo that I recently acquired quite legally, by the way, it’s declassified, but it’s from 1949. So this is only two years after the CIA came into existence. And it’s an FBI memo because the FBI, of course, very curious what the CIA is up to and the FBI are not part of this meeting, but they have someone, they’re sort of spying on what’s going on. So there was a meeting which was held in a private apartment in New York. So it’s not held in any kind of, it’s essentially never really happened because it’s in somebody’s house. And there are a couple of guys there from the CIA. One of them is Cleve Backster. Cleve Backster is the great godfather of the lie detector. Pretty much everything that we know or think we know about lie detectors today, you owe to Cleve Backster. He’s also the same guy that thought that plants could feel, which somehow was a derivative of his work on lie detectors. So these guys are there and they’re giving a talk to some military and other personnel. And there’s certain parts of the document which are of course redacted, but you could figure out what it is that they’re talking about. And they’re talking about hypnotic suggestion and all the wonderful things that you can potentially do with hypnotic suggestion. And two of the things they note is that one of the things we could potentially do is erase memories from people’s minds and implant false memories. That would be really keen to do that, just imagine how that would be done. So here to me is the interesting point. They’re talking about this in 1949. MKUltra does not come along until really 1953. Although there are all sorts of Artichoke and others, everything is sort of leading up to that. It’s simply an elaboration of programs that were already there. I don’t think that it ultimately matters whether you can implant memories or erase memories. To me, the important part is they thought they could and they were going to try to do it. And that eventually is what you find out in the efforts made during the 1950s and ’60s through MKUltra, MKSearch, MKNaomi and all the others that came out. That’s one of the things they’re working for. And among the few MKUltra era documents that survived, there’s that whole question is that could you get someone to put a gun to someone’s head and pull the trigger and then not remember it later. Yeah, you could, interestingly enough.
Let’s take an example from American intelligence, from the CIA 1950s, 1960s into the 1970s, MKUltra. That is a secret program which was involved with what is generally categorized as mind control, which really means messing with people’s heads. And what was the goal of that? Well, there seemed to have been lots of goals. But there was an FBI memo that I recently acquired quite legally, by the way, it’s declassified, but it’s from 1949. So this is only two years after the CIA came into existence. And it’s an FBI memo because the FBI, of course, very curious what the CIA is up to and the FBI are not part of this meeting, but they have someone, they’re sort of spying on what’s going on. So there was a meeting which was held in a private apartment in New York. So it’s not held in any kind of, it’s essentially never really happened because it’s in somebody’s house. And there are a couple of guys there from the CIA. One of them is Cleve Backster. Cleve Backster is the great godfather of the lie detector. Pretty much everything that we know or think we know about lie detectors today, you owe to Cleve Backster. He’s also the same guy that thought that plants could feel, which somehow was a derivative of his work on lie detectors. So these guys are there and they’re giving a talk to some military and other personnel. And there’s certain parts of the document which are of course redacted, but you could figure out what it is that they’re talking about. And they’re talking about hypnotic suggestion and all the wonderful things that you can potentially do with hypnotic suggestion. And two of the things they note is that one of the things we could potentially do is erase memories from people’s minds and implant false memories. That would be really keen to do that, just imagine how that would be done. So here to me is the interesting point. They’re talking about this in 1949. MKUltra does not come along until really 1953. Although there are all sorts of Artichoke and others, everything is sort of leading up to that. It’s simply an elaboration of programs that were already there. I don’t think that it ultimately matters whether you can implant memories or erase memories. To me, the important part is they thought they could and they were going to try to do it. And that eventually is what you find out in the efforts made during the 1950s and ’60s through MKUltra, MKSearch, MKNaomi and all the others that came out. That’s one of the things they’re working for. And among the few MKUltra era documents that survived, there’s that whole question is that could you get someone to put a gun to someone’s head and pull the trigger and then not remember it later. Yeah, you could, interestingly enough.
Lex Fridman
So non-direct violence, controlling people’s minds, controlling people’s minds at scale and experimenting with different kinds of ways of doing that.
So non-direct violence, controlling people’s minds, controlling people’s minds at scale and experimenting with different kinds of ways of doing that.
Rick Spence
One person put it that the basic argument there or the basic thing you’re after was to understand the architecture of the human mind, how it worked, how it put together, and then how you could take those pieces apart and assemble them in different ways. So this is where hypnosis comes in, which was then, still is, fairly spooky thing. Nobody’s ever explained to me exactly what it is. The idea was that could, you think the whole possibilities in this case, could you create an alternate personality and use that alternate personality in an agent role, but then be able to turn it on and off.
One person put it that the basic argument there or the basic thing you’re after was to understand the architecture of the human mind, how it worked, how it put together, and then how you could take those pieces apart and assemble them in different ways. So this is where hypnosis comes in, which was then, still is, fairly spooky thing. Nobody’s ever explained to me exactly what it is. The idea was that could, you think the whole possibilities in this case, could you create an alternate personality and use that alternate personality in an agent role, but then be able to turn it on and off.
So subsequently, the person which that personality inhabited was captured and interrogated, tortured, had their fingernails torn out, they would have no memory of it. They couldn’t give any kind of secret away because it was embedded in some part of their brain where there was a completely different person. You can just imagine the possibilities that you can dream up. And again, it’s not, I think, the question is to whether that is possible or whether it was done, although I suspect that both of those are true, but that you would try to do it. Then imagine the mischief that comes out of that. And one of the big complaints from a legal standpoint about MKUltra and the rest is that you were having medical experiments essentially being carried out on people without their knowledge and against their will, which is a no-no.
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Rick Spence
Well, one thing that was learned, and the reason why most MKUltra and similar records were destroyed on order in the early ’70s, around the time the CIA became under a certain amount of scrutiny. The mid ’70s were not a good time for the agency because you had the church committee breathing down their neck, you had all of these… People were asking lots of questions. So you need to dump this stuff because there’s all kinds of, because you are committing crimes against American citizens, so let’s eradicate it. And the important lesson to be learned is that never do these type of thing again where at least in any way in which the agency’s direct fingerprints are placed on it. You can pay people. You can subsidize research. You can set up venture capital firms. You got plenty of money and you can funnel that money into the hands of people who will carry out this research privately. So if something goes wrong, you have perfect deniability.
Well, one thing that was learned, and the reason why most MKUltra and similar records were destroyed on order in the early ’70s, around the time the CIA became under a certain amount of scrutiny. The mid ’70s were not a good time for the agency because you had the church committee breathing down their neck, you had all of these… People were asking lots of questions. So you need to dump this stuff because there’s all kinds of, because you are committing crimes against American citizens, so let’s eradicate it. And the important lesson to be learned is that never do these type of thing again where at least in any way in which the agency’s direct fingerprints are placed on it. You can pay people. You can subsidize research. You can set up venture capital firms. You got plenty of money and you can funnel that money into the hands of people who will carry out this research privately. So if something goes wrong, you have perfect deniability.
Jeffrey Epstein
Lex Fridman
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 you can just talk about that, is that something that’s at all even possible? That you have, basically this will be for coercion, 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.
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 you can just talk about that, is that something that’s at all even possible? That you have, basically this will be for coercion, 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.
Rick Spence
Well, let’s look at what Epstein was doing. He was a businessman who then also developed a very lucrative sideline in being a high-level procurer basically in supplying young girls. And he also filmed much of that activity. I think his partner in this, Ghislaine, and I’m hope I’m pronouncing her name correctly.
Well, let’s look at what Epstein was doing. He was a businessman who then also developed a very lucrative sideline in being a high-level procurer basically in supplying young girls. And he also filmed much of that activity. I think his partner in this, Ghislaine, and I’m hope I’m pronouncing her name correctly.
Lex Fridman
I think it’s Ghislaine.
I think it’s Ghislaine.
Rick Spence
Ghislaine?
Ghislaine?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rick Spence
Well, I’ve heard it both ways Ghislaine or Ghislaine, whichever it may be, I think her argument at one point was that, “Well, we did this to protect ourselves.” But this type of thing has been done before, there’s nothing new about this. Getting influential people in compromising situations and filming them. I could give you another historical example of that. In late 1920, actually early-1930s, just pre-Nazi Berlin, there was a very prominent sort of would-be psychic and occultist by the name of Erik Jan Hanussen. He had a private yacht, I think it was called the Seven Sins. And he hosted parties. He also had a whole club called the Palace of the Occult, which hosted parties where things went on. And there were cameras everywhere. He filmed important people, guys like the brownshirt chief of Berlin in various states of undress and sexual congress. And he did that for the purposes of blackmail.
Well, I’ve heard it both ways Ghislaine or Ghislaine, whichever it may be, I think her argument at one point was that, “Well, we did this to protect ourselves.” But this type of thing has been done before, there’s nothing new about this. Getting influential people in compromising situations and filming them. I could give you another historical example of that. In late 1920, actually early-1930s, just pre-Nazi Berlin, there was a very prominent sort of would-be psychic and occultist by the name of Erik Jan Hanussen. He had a private yacht, I think it was called the Seven Sins. And he hosted parties. He also had a whole club called the Palace of the Occult, which hosted parties where things went on. And there were cameras everywhere. He filmed important people, guys like the brownshirt chief of Berlin in various states of undress and sexual congress. And he did that for the purposes of blackmail.
So in Epstein’s case, he is a procurer of young girls to wealthy men largely. And many of those events were recorded. Now, even if it wasn’t his intention to use them for blackmail, think of what someone else could do it because people know about this. So you could raise a question Epstein is just kind of a greedy pervert, but through his greedy perversion, he’s now collecting information that could be useful. Who could that be useful to? Who would like dirt on Prince Andrew? Think of all the people who were there and there were important people who went to Lolita Island. So if it isn’t Epstein directly, he might have been being, I’m not trying to let him off the hook because they have anything for him, he was either running his own blackmail business or someone was using him as a front for that. I think we’re kidding ourselves if we’re trying to pretend that’s not what was going on.
Lex Fridman
So you think, EU and American intelligence agencies would be willing to swoop in and take advantage of a situation like that?
So you think, EU and American intelligence agencies would be willing to swoop in and take advantage of a situation like that?
Rick Spence
Well, you know-
Well, you know-
Lex Fridman
Just in the case.
Just in the case.
Rick Spence
American politicians could ultimately end up in a position to oversee things like intelligence budgets. One of them might even become director. You’re never know. He can never tell what some crazy president might do. It could be very, one of the guys who understood was J. Edgar Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover spent a long time collecting dossiers on politicians. How do you think he’d remain director of the FBI as long as he did? Because he systematically collected dirt on people. So there is a history of this type of thing. And again, you could argue that’s partly for his protection, to keep his job, to protect the sanctity and security of the Bureau. You can find a million different ways to justify that.
American politicians could ultimately end up in a position to oversee things like intelligence budgets. One of them might even become director. You’re never know. He can never tell what some crazy president might do. It could be very, one of the guys who understood was J. Edgar Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover spent a long time collecting dossiers on politicians. How do you think he’d remain director of the FBI as long as he did? Because he systematically collected dirt on people. So there is a history of this type of thing. And again, you could argue that’s partly for his protection, to keep his job, to protect the sanctity and security of the Bureau. You can find a million different ways to justify that.
Lex Fridman
That’s really dark.
That’s really dark.
Rick Spence
Well, there is that side to human nature, let’s put it that way.
Well, there is that side to human nature, let’s put it that way.
Lex Fridman
Whether it’s the CIA or the Okhrana, maybe that’s what the President of the United States sees when they show up to office is all this stuff they have on him or her and say that there’s a 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.
Whether it’s the CIA or the Okhrana, maybe that’s what the President of the United States sees when they show up to office is all this stuff they have on him or her and say that there’s a 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.
Rick Spence
Contacts with the deep state.
Contacts with the deep state.
Lex Fridman
The deep state.
The deep state.
Rick Spence
Entrenched, bureaucratic. Well, it’s been said and I think it’s generally true, that bureaucratic creatures are like any other creatures. It basically exists to perpetuate itself and to grow.
Entrenched, bureaucratic. Well, it’s been said and I think it’s generally true, that bureaucratic creatures are like any other creatures. It basically exists to perpetuate itself and to grow.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rick Spence
Nobody wants to go out of business. And of course, you get all of these things like Pizzagate and accusations of one form or another. But here’s an interesting thing to consider. Okay. And I want to argue that I’m not saying that Pizzagate in any way was real or QAnon, anything, but where do they get these ideas from? So let’s ask ourselves, do pedophiles exist? Yeah. Do organized pedophile organizations exist? Yeah, they share information, pictures, they’re out there on the dark web, they cooperate. So does child trafficking exist? Yeah, it does. So in other words, whether or not specific conspiracy theories about this or that group of organized pedophile cultists is real, all the ingredients for that to be real are there. Pedophiles exist, organized pedophilia exists, child and human trafficking exists. At some point, at some time, someone will put all of those together. In fact, certainly, they already have.
Nobody wants to go out of business. And of course, you get all of these things like Pizzagate and accusations of one form or another. But here’s an interesting thing to consider. Okay. And I want to argue that I’m not saying that Pizzagate in any way was real or QAnon, anything, but where do they get these ideas from? So let’s ask ourselves, do pedophiles exist? Yeah. Do organized pedophile organizations exist? Yeah, they share information, pictures, they’re out there on the dark web, they cooperate. So does child trafficking exist? Yeah, it does. So in other words, whether or not specific conspiracy theories about this or that group of organized pedophile cultists is real, all the ingredients for that to be real are there. Pedophiles exist, organized pedophilia exists, child and human trafficking exists. At some point, at some time, someone will put all of those together. In fact, certainly, they already have.
Lex Fridman
We’ll jump around a little bit.
We’ll jump around a little bit.
Bohemian Grove
Rick Spence
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
But your work is so fascinating and it covers so many topics. So if we jump into the present with the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg group.
But your work is so fascinating and it covers so many topics. So if we jump into the present with the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg group.
Rick Spence
Bilderbergers.
Bilderbergers.
Lex Fridman
So the elites, as I think you’ve referred to them. So these gathering of the elites, can you just talk about them? What is this?
So the elites, as I think you’ve referred to them. So these gathering of the elites, can you just talk about them? What is this?
Rick Spence
Well, first thing I have to point out is that Bohemian Grove is a place, not an organization, it’s where the Bohemian Club meets. It’s that 2,700 acre, old-growth redwoods near north of San Francisco. The Bohemian Club began, I think it went back in the 1870s. Its initial members were mostly journalists. In fact, supposedly the name itself comes from, it was a term for an itinerant journalist who moved from paper to paper was called a bohemian. And although I think there may be other reasons why that particular term was chosen as well. But I think the original five members, there were three journalists, there was a merchant and there was a vintner, guy owned a vineyards, California. How surprising? None of them terribly wealthy, but they formed an exclusive men’s club, was and still is. And nothing terribly unusual about that at the time. But it became fashionable. And as it became fashionable, more wealthy people wanted to become part of it. And the thing about getting rich guys to join your club is what do rich guys have? Money. And of course, it’s one of those rich guys that bought Bohemian Grove where now you build your old boys summer camp, which is what it is. They got cabins with goofy names. They go there, they perform skits, they dress up in costumes.
Well, first thing I have to point out is that Bohemian Grove is a place, not an organization, it’s where the Bohemian Club meets. It’s that 2,700 acre, old-growth redwoods near north of San Francisco. The Bohemian Club began, I think it went back in the 1870s. Its initial members were mostly journalists. In fact, supposedly the name itself comes from, it was a term for an itinerant journalist who moved from paper to paper was called a bohemian. And although I think there may be other reasons why that particular term was chosen as well. But I think the original five members, there were three journalists, there was a merchant and there was a vintner, guy owned a vineyards, California. How surprising? None of them terribly wealthy, but they formed an exclusive men’s club, was and still is. And nothing terribly unusual about that at the time. But it became fashionable. And as it became fashionable, more wealthy people wanted to become part of it. And the thing about getting rich guys to join your club is what do rich guys have? Money. And of course, it’s one of those rich guys that bought Bohemian Grove where now you build your old boys summer camp, which is what it is. They got cabins with goofy names. They go there, they perform skits, they dress up in costumes.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rick Spence
True. Some of those skits look like pagan human sacrifices, but it’s just a skit. What’s really going on there? So on the one hand you can argue, look, it’s a rich guy’s club. They like to get out there. The whole motto of the place is weaving spiders come not here. So we’re going to talk about in business. We just want to get out into the woods, put on some robes, burn a couple of effigies in front of the owl, have a good time, probably get drunk a lot.
True. Some of those skits look like pagan human sacrifices, but it’s just a skit. What’s really going on there? So on the one hand you can argue, look, it’s a rich guy’s club. They like to get out there. The whole motto of the place is weaving spiders come not here. So we’re going to talk about in business. We just want to get out into the woods, put on some robes, burn a couple of effigies in front of the owl, have a good time, probably get drunk a lot.
Lex Fridman
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 and then sacrificing, I don’t know, whatever?
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 and then sacrificing, I don’t know, whatever?
Rick Spence
Why do you have a giant owl?
Why do you have a giant owl?
Lex Fridman
Exactly.
Exactly.
Rick Spence
Why do you do that?
Why do you do that?
Lex Fridman
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?
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?
Rick Spence
Well, part of it is the ritual aspect of it. And yeah, that clearly is a ritual. Rituals are pretty simple. Rituals are just a series of actions performed in a precise sequence to produce an effect. That describes a lot of things. It describes plays, symphonies, every movie you’ve ever seen. A movie is a ritual. It is a series of actions carried out in a precise sequence to produce an effect with an added soundtrack to cue you to what emotions you’re supposed to be feeling.
Well, part of it is the ritual aspect of it. And yeah, that clearly is a ritual. Rituals are pretty simple. Rituals are just a series of actions performed in a precise sequence to produce an effect. That describes a lot of things. It describes plays, symphonies, every movie you’ve ever seen. A movie is a ritual. It is a series of actions carried out in a precise sequence to produce an effect with an added soundtrack to cue you to what emotions you’re supposed to be feeling.
Lex Fridman
It’s a great idea. So the rich people should just go to a movie or maybe just go to a Taylor Swift concert. Why do you have to, why the owl thing?
It’s a great idea. So the rich people should just go to a movie or maybe just go to a Taylor Swift concert. Why do you have to, why the owl thing?
Rick Spence
Part of it is to create this kind of sense, I suppose, of group solidarity. You’re all going to appear and also a way of transcending yourself in a way. When you put on the robe, it’s like putting on a uniform. You are in some way a different or more important person. It’s a ritual. Okay. The key ritual at Bohemian Grove is a thing called the cremation of care. And that’s what it’s supposed to be. “We’re going to put all of our, we’re rich, important people. We have to make all of these critical decisions. Life is so hard. So we’re going to go out here in the woods and we’re going to kick back and we’re all going to gather around the lake and then we’re going to carry,” it’s wicker, it’s not a real person. And how would you know? “And this is the cremation of our care,” but it’s a ritual which is meant to produce a sense of solidarity and relief among those people who are there.
Part of it is to create this kind of sense, I suppose, of group solidarity. You’re all going to appear and also a way of transcending yourself in a way. When you put on the robe, it’s like putting on a uniform. You are in some way a different or more important person. It’s a ritual. Okay. The key ritual at Bohemian Grove is a thing called the cremation of care. And that’s what it’s supposed to be. “We’re going to put all of our, we’re rich, important people. We have to make all of these critical decisions. Life is so hard. So we’re going to go out here in the woods and we’re going to kick back and we’re all going to gather around the lake and then we’re going to carry,” it’s wicker, it’s not a real person. And how would you know? “And this is the cremation of our care,” but it’s a ritual which is meant to produce a sense of solidarity and relief among those people who are there.
The question comes down with the rituals as how seriously do you take them? How important is this to the people who carry them out? And the interesting answer to that is that for some people it’s just boring. There are probably people standing around the owl who think this is ridiculous and can’t wait for it to get over with. There are the people that are kind of excited about it, get caught up into it, but other people can take it very seriously. It’s all the matter of the intention that you have about what the ritual means. And I don’t mean to suggest by that that there’s anything necessarily sinister about what’s going on, but it is clearly a ritual carried out for some kind of group reinforcing purpose. And you’re absolutely right. You don’t have to do it that way. I’ve gone to summer camps and we never carried out mock sacrifices in front of an owl. We did all those other things. We didn’t even have any robes either. So it goes beyond merely a rich guy summer camp, although that’s an aspect of it.
But it also I think often obscures, focusing on Bohemian Grove at the getaway of the club, ignores that the club is around all the time. That’s what’s at the center of this, it is the club and its members. So despite all the talk about no weaving spiders coming around here, one of the other features of the summer meeting are things called lakeside talks. And this, often people are invited to go there. And one of the people who was invited, I think around 1968, was Richard Nixon who was making his political comeback. And he was invited to give a talk where very important people are listening. And Nixon in his memoirs, realized what was going on. He was being auditioned as to whether or not he was going to be [inaudible 00:57:19], he recognized that that was really the beginning of his second presidential campaign. He was being vetted.
So one of the main theories, call it a conspiracy theory or not, about the Bohemian Club and the gatherings, is that people of wealth and influence gather together and whether or not it’s part of the agenda or not, inevitably you’re going to talk about things of interest. But to me, the mere fact that you invite people in, political leaders, to give lakeside talks means that there are weaving spiders which are going on and it is a perfect private venue to vet people for political office.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, where else are you going to do it, if you are interested in vetting, if you are interesting and powerful people selecting?
Yeah, where else are you going to do it, if you are interested in vetting, if you are interesting and powerful people selecting?
Rick Spence
Well see, here’s the question. Are these guys actually picking who’s going to be president? Is that the decision which is being made or are they just deciding what horses they’re going to back?
Well see, here’s the question. Are these guys actually picking who’s going to be president? Is that the decision which is being made or are they just deciding what horses they’re going to back?
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Rick Spence
I think the latter is the simpler version of it, but it doesn’t mean it’s the other way around. But these are the kinds of, Nixon was, there was the whole 1960 thing. So he’s the new Nixon, remember, and this is where the new Nixon apparently made a good impression on the right people because he did indeed get the Republican nomination and he did indeed become president.
I think the latter is the simpler version of it, but it doesn’t mean it’s the other way around. But these are the kinds of, Nixon was, there was the whole 1960 thing. So he’s the new Nixon, remember, and this is where the new Nixon apparently made a good impression on the right people because he did indeed get the Republican nomination and he did indeed become president.
Lex Fridman
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 policies, foreign policy.
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 policies, foreign policy.
Rick Spence
Why wouldn’t they? Why would you assume that people are not going to do that?
Why wouldn’t they? Why would you assume that people are not going to do that?
Lex Fridman
It’s the owl thing with the robes.
It’s the owl thing with the robes.
Rick Spence
Why the owl and why the robes?
Why the owl and why the robes?
Lex Fridman
Which is why it becomes really compelling when guys like Alex Jones, forgive me, but I have not watched his documentary, I probably should at some point, about the Bohemian Grove where he claims that there is a Satanist human sacrifice of, I think, children. And I think that’s quite a popular conspiracy theory. Or has lost popularity, it kind of transformed itself into the QAnon set of conspiracy theories. But can you speak to that conspiracy?
Which is why it becomes really compelling when guys like Alex Jones, forgive me, but I have not watched his documentary, I probably should at some point, about the Bohemian Grove where he claims that there is a Satanist human sacrifice of, I think, children. And I think that’s quite a popular conspiracy theory. Or has lost popularity, it kind of transformed itself into the QAnon set of conspiracy theories. But can you speak to that conspiracy?
Rick Spence
Let’s put it this way, the general public rich people are inherently suspicious.
Let’s put it this way, the general public rich people are inherently suspicious.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Great.
Yeah. Great.
Rick Spence
Let’s put it that way. First of all, they’ve got all that money. And exactly how did one obtain it? And I do not of necessity adhere to the view that behind every great fortune there is a great crime, but there often are. There are ways in which it’s acquired. But I think it’s one of the things I think that can happen is particularly when people acquire a huge amount of money, and I won’t name any names, but let’s say there are people who perhaps in the tech sphere who coming from no particular background of wealth, suddenly find themselves with $600 billion. Whoa. This is the question you would have to ask yourself. Why me? Because you’re one of the rare, tiny group of human beings who will ever have that kind of wealth in your hands. Even if you are a convinced atheist, I think at some point, you have to begin to suspect that the cosmic muffin, providence, whatever it is, put this money in your hands to do what? Achieve great things. Just think of all the stuff.
Let’s put it that way. First of all, they’ve got all that money. And exactly how did one obtain it? And I do not of necessity adhere to the view that behind every great fortune there is a great crime, but there often are. There are ways in which it’s acquired. But I think it’s one of the things I think that can happen is particularly when people acquire a huge amount of money, and I won’t name any names, but let’s say there are people who perhaps in the tech sphere who coming from no particular background of wealth, suddenly find themselves with $600 billion. Whoa. This is the question you would have to ask yourself. Why me? Because you’re one of the rare, tiny group of human beings who will ever have that kind of wealth in your hands. Even if you are a convinced atheist, I think at some point, you have to begin to suspect that the cosmic muffin, providence, whatever it is, put this money in your hands to do what? Achieve great things. Just think of all the stuff.
So you’re going to start a foundation and you’re going to start backing all the things that you like. I think there’s an element of ego that comes in with it as well. And again, it may not be so much what the rich person with a huge amount of money at their disposal and a lot of fuzzy ideas about what to do with it can be influenced by others. It’s always that question as to who is actually manipulating these events? What’s going on in that regard? In some way, they can be a very useful sucker. Find somebody with a lot of money and get them to finance the things that you want them to do.
The Bohemian Club is I don’t think in and of itself inherently evil or sinister, but it means that there are lots of different people in it who have different agendas. It goes back to what I said about how somebody feels about the cremation of care ritual. This is either just a waste of time, it’s just some sort of silly thing that we’re doing or it’s something of great importance. Perhaps even mystical or religious importance. Because that’s ostensibly what it’s pretending to be. There’s always this question as to what degree you begin to play and the play becomes serious. That tends to happen a lot.
Occultism
Lex Fridman
You’ve studied a lot of cults and occultism, what do you think is the power of that mystical experience?
You’ve studied a lot of cults and occultism, what do you think is the power of that mystical experience?
Rick Spence
Well, what is broadly referred to… Well, we get into what’s occultism, what’s the occult? The occult is the hidden, that’s all it really means. Specifically, hidden from sight. And the basis of it is the idea that what is hidden, well, what is hidden from us is most of the world, most of reality. So the basic concept within occultism, the basic concept within most religions, which are approved forms of occultism, is that the world, the physical world that we are aware of is only a very small part of a much larger reality. And that what the methods and practices of occultism arguably do is to allow someone to either enter into this larger reality or to access that larger reality for purposes to be exploited here. The most interesting statement about and a key element of this becomes the thing called magic.
Well, what is broadly referred to… Well, we get into what’s occultism, what’s the occult? The occult is the hidden, that’s all it really means. Specifically, hidden from sight. And the basis of it is the idea that what is hidden, well, what is hidden from us is most of the world, most of reality. So the basic concept within occultism, the basic concept within most religions, which are approved forms of occultism, is that the world, the physical world that we are aware of is only a very small part of a much larger reality. And that what the methods and practices of occultism arguably do is to allow someone to either enter into this larger reality or to access that larger reality for purposes to be exploited here. The most interesting statement about and a key element of this becomes the thing called magic.
Now, we all know magic, it’s a guy standing on stage performing a trick. But the interesting thing about a stage magician is that a stage magician is we know when we’re watching it that it’s a trick, yet we can’t really figure out, if he does it well, how that trick is being accomplished because it seems to defy physical laws. And that’s fascinating about it. So even though it’s a trick, if you can’t figure it out, it has this kind of power of fascination. But it’s mimicking something. Stage magic is mimicking real magic. So what’s real magic. Well, let’s go back to Aleister Crowley because he always has to come. I knew he was going to come up at some point in this, earlier than not, because he always does.
Lex Fridman
All roads lead to Aleister.
All roads lead to Aleister.
Rick Spence
All roads lead to Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley and I’ve said this enough that I should be able to get it right, but I’m paraphrasing here, he goes, ” Magick,” which of course her spelled with a K or CK, “is the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will?” So in a way, that’s sort of mind over matter. But it’s the idea that one can through will, through intention bend reality to make something happen. Somebody once put it this way, it’s tipping the luck plane. So you got some kind of a level plane. What we’re just trying to do is just tip it just a little bit so the marble rolls over one side or to another. Now that presupposes a lot of things, that is there a luck plane? I don’t know. But it’s a good sort of idea to have. And here again, don’t become overly bothered trying to figure out whether you actually can bend reality, become bothered by the fact that there are people who believe that they can and will go to great efforts to do so and will often believe they have succeeded.
All roads lead to Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley and I’ve said this enough that I should be able to get it right, but I’m paraphrasing here, he goes, ” Magick,” which of course her spelled with a K or CK, “is the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will?” So in a way, that’s sort of mind over matter. But it’s the idea that one can through will, through intention bend reality to make something happen. Somebody once put it this way, it’s tipping the luck plane. So you got some kind of a level plane. What we’re just trying to do is just tip it just a little bit so the marble rolls over one side or to another. Now that presupposes a lot of things, that is there a luck plane? I don’t know. But it’s a good sort of idea to have. And here again, don’t become overly bothered trying to figure out whether you actually can bend reality, become bothered by the fact that there are people who believe that they can and will go to great efforts to do so and will often believe they have succeeded.
So it’s this effort to make things occur in a particular way, maybe just to sort of nudge reality in one little way or another. And that’s where things like rituals come in. Rituals are a way of focusing will and intention. We’re all there. We’re all thinking about the same thing. And you have to imagine just how the pervasiveness of what could be called that kind of magical thinking every day is everywhere. So let me give you an example. You ever attended a high school football pep rally? Think of what’s going on there. Okay, your team is going to battle the other team. You’ve now assembled everyone in the gymnasium. You’ve got people who are dancing around in animal totem costumes. And what are you chanting? Everyone is supposed to chant that the other team dies, that you’ll be horribly defeated and that our team will be victorious.
That is a magic ritual. The idea is it becomes into this idea that’s very popular today about visualizing things, visualizing, manifesting. I love this term. You need to manifest your success. Well, that’s just magic. That is trying to cause change in conformity with will. So these things can happen without you being even consciously aware of what’s going on. And you don’t need to be because if you’re all a part of a mob, which is there in the gymnasium and you get into this and you get worked up and a cultist would argue what you’re doing is you’re creating a huge amount of energy. All of these people are putting energy into something and that energy goes somewhere. And maybe you can. Maybe, just maybe, you actually can slightly increase the chances of your team’s victory. Of course, your opponents are having their own ritual at the same time. So whoever has the bigger mojo will apparently win on the team.
Lex Fridman
So 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.
So 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.
Rick Spence
Yes, you’re exactly right. Bring to conceive of something and then through intention, will, to manifest that into this realm.
Yes, you’re exactly right. Bring to conceive of something and then through intention, will, to manifest that into this realm.
Lex Fridman
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 horrible things or anything.
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 horrible things or anything.
Rick Spence
There might be a cult that does good things. I don’t know. It depends.
There might be a cult that does good things. I don’t know. It depends.
Lex Fridman
We usually don’t call those cults.
We usually don’t call those cults.
Rick Spence
We don’t call those cults.
We don’t call those cults.
Lex Fridman
Exactly. A hundred percent.
Exactly. A hundred percent.
Rick Spence
Without endorsing this entirely and interesting, one of the questions, what’s the difference between a cult and a religion? And it has been said that in the case of a cult, there’s always someone at the top who knows what’s going on, generally, who knows it’s a scam. In a religion, that person is dead. So see, I’ve just managed to insult every single religion. But it’s an…
Without endorsing this entirely and interesting, one of the questions, what’s the difference between a cult and a religion? And it has been said that in the case of a cult, there’s always someone at the top who knows what’s going on, generally, who knows it’s a scam. In a religion, that person is dead. So see, I’ve just managed to insult every single religion. But it’s an…
Rick Spence
… Insult every single… But, it’s an interesting way of thinking about it, because I think there is some degree of accuracy in that statement.
… Insult every single… But, it’s an interesting way of thinking about it, because I think there is some degree of accuracy in that statement.
Lex Fridman
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 it?
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 it?
Rick Spence
Begin to believe your own bullshit?
Begin to believe your own bullshit?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rick Spence
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
That seems to be-
That seems to be-
Rick Spence
That, again, is part of magic, I think, is believing your own bullshit. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the head of the cult realized, but there’s someone, maybe the second… I always look in the lieutenant, someone probably has an idea about what’s going on. The other thing that seems to be a dead giveaway for what we would call a cult is what’s called excessive reverence for the leader. People just believe everything these people say. To give you an example, the first time I ever encountered anything like that was in Santa Barbara, California in the 1970s. I was going to grad school. And there was a particular cult locally, I think it was Brotherhood of the Son. And, it was the same. So there was some guy who… Among the other things, followers were convinced to hand over all their money and personal belongings to him. I believe he used part of that money to buy a yacht with. Anyway. A lot of it went to him.
That, again, is part of magic, I think, is believing your own bullshit. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the head of the cult realized, but there’s someone, maybe the second… I always look in the lieutenant, someone probably has an idea about what’s going on. The other thing that seems to be a dead giveaway for what we would call a cult is what’s called excessive reverence for the leader. People just believe everything these people say. To give you an example, the first time I ever encountered anything like that was in Santa Barbara, California in the 1970s. I was going to grad school. And there was a particular cult locally, I think it was Brotherhood of the Son. And, it was the same. So there was some guy who… Among the other things, followers were convinced to hand over all their money and personal belongings to him. I believe he used part of that money to buy a yacht with. Anyway. A lot of it went to him.
And then, of course, working for free upon different cult-owned business enterprises, of which there were several. And there was a person I knew who became a devoted follower of this, and all I could think of at one point was ask them, “What the hell is the matter with you? I mean, have you lost your mind? What is it that this person can possibly be providing that you essentially are going to become a slave to them?” Which is what they were doing. And I actually give that credit in a way of sparking my whole interest in things like secret societies. And here, again, as a disclaimer, I am not now, nor have I ever been the member of any fraternal organization, secret society, or cult that I know of. And that’s what interests me about them, because I’m just always trying to figure out why people do these things. Like I said, why the robes and the owl? Why?
Lex Fridman
… Yeah.
… Yeah.
Rick Spence
Why do you do that? And, it’s trying to figure it out. I mean, I couldn’t even hack the boy scouts. Okay? That was too much. Because to me, you join an organization and the first thing that comes along is there are rules and someone is telling you what to do. Okay? I don’t like people telling me what to do. Spent much of my life trying to avoid that as much as possible. And, join a cult, there’s going to be someone telling you what to do. Join the Bohemian Club, and there’s going to be someone telling you what to do. Obviously, a lot of people really get something out of that. In some ways, it’s necessary for them to function. But I do not understand it and my study of it is a personal error to try to understand why people do that.
Why do you do that? And, it’s trying to figure it out. I mean, I couldn’t even hack the boy scouts. Okay? That was too much. Because to me, you join an organization and the first thing that comes along is there are rules and someone is telling you what to do. Okay? I don’t like people telling me what to do. Spent much of my life trying to avoid that as much as possible. And, join a cult, there’s going to be someone telling you what to do. Join the Bohemian Club, and there’s going to be someone telling you what to do. Obviously, a lot of people really get something out of that. In some ways, it’s necessary for them to function. But I do not understand it and my study of it is a personal error to try to understand why people do that.
Lex Fridman
And there are so many reasons, primary of which I would say is the desire in the human heart to belong. And, the dark forms that takes throughout human history. Recent history is something I’d love to talk to you a bit about. 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?
And there are so many reasons, primary of which I would say is the desire in the human heart to belong. And, the dark forms that takes throughout human history. Recent history is something I’d love to talk to you a bit about. 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?
Nazi party and Thule society
Rick Spence
Well, I guess we could start with what on earth is The Thule Society? So The Thule Society was a small German occult society. That is, they studied metaphysics, another fancy word for occultism, that appeared in Munich around 1917, 1918. The key figure behind it was a German esotericist by the name of Rudolf von Sebottendorff. Okay, not his real name. His real name was Adam Rudolf Glauer. He was adopted by a German nobleman and got the name von Sebottendorff, and I like to say that name.
Well, I guess we could start with what on earth is The Thule Society? So The Thule Society was a small German occult society. That is, they studied metaphysics, another fancy word for occultism, that appeared in Munich around 1917, 1918. The key figure behind it was a German esotericist by the name of Rudolf von Sebottendorff. Okay, not his real name. His real name was Adam Rudolf Glauer. He was adopted by a German nobleman and got the name von Sebottendorff, and I like to say that name.
So, I have this real thing about vague, mysterious characters who show up and do things, and trying to figure out who these people are. So we’re working up the years prior to the first World War. So, the decade or so prior to World War I, he spends a lot of time in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey. There was none in the Ottoman Empire, which was a fairly tumultuous place, because in 1908 and 1909, there was the Young Turk Revolution. And, you had a military coup, which effectively overthrew the Ottoman Sultan and installed a military junta, which would go on during the first World War to make its greatest achievement in the Armenian Genocide. Eventually, it created a genocidal military regime which would lead the country into a disastrous first world war, which would destroy the Ottoman Empire, out of which modern Turkey emerges. Yada, yada, yada.
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Rick Spence
It’s one of those things that often comes out of revolutionary situations. Revolutions always seek to make things better. Don’t they? “We’re going to take a bad old regime. The Sultan is…” And the Sultan was bad, I think it’s fair to say. Abdul Hamid II wasn’t called a red sultan because of his favorite color type of thing. And, the idea is that they were going to improve. The Ottoman Empire was a multinational empire. They were going to try to equalize and bring in the different groups. And, none of that happened. It became worse, in the same way that you could argue that the goal of Russian revolutionaries was to get rid of the bad old, incompetent, medieval Tsarist regime and to bring in a new great shining future. And it became even more authoritarian. And, the crimes of the Imperial Russian regime pale in significance of what would follow, in the same way that the crimes of Abdul Hamid pale when you get to the Young Turks.
It’s one of those things that often comes out of revolutionary situations. Revolutions always seek to make things better. Don’t they? “We’re going to take a bad old regime. The Sultan is…” And the Sultan was bad, I think it’s fair to say. Abdul Hamid II wasn’t called a red sultan because of his favorite color type of thing. And, the idea is that they were going to improve. The Ottoman Empire was a multinational empire. They were going to try to equalize and bring in the different groups. And, none of that happened. It became worse, in the same way that you could argue that the goal of Russian revolutionaries was to get rid of the bad old, incompetent, medieval Tsarist regime and to bring in a new great shining future. And it became even more authoritarian. And, the crimes of the Imperial Russian regime pale in significance of what would follow, in the same way that the crimes of Abdul Hamid pale when you get to the Young Turks.
But, that wasn’t necessarily the intention. But, von Sebottendorff is a German businessman who’s working in this period. And the whole point here is that the Ottoman Empire in this period is a hotbed of political intrigue and all kinds of interesting things about it. The Young Turk Revolution is essentially a military coup, but it is plotted in Masonic lodges. Okay? I know, technically Masonic lodges are never supposed to be involved in politics, but they are. Or, the lodge meeting breaks up, and then you plot the revolution. So, same group of people, but it’s not technically. But yes. And there’s the Macedonia Resorcia Lodge in Thessaloniki was ground zero for plotting this military coup that was supposed to improve the Empire. Sebottendorff is, in one way or another, mixed up in all of this, or at least he’s an observer. Plus, he’s initiated into the Masonic lodges.
And interestingly enough, the fellow initiates him into one of these eastern lodges is a Jewish merchant by the name of Termoodi, and who’s also a Kabbalist. And, Sebottendorff is very, very interested in the occult. He’s initiated into eastern Masonic lodges and a period when those same lodges are being used as a center for political intrigue. He also apparently is involved in gunrunning, which in revolutionary periods is there’s a lot of money to be made off of that. So he’s connected to various dark businesses in a tumultuous time with connections to politicized freemasonry and the occult. Now, in the course of the first World War, he returns to Germany. He just shows up. And, it would be my operative suspicion or theory that Sebottendorff was working for someone. I don’t think he just pops up in Munich on his own accord. Why does he leave the Ottoman Empire and return to that place? Who’s behind him? Now, maybe no one, but maybe someone, because he does seem to have money at his disposal. And he comes into Munich and he basically takes over this small occult study group.
Now, the interesting thing is that The Thule Society is really just a branch of another existing, what’s called, an Areosophist order, a thing called the German order, or the Germanic order, which is centered in Berlin. But for some reason, he doesn’t want his group to be connected by name with the Germanic order. So, Thule Society, Thule in this case, is a reference to supposedly a mythical Arctic homeland of the Aryan race. Apparently, they were all snow people who wander out of the snow at some point. It’s a frozen Atlantis. So I mentioned these people, the Areosophists, which, you have to practice saying that. So, what are they? Well, they’re a racist Germanic offshoot of Theosophy. And, I know I’m explaining one thing to explain something, but there’s no other way to do this.
So, Theosophy was 19th century very popular and widely modeled occult belief that was founded by a Russian woman by the name of Helena Blavatsky. She was a medium psychic, supposedly got channelings from the ascended masters. The basic story there, they’re all of the ascended masters, which are mystical beings that may or may not have once been human. They live inside the Himalayas or they float among them on a cloud, and they guide the spiritual evolution of humanity. What Blavatsky did was to take Western esotericism and blend it with Hindu and Buddhist esotericism, which became very, very sexy in the West, still is. Buddhism attracts a lot of people, because, well, it’s Buddhism, it’s different, see? So, the Mahatmas, the ascended masters were sending her messages, despite the fact that she was later proven pretty much to be a fraud and writing the letters herself. Nevertheless, people still went along with this doctrine, and it’s been widely modified and copied since then. So, an idea in Theosophy was that human spiritual evolution was tied to physical evolution.
In the case of Blavatsky, Blavatsky never said that Aryans, white people, anything out this superior. She talked about the different root races, but their version of it’s just gobbledygook that seems to include everyone in. I’d defy you to make much sense out of it. But, in the early 20th century, there were different… One of the things that became fashionable, not terribly popular, these are small movements, was the idea that, well, Germany is a new upcoming country, and part of this I think was really trying to define who the Germans were, because remember, the German Empire, Germany as a political state, doesn’t come until existence until 1871. Prior to that, Germany was a geographic expression, a vaguen, which described a large area in Central Europe where a lot of people who wore leather shorts or something like that and spoke similar German dialects were nominally Germans, but they might be Prussians or Bavarians. They came in all sorts of varieties in religion. There was no German identity.
Something very similar happened in Italy in this same period. I mean, there weren’t Italians, there were Sardinians, and there were Romans, and there were Sicilians. Umbrians spoke, again, dialects of a similar language, but had never lived, not since the Roman Empire under a single state and really didn’t think of themselves as the same. So you have to create this artificial thing. You have to create Germans. “There is now a Germany with an emperor. And so, we’re all going to be Germans.” Well, exactly what is that? Much of it is an artificial creation. You have to decide upon some standard dialect. Okay, we’ll decide what that is. Often dialect that only a few people actually speak, and then they will be drilled into children’s heads through state schooling programs. So I think this is the milieu that it comes out of. People were trying to figure out what on earth Germans actually were. And, the need for some common identity. And, that leads to everything like Wagnerian Opera. Richard Wagner wanted to create a German mythical music. So he went back and strip mined old German myths and cobbled them together into a lot of people standing on stage singing. And, that was his purpose. He was a nationalist. He was in many ways a racialist nationalist. And this was his idea of trying to create out of bits and pieces of the past, a newfangled form of German identity.
So, on the more mystical end of this, you had the ideas that, well, Germany must have been created for some special purpose, because the Germans must be very special people and we must have some particular destiny. And then, out of this, the direction this is heading, well, we’re all part of some master race with some ties to some great civilization in the past, call it Thule, call it whatever you want to be. They basically just invent things and try to attach those to the past. And so, Areosophy was the Areonized version of Theosophy. And what this did was to take the idea that spiritual and physical evolution had led to the most advanced form of human beings, which were the Aryans, and the most advanced group of them were, of course, the Germans. And, this attracted appeal.
Keep in mind, again, this was not a mass movement. This was very much a fringe movement. Most people weren’t aware of it and weren’t particularly interested in it, but it had an appeal for those who already had a esoteric bent in some form or another. And, this is where things like the Germanin order or the German order and their other groups, it was only one of many, grew out of. And, what it was that the Thule Society as a branch, The Thule Gesellschaft was supposed to do, was to study this. It was an esoteric study group. And so, people would get together and they’d talk about things, probably make more stuff up and all work around this idea of German Aryans as the most advanced human beings, and all the wonderful things that the future would hold.
And the fact that this was in the midst of a war in which Germany was, again, fighting, as they saw it, for its existence, heightened those tensions as well. So, my suspicion, again, is that Sebottendorff, in terms of who was behind him, that he was essentially called back to Germany to work either for the Prussian political police or for some aspect of German intelligence or security to try to mobilize occultism or esotericism for the war effort, because again, this is 1918, the war, it’s gone on way too long. Within a few months, Germany will collapse, and it will collapse simply from the psychological exhaustion of the population.
Lex Fridman
So this is almost to help the war effort with a propaganda, a narrative that can strengthen the will of the German people.
So this is almost to help the war effort with a propaganda, a narrative that can strengthen the will of the German people.
Rick Spence
Well, strengthen the will of some people.
Well, strengthen the will of some people.
Lex Fridman
Some people.
Some people.
Rick Spence
You have to try to appeal to different aspects of this. But the mystical aspect is one of those things, it can have a very powerful influence. And the idea is that if we can come up with some mystical nationalism, maybe that’s one way to put it, a mystical nationalism that can be exploited for the… Because at this point you, you’re grasping at straws, and this is a whole period when the Germans are marshalling the last of their forces to launch a series of offensives on the Western front, the Peace Offensive, which will initially be successful, but will ultimately fail, and lead to a collapse in morale. But among the leadership of Germany, it was a recognition. It was that national morale was flagging. And, one of the other things that was raising its head was what had happened nearby a year… Well, the Russian Revolution, which had now brought the idea, which brought another solution to all of this, the idea of revolutionary Marxism. Here, we need to remind ourselves as to where Marxism comes from, not Russia, Germany. Where was the largest Marxist party? In Germany.
You have to try to appeal to different aspects of this. But the mystical aspect is one of those things, it can have a very powerful influence. And the idea is that if we can come up with some mystical nationalism, maybe that’s one way to put it, a mystical nationalism that can be exploited for the… Because at this point you, you’re grasping at straws, and this is a whole period when the Germans are marshalling the last of their forces to launch a series of offensives on the Western front, the Peace Offensive, which will initially be successful, but will ultimately fail, and lead to a collapse in morale. But among the leadership of Germany, it was a recognition. It was that national morale was flagging. And, one of the other things that was raising its head was what had happened nearby a year… Well, the Russian Revolution, which had now brought the idea, which brought another solution to all of this, the idea of revolutionary Marxism. Here, we need to remind ourselves as to where Marxism comes from, not Russia, Germany. Where was the largest Marxist party? In Germany.
Lex Fridman
And Marx probably expected the revolution to begin in Germany.
And Marx probably expected the revolution to begin in Germany.
Rick Spence
Where else?
Where else?
Lex Fridman
I mean, the Soviet Union is not very industrialized. Germany is. And so, that’s where it would probably be.
I mean, the Soviet Union is not very industrialized. Germany is. And so, that’s where it would probably be.
Rick Spence
Russia, 5% of the population is industrial workers. In Germany, 40% of the population is industrial. So, if any place was made for Marxism, it was Germany. I think that’s why it caught on in East Germany so well, because it had come home. And, it was a local belief. It wasn’t something imported by the Russians. It was a German invention. One of the things you can see in this is The Thule Society was particularly involved in a anti-Marxist or anti-Bolshevik agitation. Sebottendorff saw them as this whole movement. It was a counter to this. It was a counter-Marxist movement.
Russia, 5% of the population is industrial workers. In Germany, 40% of the population is industrial. So, if any place was made for Marxism, it was Germany. I think that’s why it caught on in East Germany so well, because it had come home. And, it was a local belief. It wasn’t something imported by the Russians. It was a German invention. One of the things you can see in this is The Thule Society was particularly involved in a anti-Marxist or anti-Bolshevik agitation. Sebottendorff saw them as this whole movement. It was a counter to this. It was a counter-Marxist movement.
Lex Fridman
Can we 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? Do they formulate that in national versus global terms? How do they see this?
Can we 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? Do they formulate that in national versus global terms? How do they see this?
Rick Spence
Marxism formulates everything by class. Okay? People are categorized by class. You’re either part of the proletariat or you’re part of the bourgeoisie, or you’re either part of the proletariat or just some scum. Really, it needs to be swept into the dustbin of history. Only workers count. And, that was what would take someone who was a nationalist would drive them crazy, because their idea is, “We’re trying to create a German. People. We’re trying to create a common German identity.” But what the Marxists are doing is they’re dividing Germans against each other by class. German workers hate the German bourgeoisie. German proletariat as opposed to German capitalists. We’re all trying to fight this war together.
Marxism formulates everything by class. Okay? People are categorized by class. You’re either part of the proletariat or you’re part of the bourgeoisie, or you’re either part of the proletariat or just some scum. Really, it needs to be swept into the dustbin of history. Only workers count. And, that was what would take someone who was a nationalist would drive them crazy, because their idea is, “We’re trying to create a German. People. We’re trying to create a common German identity.” But what the Marxists are doing is they’re dividing Germans against each other by class. German workers hate the German bourgeoisie. German proletariat as opposed to German capitalists. We’re all trying to fight this war together.
So, that was why Marxism, particularly in the form of Bolsheism, was seen as unpatriotic. And of course, was opposed to the war as a whole, the idea that parroting Lenin was that the war was an imperialist war. And the only thing that was good that was going to come out of it is that the imperialist war, through all of the crises it was creating, would eventually lead to a class war. And that would be good, because that would reconcile all of these things. But, think of the two very different versions of this, the Bolshevist version, or let’s just call it, the Marxist version of Germany, was going to be a class society in which we’re going to have to have some civil upheaval, which will have Germans fighting Germans.
Whereas, the mystical nationalism, the almost religious nationalism that Sebottendorff from The Thule Society had hitched its wagon to held that Germans are all part of a single racial family, and that’s what must be the most important thing. And that these can be different ways of trying to influence people. It comes down to a matter of political influence. So in a sense, I think that what Sebottendorff and The Thule Society was trying to do, at least within Munich, was to use this idea of mystical nationalism as a potential rallying point for some part of the population to oppose these other forces to keep people fighting. The war is lost though in November, the Kaiser abdicates, and essentially, the socialists do take over Germany. Things come very, very close to following the Russian model. And, you even get the Russian version or take on the Bolsheviks, which are the Spartacists who try and fail to seize power early on. But you do essentially end up with a socialist Germany.
And, that then leaves in the aftermath of the war. The Thule Society is sort of the odd man out, although they’re still very closely connected to the army. And here’s one of the things that I find interesting. When you get into 1919, who is it that’s paying Sebottendorff’s bills? It’s the army. The one thing the German army is absolutely determined to do is to preserve its social position and power. And they’re perfectly willing to dump the Kaiser to do that. This deal, which is made in November of 1918, Kaiser’s abdication, the proclamation of a German Republic, which, you just had this guy declare it. It wasn’t really planned. There’s the Ebert-Groner Pact. Groner is the chief of general staff at this point. Ebert is the chief socialist politician basically, and they make an agreement. And the agreement basically is that the Army will support Ebert’s government if Ebert supports the Army. And particularly that means the continuation of the Officer Corps and the general staff in one form or another. So a deal is made. And that of course, is what will eventually help defeat the Spartacist uprising.
Lex Fridman
Now, was the Army doing the similar things that we’ve talked about with the intelligence agencies, this same trying to control the direction of public power?
Now, was the Army doing the similar things that we’ve talked about with the intelligence agencies, this same trying to control the direction of public power?
Rick Spence
The German intelligence landscape in the first World War is obscure in many ways. There are lots of things that are going on. Germany has a military intelligence service called Abteilung or Section IIIB. That’s just plain military intelligence. They’re constantly trying to collect military information before the war about the weaponry and plans of the enemies. And then, about what the operational plans were during the war. It doesn’t really go much beyond that though. The German foreign office runs a political intelligence service, and that’s the one which is much more involved in things like subsidizing subversion in Russia, which is one of the things that the Germans sign on to fairly early. Little diversion here in 1915, there is a Russian revolutionary who’s lived much of his life in Germany, who goes by the code name of Parvis. And, he essentially comes to the Germans in Constantinople, interestingly enough, in Turkey, he’s hanging around there at the same time as Sebottendorff is there, which I find curious.
The German intelligence landscape in the first World War is obscure in many ways. There are lots of things that are going on. Germany has a military intelligence service called Abteilung or Section IIIB. That’s just plain military intelligence. They’re constantly trying to collect military information before the war about the weaponry and plans of the enemies. And then, about what the operational plans were during the war. It doesn’t really go much beyond that though. The German foreign office runs a political intelligence service, and that’s the one which is much more involved in things like subsidizing subversion in Russia, which is one of the things that the Germans sign on to fairly early. Little diversion here in 1915, there is a Russian revolutionary who’s lived much of his life in Germany, who goes by the code name of Parvis. And, he essentially comes to the Germans in Constantinople, interestingly enough, in Turkey, he’s hanging around there at the same time as Sebottendorff is there, which I find curious.
So, Parvis or Alexander Helpant to give his actual name, comes to them and he goes, “Look, there’s a lot of revolutionaries in Russia and there’s a lot of mistrust with the regime. We think that the war will increase the contradictions in Russian society. And, if you give me a lot of marks, I can finance this revolutionary activity. And through subversion, I can take Russia out of the war.” Well, the Germans are facing a two-front war. That sounds great. “We’ll use money in order to…” But notice what they’re doing. The German general staff, a very conservative organization, not a bunch of revolutionaries, are going to finance revolution in an opposing country. They’re going to finance revolutionary subversion to take Russia out of the war, which basically works. So that gives you another idea as to what the German military is willing to do. They’re not revolutionaries, but they’ll pay revolutionaries to subvert another regime. Now, you’ve got the problem, is that, the revolutionary regime that your money helped bring to power is now threatening to extend into your country.
So, the whole question for the Army and for others in Germany in 1919 is how to keep Germany from going Bolshevik from, in a sense, being hoist by your own petard. So The Thule Society, I don’t think is a huge part of this program, but it is a part of it, and it’s all an effort to try to keep control. And that’s why the army is financing them. That’s even why the Army at some point then supplies them with its own propagandists. So, The Thule Society begins to create under Sebottendorff leadership, what he called, the Rings of Thule. And these are satellite organizations that aren’t the society as though, but they’re controlled and inspired by it. And one of those is a thing called the German Workers Party.
And the German Workers Party, again, is local. It’s not large, it’s not terribly influential, but what does it aspire to be? It aspires to be a party that will bring German workers away from the seductive influence of the Bolsheviks and into a more patriotic position. And, the way that I describe this is that it’s not an anti-communist organization, it’s a counter-communist organization. So you don’t create something which completely opposes it, you create something which mimics it, which is ultimately what the German Workers Party will become, is the National Socialist German Workers Party, known as that term, socialist. And that is, in my view, what Nazism is from the beginning. It is a counter-communist movement.
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Rick Spence
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
Man.
Man.
Rick Spence
Well, he’s going to come into this, because remember, I said the Army was going to supply its own propagandists to help the German Workers Party and The Thule Society do their work. And the propagandists they supply them with is a man who the Army trains, sends to classes to learn the art of public speaking and propaganda. And that fellow is Corporal Adolf Hitler.
Well, he’s going to come into this, because remember, I said the Army was going to supply its own propagandists to help the German Workers Party and The Thule Society do their work. And the propagandists they supply them with is a man who the Army trains, sends to classes to learn the art of public speaking and propaganda. And that fellow is Corporal Adolf Hitler.
Lex Fridman
So how does Adolf Hitler connect with the German Workers Party?
So how does Adolf Hitler connect with the German Workers Party?
Rick Spence
Well, he’d been in the Army during the war. The only regular job that he’d ever had, liked it. So you often get the view is that, well, at the end of the war, he joined millions of other German soldiers who didn’t have… No, no, he stays in the army. He stays in the Army until 1921. He’s on the Army payroll at the very time in which he has helped them to set this up. What appears to have happened is this, Sebottendorff had organized The Thule Society, they had tried to oppose. There’s actually a brief period of time in which the communists actually take over Munich, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which doesn’t last very long. And eventually, the Army volunteers to put this down. While that’s going on by the way, Hitler is actually sitting in the barracks in Munich wearing a red armband, because he is technically part of the soldiers who have got over to the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
Well, he’d been in the Army during the war. The only regular job that he’d ever had, liked it. So you often get the view is that, well, at the end of the war, he joined millions of other German soldiers who didn’t have… No, no, he stays in the army. He stays in the Army until 1921. He’s on the Army payroll at the very time in which he has helped them to set this up. What appears to have happened is this, Sebottendorff had organized The Thule Society, they had tried to oppose. There’s actually a brief period of time in which the communists actually take over Munich, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which doesn’t last very long. And eventually, the Army volunteers to put this down. While that’s going on by the way, Hitler is actually sitting in the barracks in Munich wearing a red armband, because he is technically part of the soldiers who have got over to the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
He seems to have had flexible interests in this case. So, once order is restored, so to speak, the army comes in and decide that, “Well, one of the things we need? We need to have people who can lecture soldiers on patriotic topics.” And so, there is a particular captain by the name of Karl Mayer who spots Hitler. He later describes him as a stray dog looking for a master. Hitler has a knack for public speaking. Other soldiers will listen to him. Some people can do that, some people can’t. Mayer decides that he’s a good candidate for further training. And so, yes, they bring him in. They turn him into a, what’s called, a [foreign language 01:43:56], a liaison man. He’s an army propagandist.
And then, you’ve got this little outfit called the German Workers Party. And essentially what happens is that Hitler is sent in to take over leadership of that, which is what happens. He shows up, he attends a meeting, there are 50 people there. By the way, the topic of the first meeting he’s at, is how and why capitalism should be abolished, which is not what you might, well, expect. Because remember, the German Workers Party is trying to cast itself as a counter Bolshevism. So it’s not saying that capitalism is great, which is important. No, capitalism is evil. We agree upon that. We just agree it has to be destroyed from a nationalist point of view, as opposed from some strange internationalist point of view. So Hitler is essentially, as I see it, sent in by the Army as their trained man to assume leadership within this small party and to use it-
Rick Spence
To assume leadership within this small party and to use it for the army’s patriotic propaganda campaign. And is a season doing so even to the name change, to the National Socialist or German Workers Party. I mean, really what sounds more red than that?
To assume leadership within this small party and to use it for the army’s patriotic propaganda campaign. And is a season doing so even to the name change, to the National Socialist or German Workers Party. I mean, really what sounds more red than that?
Lex Fridman
So the interesting thing here is from where did anti-Semitism seep into this whole thing? It seems like the way they try to formulate counter-Marxism is by saying the problem with capitalism and the problem with Marxism is that it’s really Judeo-capitalism and, “Judeo-Bolshevism”. From where did that ideology seep in?
So the interesting thing here is from where did anti-Semitism seep into this whole thing? It seems like the way they try to formulate counter-Marxism is by saying the problem with capitalism and the problem with Marxism is that it’s really Judeo-capitalism and, “Judeo-Bolshevism”. From where did that ideology seep in?
Rick Spence
Well, that’s a huge topic. Where does anti-Semitism come from? Let’s start with that term itself. A term which I have really grown increasingly to dislike because it doesn’t actually say what it means. Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewism. That’s all it is. I’m not sure whether there has ever existed a person who hated Jews, Arabs, and Maltese equally. Okay. That’s kind of hard to imagine. I don’t know. But that’s technically what that would mean because let’s face it, most Semites are Arabs. So if you’re an anti-Semite, then you don’t seem to distinguish Jews from Arabs. It makes no sense. The origin of the term is invented by, guess what? An anti-Semite. Okay. A guy in the 1870s, a German journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who is, wouldn’t you know it part Jewish himself. And who decides that you really needed a better term than Judenhass, Jew hate, which was the term that, because that just sounds so inelegant, doesn’t it?
Well, that’s a huge topic. Where does anti-Semitism come from? Let’s start with that term itself. A term which I have really grown increasingly to dislike because it doesn’t actually say what it means. Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewism. That’s all it is. I’m not sure whether there has ever existed a person who hated Jews, Arabs, and Maltese equally. Okay. That’s kind of hard to imagine. I don’t know. But that’s technically what that would mean because let’s face it, most Semites are Arabs. So if you’re an anti-Semite, then you don’t seem to distinguish Jews from Arabs. It makes no sense. The origin of the term is invented by, guess what? An anti-Semite. Okay. A guy in the 1870s, a German journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who is, wouldn’t you know it part Jewish himself. And who decides that you really needed a better term than Judenhass, Jew hate, which was the term that, because that just sounds so inelegant, doesn’t it?
Okay. What do you want to call yourself a Jew-hater or an anti-Semite? See, anti-Semitism, it’s got that ism part of the end of it, which means it’s a system of belief. Anything that has an ism must somehow be scientific and important. It’s all part of the 19th century obsession with trying to bring science into something, one or the other. So we’re going to get rid of Jew-hate, and we’re going to turn it into anti-Semitism. And we’re only going to be talking about Jews, but we’ll never actually say that. And somehow the invention of a Jew-hater to disguise the fact that he’s a Jew-hater, even though he’s partly Jewish by inventing the term anti-Semitism worked because everybody has bought it and repeated it ever since. So I don’t know, maybe just because anti-Jewism would just be, is it too direct in some way? Do we have difficulty confronting actually what it is that we’re talking about?
Lex Fridman
I do wish terms were a little bit more direct and self-explanatory. Yeah, Jew-hate is a better term.
I do wish terms were a little bit more direct and self-explanatory. Yeah, Jew-hate is a better term.
Rick Spence
Well, the question then comes, what exactly do you hate about Jews? And a lot of this has to do with, if you go back prior to the 19th century, if Jews were hated, they were hated for religious reasons. In Christian Europe, they were hated because they weren’t Christians and they existed as the only kind of significant religious minority. But other than that, they tended to live separately. They had little economic influence. Jews tended to live in shtetls in the East, ghettos elsewhere. They were, some were involved in banking and business, but they sort of remained segregated from much of society.
Well, the question then comes, what exactly do you hate about Jews? And a lot of this has to do with, if you go back prior to the 19th century, if Jews were hated, they were hated for religious reasons. In Christian Europe, they were hated because they weren’t Christians and they existed as the only kind of significant religious minority. But other than that, they tended to live separately. They had little economic influence. Jews tended to live in shtetls in the East, ghettos elsewhere. They were, some were involved in banking and business, but they sort of remained segregated from much of society.
That changes when you get to the 19th century and with what’s called Jewish emancipation. And that means that between about 1800 and 1850, most European countries drop the various legal or social restrictions against Jews. They are assimilated into the general society. So ideally, you stop being a German Jew and you become a Jewish German. Those are two very different important concepts. And what that does, of course, is that it opens up the professions, business world, elsewhere. So Jews move who had been largely within those realms to begin with, they already had a good deal of experience in banking business, and they move into those areas and professions and become quite visible.
And that’s what then creates anti-Semitism because in some way that is seen as part of the changes that have taken place. And there are a lot of things going on here. Part of it has to do with the kind of wrenching social and economic changes that took place with industrialization. So one of the things to keep in mind is that in the process of industrialization, just like today, whole classes of people were made extinct economically, craftsmen, for instance. So when factories came along and began to produce things with machines, all the craftspeople who had made those things previously are now unemployed or go to work as wage labor in factories. So there are winners and losers in industrialization. And what people saw in Germany and elsewhere is that among this new sort of rising capitalist elite among these new professions, among the bureaucrats that are coming out of these burgeoning states, they were visibly a fair number of Jews.
So in some way, the rise of Jews in the minds of many people were connected to all of the other bad things that were going on. The world was changing in a way we don’t like. And seemingly the Jews are prospering while I am not, and that was true in Germany and elsewhere, Jews because highly visible in the professions, they became very visible in banking. They became visible in legal profession. They became visible in the medical profession. And those are people that a lot of people would come in contact with, bankers, lawyers, and doctors. They were not the majority there, but vastly overrepresented in terms of the general population and especially within the cities. So in that sense, the roots of anti-Semitism to me is that Jews in Germany and Elsewhere and not just in Germany by any means, France, Britain, everywhere else became identified with the bad changes that were taking place.
But you also found that Jews were not only prominent among capitalists, they were also prominent in the socialist movement as well. So one of the things you could look around if we returned to Germany in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I, and you look around in Bavaria or elsewhere, you tend to find that there are a lot of Jews in visible positions on the German left. Rosa Luxemburg is but one example of that, Eugen Levine, some of them came in from Russia. When the Soviets send a representative to Germany in this period, it’s Karl Radek, a Jew. So it wasn’t difficult to exploit that, to argue that just as the ranks of capitalism was full of Jews, the ranks of Bolshevism or of the revolutionary left, were full of Jews. Because you could easily go around and distinguish a great many of them.
Again, they don’t have to be the majority, they just have to be numerous, prominent, and visible, which they were. So this provided you a, in the case of the propaganda of the German army, the type of stuff that Hitler was spewed out. They could put all the anti-capitalist rhetoric in there, wanted to. The army was never going to overthrow capitalism, and the capitalists knew they weren’t going to do it. So go ahead, talk shit about us. We don’t really care. That’s not going to, because we know that the army would prevent that from happening. The way to then undermine the real enemy, it was a scene. The revolutionary left was to point out the Jewish influence there. I mean, look at Russia. Well, Lenin is up, Trotsky, there he is. Look, there’s a Jew. There’s one. Radek is a Jew. It wasn’t hard to find them in that regard.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Lex Fridman
You gave a lecture on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s widely considered to be the most influential work of anti-Semitism ever perhaps. Can you describe this text?
You gave a lecture on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s widely considered to be the most influential work of anti-Semitism ever perhaps. Can you describe this text?
Rick Spence
Well, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is probably one of the most troublesome and destructive works of literature that has ever emerged. And yet its origins remain obscure. So you get a whole variety of stories about where it came from. So the one story that is often is that it was the work of the Okhrana, the Russian Secret police. And in particular, it was all crafted in 1904 and 1905 in Paris. There’s a whole description of Pyotr Rachkovsky who was the, supposedly the chief of the Okhrana at the time, was the man behind it, another fellow by the name of Matvei Golovinski was the drafter of it. And that they had this document written by a French political writer from some decades back called Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which they were then adapting. Usually it’s argued that they plagiarized it into the protocols.
Well, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is probably one of the most troublesome and destructive works of literature that has ever emerged. And yet its origins remain obscure. So you get a whole variety of stories about where it came from. So the one story that is often is that it was the work of the Okhrana, the Russian Secret police. And in particular, it was all crafted in 1904 and 1905 in Paris. There’s a whole description of Pyotr Rachkovsky who was the, supposedly the chief of the Okhrana at the time, was the man behind it, another fellow by the name of Matvei Golovinski was the drafter of it. And that they had this document written by a French political writer from some decades back called Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which they were then adapting. Usually it’s argued that they plagiarized it into the protocols.
And none of that is really true. I mean, the first part about it is that at the time this supposedly took place, Rachkovsky wasn’t working for the Okhrana, he had been fired and he wasn’t in Paris. And the whole situation, which is described couldn’t have taken place because the people who did it weren’t there. It’s a story, but it provides a kind of explanation for it. So the protocols emerge, so you always have to go back. This is one of the things that I have found always useful in research, is go back to the beginning, find the first place this is mentioned, or the first version, or the first iteration. Where does it start?
So you go back to Saint Petersburg, Russia around 1903. There is a small right wing anti-Semitic newspaper published there called Znamya, banner. And it publishes in a kind of serial form a work doesn’t credit with any original author. And this is the first version of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. But what it’s actually describing is a Judeo-Masonic plot to rule the world. Those two terms are always combined together. And I think in the earlier version, there’s far more mentions of Freemasons than there are Jews.
And the publisher of Znamya is closely connected to a thing called the Union of Russian People. The Union Russian Men, which was ostensibly existed to defend the empire against subversion and particularly against what it thought was Jewish subversion when they also argued that the prominence of Jews in revolutionary movements somehow proved that this was in some way a Jewish revolution. But again, this is not a mainstream newspaper. It’s not appealing to a mainstream population. Very few people saw it, but this is where it appears. Now keep in mind that’s two or three years before it’s usually said to have been written, or the other version is that there’s this crazy priest by the name of Sergei Nilus, and he wrote it or actually appended it as an appendix to his work in 1905. Now it was around before that. So Nilus didn’t create it. It wasn’t drafted in Paris in 1904 and 1905. It was serialized in an obscure right wing Russian newspaper, 1903.
Lex Fridman
And by the way, we should say that these are 24 protocols.
And by the way, we should say that these are 24 protocols.
Rick Spence
Well, it varies.
Well, it varies.
Lex Fridman
It varies.
It varies.
Rick Spence
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That are, I guess supposed to be meeting notes about the supposed cabal where the Jews and Freemasons are planning together a world domination. But it’s like meeting notes, right?
That are, I guess supposed to be meeting notes about the supposed cabal where the Jews and Freemasons are planning together a world domination. But it’s like meeting notes, right?
Rick Spence
Protocol, which are Russian term basically for notes of a meeting.
Protocol, which are Russian term basically for notes of a meeting.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rick Spence
Well, it’s notes of a meeting. These are the goofiest things I’ve ever seen because what you’ve got here, it’s not notes. No one takes notes from a meeting that way. What you’ve got is the exposition of a Bond villain. All right. It’s all of this, boy, all them, we’re going to do this. And then the last thing you want to do is lay out, if you’ve got a plan for world domination, my suggestion would be don’t write it down. So it’s not notes of a meeting. It’s again, it’s another sort of narrative or story that’s being told. It bears no resemblance to the Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. But what it is, the best thing, it’s not particularly readable in some ways. There was an Italian writer by the name of Cesare Michelis, who wrote a book translated in English called The Non-Existent Manuscript. And what it is, is that he takes the different versions starting with the 1902, 1903 versions and looks through the other ones, and he tries to, in the process, to reconstruct what he thinks the original might have been.
Well, it’s notes of a meeting. These are the goofiest things I’ve ever seen because what you’ve got here, it’s not notes. No one takes notes from a meeting that way. What you’ve got is the exposition of a Bond villain. All right. It’s all of this, boy, all them, we’re going to do this. And then the last thing you want to do is lay out, if you’ve got a plan for world domination, my suggestion would be don’t write it down. So it’s not notes of a meeting. It’s again, it’s another sort of narrative or story that’s being told. It bears no resemblance to the Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. But what it is, the best thing, it’s not particularly readable in some ways. There was an Italian writer by the name of Cesare Michelis, who wrote a book translated in English called The Non-Existent Manuscript. And what it is, is that he takes the different versions starting with the 1902, 1903 versions and looks through the other ones, and he tries to, in the process, to reconstruct what he thinks the original might have been.
But the other thing he does, which was fascinating to me, is that he takes this whole sort of initial text and in bold type he indicates the paragraphs, but more often sentences or phrases that appear to be identical from the Joly work and they’re just scattered throughout it. There’s no particular rhyme or reason to it. You don’t plagiarize that way. I mean, who does that? It’s sentence here, sentence there, which has led to a peculiar theory of mine, which of course I will have to expound upon, which is that I think that the original author of the protocols was the same Maurice Joly. I think what someone stumbled across was a work which he wrote and never published, and which he just drew. It’s exactly what someone would do working from your own kind of material, because I’ve written things and then taken what I’ve written and then sort of repackaged that into something else.
Lex Fridman
Sentence here, sentence there.
Sentence here, sentence there.
Rick Spence
Yeah. And the same sort of thing comes out, only sort of bits and pieces of it remain. So why would Joly have done that? Joly was, we’re talking about a man whose career basically spanned the 1850s to 1870s. He’s an obscure figure. I’m not even totally sure he existed, I mean, but it’s one of those things you go looking for him.
Yeah. And the same sort of thing comes out, only sort of bits and pieces of it remain. So why would Joly have done that? Joly was, we’re talking about a man whose career basically spanned the 1850s to 1870s. He’s an obscure figure. I’m not even totally sure he existed, I mean, but it’s one of those things you go looking for him.
Lex Fridman
I love that you’re a scholar of people that just kind of emerge out of the darkness.
I love that you’re a scholar of people that just kind of emerge out of the darkness.
Rick Spence
They just come from nowhere.
They just come from nowhere.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And there’s the Okhrana 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?
Yeah. And there’s the Okhrana 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?
Rick Spence
Russian. But my hunch is that that’s adopted from a French version. First of all, they’re constantly harping on Freemasons, which wasn’t nearly as a big idea as there. If you go back to France in the 1890s, there’s some big scandals. Well, there’s the Dreyfus scandal. We got that. All right. Where you’ve got a Jewish officer on trial for being a traitor. All right. So that was [inaudible 02:02:34]. So you bring in the whole Jewish element. Jews is disloyal Dreyfus case 1894. Earlier you had the Panama scandal, which was this huge investment scandal when the Panama Canal company in Paris collapsed. And again many of the major players in that were Jewish financiers. And then you’ve got the Taxil hoax.
Russian. But my hunch is that that’s adopted from a French version. First of all, they’re constantly harping on Freemasons, which wasn’t nearly as a big idea as there. If you go back to France in the 1890s, there’s some big scandals. Well, there’s the Dreyfus scandal. We got that. All right. Where you’ve got a Jewish officer on trial for being a traitor. All right. So that was [inaudible 02:02:34]. So you bring in the whole Jewish element. Jews is disloyal Dreyfus case 1894. Earlier you had the Panama scandal, which was this huge investment scandal when the Panama Canal company in Paris collapsed. And again many of the major players in that were Jewish financiers. And then you’ve got the Taxil hoax.
So the Taxil hoax was the work of this guy. His real name was I think Jogand-Pages. He was kind of a French journalist. I don’t know. He started out writing porn. So I mean, he wrote things like Sex Lives of the Popes and the Erotic Bible and various things of that kind. He was a Catholic, broke with the Catholic Church, wrote bad stuff about the Popes, and apparently became a Freemason for a while, and then supposedly recanted his evil ways, went back to the church. And then under the name Leo Taxil began writing these whole series of articles, basically arguing that there was a Masonic-Satanic conspiracy run, by the way, by an American, Albert Pike. And this also included child sacrifice. It’s got Pizzagate and it is as well by a high priestess Diana Vaughan.
And so there’s like child sacrifice, weird Robie, Bohemian Grove stuff, and the Freemasons or devil worshipers going back to the Knights Templars. And so there’s a thing called the Devil in the 19th Century and the Secrets of Freemasonry, and this became a bestseller in France. So France is just obsessed with all these kinds of conspiracies. So evil, Satanic, Freemasons, evil, Jewish financiers, Dreyfus. This, this is the brew where all of this come. So want to figure out how Freemasons and Jews get connected together? France is the place where this happens.
Now, Taxil or Jogand-Pages eventually pulls another interesting thing in this around 1897, critics argue that he’s making this stuff up and demand that he present Diana Vaughan, suppose Satanic, high priestess toddler killer. And he says, oh, we’re going to have a press conference. She’ll appear and say all of this stuff as she returns to the church and possibly becomes a nun. And so people show up, high figures in the Catholic Church shows up, and he does. No Diana Vaughan and Jogand-Pages goes, it’s all a hoax. I made it up. You’re all a bunch of idiots for believing it. Okay. You, you members of the church, especially just what gullible morons you are, and that’s it. He confesses.
To this day however, you will find people who will insist that it’s actually true because they desperately want it to be true. But this is, I think the milieu that, I like that word apparently that this comes out of, and this is this whole kind of unhealthy mix. So France to me is the only place that in the decade preceding it, that something like this would be concocted. So it was either created by some sort of unknown person there. But I still think that even though he dies in like 1879, that in Maurice Joly’s troubled career, he went from being an opponent of French Emperor, Napoleon III, which is what the whole dialogues was written against.
And then he was for a time, a close political ally of a French politician by the name of Adolphe Cremieux. So Adolphe Cremieux, well, what’s he got going for him? Well, he was kind of a radical politician. He was an opponent of Napoleon III. He was a Freemason. Oh, and he was Jewish. In fact, at one point, I think he was actually the head, both of the Scottish right in France, and an important figure in the Alliance Israélite, the Jewish organization in France. So he was publicly very prominently Jewish and Masonic. So someone else who would’ve linked them together.
Joly, as he did with virtually everyone, this was a guy whose life largely consisted of dual threats and fistfights. So he gets angry at Cremieux, and it’s exactly the type of thing that he might write to vent his spleen about it. But he died, probably a suicide, that’s kind of difficult to tell in obscurity. His son seems to have inherited most of his literary works, and his son became a journalist, worked for newspapers in France in the 1890s, but was also associated with some people on the fringes of the Okhrana or the Russian press in France. So one of the little things that had happened by this time is that France and Russia had become allies, even though their political systems were completely incompatible.
And so the Russians were using money to subsidize French newspapers that were championing the alliance between the two. Russian meddling. Okay. Now they’re just paying to have the right kind of newspapers come out. So there’s this whole connection between the kind of Russian journalistic world and the French journalistic world and all of these scandals which are going on, and Joly’s son and then 10 years down the road, this thing pops up in a newspaper in Saint Petersburg. That’s where I think the origins lay.
Lex Fridman
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 real?
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 real?
Rick Spence
Well, it doesn’t take off immediately. Okay. Never receives any kind of wide, I mean, nobody much reads the first edition of it. It keeps getting, there is something like 18 or 19 different versions as it goes through. I mean, people leave this protocol out or leave another one. As time goes on, there’s more and more emphasis on Jews and less and less on Freemasons. So it’s sort of, and the whole thing could have begun as an anti-Masonic tract.
Well, it doesn’t take off immediately. Okay. Never receives any kind of wide, I mean, nobody much reads the first edition of it. It keeps getting, there is something like 18 or 19 different versions as it goes through. I mean, people leave this protocol out or leave another one. As time goes on, there’s more and more emphasis on Jews and less and less on Freemasons. So it’s sort of, and the whole thing could have begun as an anti-Masonic tract.
I mean, you could leave Jews out of it entirely and just turn it into a Masonic plot to rule the world, but let’s just throw them in as well since the two things are already being combined elsewhere. It doesn’t become a big deal until really after the first World War because the initial versions of it are all in Russian. And let’s face it, well, that’s widely read in Russia. It’s not much read anywhere else. It’s a different alphabet. Nobody can even see what it means. So it has no particular influence outside of Russia. But then you get to 1919 and you get all these different versions of it. So suddenly you get two English versions in the US, another English version in Britain, a German edition, a French edition, a Dutch edition. Everybody is coming up with these things. So it’s not until in the immediate aftermath of the first World War that this metastasizes and it begins to show up in all of these different foreign editions.
And I think that it just has to do with the changes that have taken place during the war. One of the things that people began looking for was that why was there a war? And we’ve just had this whole disastrous war and the world has been turned upside down. So there has to be some kind of explanation for that. I don’t know. And one of the things this offered to, see there’s this evil plan, there’s this evil plan that has been put into motion, and this could possibly explain what’s taking place. The reason with the protocols were, I think widely bought then and why they still are in many ways is the same reason that the Taxil hoax I was talking about was. Because it told a story that people wanted to believe.
So in France in the 1890s, there was widespread suspicion of Freemasons. It was seen as a somewhat sinister, secretive organization, certainly secretive. And there was also the same sort of generalized prejudices about Jews, clannish distinct, too much influence, all of the things that went on. So it was sort of easy to combined those two things together. And even though Taxil admits it was a hoax, there were those who argued that this is just too, it’s too accurate. It describes things to completely to be a hoax. And that you get the same arguments, in fact, I’ve heard the same arguments with the protocol. I don’t even buy this as an example of plagiarism, because you can’t actually prove what’s being plagiarized in any sense. To me, the protocols are a prime example of what I call a turd on a plate. These things crop up. I have to explain that now.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, please.
Yeah, please.
Rick Spence
But afterward. What is a turd on a plate? Well, a turd on a plate is a turd on a plate. Suppose you come in and there’s a plate sitting on the table and there’s a turd on it. Now the first thing you’re going to wonder, is that a turd? Is it a human turd? Where did it come from? Why would someone poop on a plate? There are all these questions that come to mind. It makes no sense, but that’s what you come, it’s just there. Right. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why. But there’s a turd on a plate, and that’s what the protocols, that they’re just there.
But afterward. What is a turd on a plate? Well, a turd on a plate is a turd on a plate. Suppose you come in and there’s a plate sitting on the table and there’s a turd on it. Now the first thing you’re going to wonder, is that a turd? Is it a human turd? Where did it come from? Why would someone poop on a plate? There are all these questions that come to mind. It makes no sense, but that’s what you come, it’s just there. Right. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why. But there’s a turd on a plate, and that’s what the protocols, that they’re just there.
Lex Fridman
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 it’s viewed by tens of millions of people or whatever. It becomes popular. So wherever the turd came from, it did captivate the imagination.
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 it’s viewed by tens of millions of people or whatever. It becomes popular. So wherever the turd came from, it did captivate the imagination.
Rick Spence
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
It did speak to something,
It did speak to something,
Rick Spence
But does it seemed to provide an explanation?
But does it seemed to provide an explanation?
Lex Fridman
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?
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?
Rick Spence
It goes all the way back to the Greeks. Let’s blame them. So one of the first occasions you find the idea that Jews are a distinct, mean-spirited, nasty people goes back to, and a Greco-historian named Manetho. This is around, I think 300 B.C. early, can’t even rope the Romans into this one. So Manetho is trying to write a history of the dynasties of Egypt. I think his history of dynasties of Egypt still is one of the basic works in this. But he tells this whole story, which essentially describes the kind of first blood libels, that the Jews to celebrate their various religious holidays would capture Greeks and fatten them up in the basement and then slaughter them and eat them or drain their blood or do something. Yeah. It’s just the sort of earlier version of that kind. Also, I think it repeats the sort of Egyptian version of the Exodus out of Egypt, which is quite different than the biblical version. In this case, the Egyptian, they stole all the stuff out of the Egyptian’s houses and ran off into the desert.
It goes all the way back to the Greeks. Let’s blame them. So one of the first occasions you find the idea that Jews are a distinct, mean-spirited, nasty people goes back to, and a Greco-historian named Manetho. This is around, I think 300 B.C. early, can’t even rope the Romans into this one. So Manetho is trying to write a history of the dynasties of Egypt. I think his history of dynasties of Egypt still is one of the basic works in this. But he tells this whole story, which essentially describes the kind of first blood libels, that the Jews to celebrate their various religious holidays would capture Greeks and fatten them up in the basement and then slaughter them and eat them or drain their blood or do something. Yeah. It’s just the sort of earlier version of that kind. Also, I think it repeats the sort of Egyptian version of the Exodus out of Egypt, which is quite different than the biblical version. In this case, the Egyptian, they stole all the stuff out of the Egyptian’s houses and ran off into the desert.
Lex Fridman
The Jews stole all the stuff and ran off?
The Jews stole all the stuff and ran off?
Rick Spence
Yeah, Hebrews. Hebrews robbed the Egyptians. They were taken in. We took them in and sheltered them, gave them jobs, and then they stole all the jewelry and ran away. We didn’t even chase them. We were glad to see them gone. So it’s a different narrative on that story, but it essentially portrays the Jews as being hostile, that they don’t like other people, they’re contemptuous of other people’s religions, the rest of it. And see, the Greeks tended to think of themselves as being extremely cosmopolitan. Now, the Greeks run across people worshiping other gods. They go, oh, well those are just our gods under different names. Okay. Everything was sort of adjusted into their landscape. So you end up with that kind of hostility, which was there at the time. And that was probably influenced also by some of these earlier rebellions that had taken place in Egypt.
Yeah, Hebrews. Hebrews robbed the Egyptians. They were taken in. We took them in and sheltered them, gave them jobs, and then they stole all the jewelry and ran away. We didn’t even chase them. We were glad to see them gone. So it’s a different narrative on that story, but it essentially portrays the Jews as being hostile, that they don’t like other people, they’re contemptuous of other people’s religions, the rest of it. And see, the Greeks tended to think of themselves as being extremely cosmopolitan. Now, the Greeks run across people worshiping other gods. They go, oh, well those are just our gods under different names. Okay. Everything was sort of adjusted into their landscape. So you end up with that kind of hostility, which was there at the time. And that was probably influenced also by some of these earlier rebellions that had taken place in Egypt.
During the Roman period, you not only have the Judean Rebellion in 70 A.D., but you have a couple of other uprisings in North Africa, and they were very bloody affairs. And in some cases, Jews began massacring other people around them. They start killing the Greeks and the Greeks start killing them. So there was a fair amount of, from that periodonic, a certain amount of bad blood of mutual contempt between Greeks or between Hellenes, between the people who became Hellenized as the Romans would be and the Jews. And the Romans also seems to have developed much of that idea. They considered Judea as being a horrible place to have to govern, inhabited by a stubborn, obnoxious people, not well-liked.
So that’s really where you see the earliest version of that. And the reasons for it would be complicated, but you could say is that going back to Manetho and to the Roman period, Jews, Judeans frequently experienced difficulties, conflicts with other people living around them. And part of that probably had to do with the diaspora, which was the movement. Well, you get the idea. The Romans came in and kicked everybody out, which they didn’t. Jews had been leaving Judea since it was a poor limited area. And moving into areas like North Africa, Egypt, Cyrenaica, all the way into Southern France. They moved widely around the Roman Empire. So that sense of both distinctness and hostility existed since ancient times.
So it wasn’t just, the attitude of the church towards Jews was mixed by… Well, one of the ideas, of course, is that at the end of time, just before the second coming, one of the signs, how are we going to know that Jesus is going to return and the world is going to end? Well, the Jews will all convert. There will be a mass conversion. They’ll sort of see the light. Now, so there have to be Jews around to do that, or we won’t. It’s like a canary in a coal mine. You have to have them there to tip it off. So that was one of the arguments as to why, within the church as to why Jews would not be forcibly converted beyond the fact that it’s just kind of bad policy to forcibly convert people because you don’t know whether it’s sincere, but they need to be preserved as a kind of artifact, which will then redeem itself at the end of time. It’s not something which is encouraged. It predates Christianity, and then Christianity, of course, in its own way, just sort of…
Rick Spence
… of course, in its own way, just plagiarizes the whole Jewish thing, doesn’t it? I mean, I hesitate to use that term, but that’s what you do. It’s just like, “Well, we’re the Jews now. You used to have a unique relationship with God, but now it’s been passed over to us. Thanks for the Bible.” I can remember that on my mom’s side, I was periodically exposed to Sunday school, and pretty much the Old Testament was always presented as if somehow it was the history of, for lack of better term, Europeans in some way. It was a Christian history. It was all the prequel to that. First, the term Hebrew was always used, never Jews. So the ancient Hebrews, and somehow the Hebrews just became the Christians, and I don’t know, the Jews, they didn’t get a memo or something.
… of course, in its own way, just plagiarizes the whole Jewish thing, doesn’t it? I mean, I hesitate to use that term, but that’s what you do. It’s just like, “Well, we’re the Jews now. You used to have a unique relationship with God, but now it’s been passed over to us. Thanks for the Bible.” I can remember that on my mom’s side, I was periodically exposed to Sunday school, and pretty much the Old Testament was always presented as if somehow it was the history of, for lack of better term, Europeans in some way. It was a Christian history. It was all the prequel to that. First, the term Hebrew was always used, never Jews. So the ancient Hebrews, and somehow the Hebrews just became the Christians, and I don’t know, the Jews, they didn’t get a memo or something.
Lex Fridman
So it’s basically like, Christianity, the prequel, is the Old Testament.
So it’s basically like, Christianity, the prequel, is the Old Testament.
Rick Spence
Well, they just take over. “We have the special dispensation now. Thank you very much.” You’re an artifact.
Well, they just take over. “We have the special dispensation now. Thank you very much.” You’re an artifact.
Lex Fridman
So it’s interesting. So this whole narrative that I would say is a viral meme started, as you described, in 300 BC. It just carried on in various forms and morphed itself and arrived after the Industrial Revolution in a new form to the 19th and 20th century, and then somehow captivated everybody’s imagination.
So it’s interesting. So this whole narrative that I would say is a viral meme started, as you described, in 300 BC. It just carried on in various forms and morphed itself and arrived after the Industrial Revolution in a new form to the 19th and 20th century, and then somehow captivated everybody’s imagination.
Rick Spence
I think that modern antisemitism is very much a creation of the modern world and the Industrial Revolution. It’s largely a creation of Jewish emancipation. It’s the nasty flip side of that. All of the restrictions, they’re thrown off, but now also you become the focus of much more attention than what you had before. Prior to that, you had the ghettoization, which worked both ways. I mean, there were rabbis who praised the ghettos as a protection of Jews against the outside world, because inside we can live our life as we wish and we’re unmolested. The great fear is that if we were absorbed into this larger world, we’ll lose our identity. That sort of question comes up in the 18th century in things like the Haskalah movement in Germany, because the German Jews were always at the cutting edge of assimilation and modernity. And Moses Mendelssohn was an example of that, arguing that we just need to become Germans. So as much as possible, synagogues should look like Lutheran churches. Things should be given in good German. We need to become Jewish Germans. We don’t want to become a group of people who are apart in that way, and that has created great tensions ever since.
I think that modern antisemitism is very much a creation of the modern world and the Industrial Revolution. It’s largely a creation of Jewish emancipation. It’s the nasty flip side of that. All of the restrictions, they’re thrown off, but now also you become the focus of much more attention than what you had before. Prior to that, you had the ghettoization, which worked both ways. I mean, there were rabbis who praised the ghettos as a protection of Jews against the outside world, because inside we can live our life as we wish and we’re unmolested. The great fear is that if we were absorbed into this larger world, we’ll lose our identity. That sort of question comes up in the 18th century in things like the Haskalah movement in Germany, because the German Jews were always at the cutting edge of assimilation and modernity. And Moses Mendelssohn was an example of that, arguing that we just need to become Germans. So as much as possible, synagogues should look like Lutheran churches. Things should be given in good German. We need to become Jewish Germans. We don’t want to become a group of people who are apart in that way, and that has created great tensions ever since.
One of the essential points that seems to me in antisemitism, anti-Jew-ism is that all the Jews are in this together. Isn’t that one of the things? Okay. They’re always talking about as if they’re collective. Jews this, Jews that as if it’s a single, undifferentiated mass of people who all move and speak in the same way. From my personal experience, not being Jewish, it’s incredibly diverse in many ways, really. One of the things that anti-Semitism proposes is a continuity or a singularity of Jewish identity that never existed.
Lex Fridman
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. It gives us a direction of a people to fight, of a people to hate on which we project our pain, because life is difficult. Life for most is full of suffering. And so we channel that suffering into hatred towards the other.
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. It gives us a direction of a people to fight, of a people to hate on which we project our pain, because life is difficult. Life for most is full of suffering. And so we channel that suffering into hatred towards the other.
Maybe if you can just zoom out, what do you, from this particular discussion, learn about human nature that we pick the other in this way? We divide each other up in groups and then construct stories. And we like constructing those stories, and they become really viral and sexy to us. And then we use those stories to channel our hatred towards the other.
Rick Spence
Well, yeah. Jews aren’t the only recipient of that. I mean, anytime you hear people talking about Jews this or that, white people this or that, black people this or that, Asians this or that, where they’re an undifferentiated mass, who apparently all share something in common, well, then nobody’s really thinking. And the other thing you’ll find is that people who will express those views when pressed will argue that, “Oh, well, if they actually know anybody from those groups, those are okay.” It’s like Nazis. They go, “This is an okay Jew. They’re all right.” They would always be constantly making exceptions in one form. What they actually met an actual human being, and they seemed to be fairly normal, well, they were okay. So what it was that they hated weren’t actual people for the most part, it was just this golliwog vision that they had of them. You’re not even talking about real people.
Well, yeah. Jews aren’t the only recipient of that. I mean, anytime you hear people talking about Jews this or that, white people this or that, black people this or that, Asians this or that, where they’re an undifferentiated mass, who apparently all share something in common, well, then nobody’s really thinking. And the other thing you’ll find is that people who will express those views when pressed will argue that, “Oh, well, if they actually know anybody from those groups, those are okay.” It’s like Nazis. They go, “This is an okay Jew. They’re all right.” They would always be constantly making exceptions in one form. What they actually met an actual human being, and they seemed to be fairly normal, well, they were okay. So what it was that they hated weren’t actual people for the most part, it was just this golliwog vision that they had of them. You’re not even talking about real people.
I don’t know. What does that tell you about human nature? Well, okay, in 70 odd years, what have I learned about my fellow creatures? One, I don’t actually understand them any better than I ever did. In fact, less so. I would say this, when I was 17, I thought I had the world much more figured out than I do now. Completely deluded. But it seemed to make much more sense, and I could categorize things. Basic take upon human beings, most people, most of the time are polite, cooperative and kind until they’re not. And the exact tipping point and moment in which they go from one to the other is unpredictable.
Charles Manson
Lex Fridman
God, that’s brilliantly put. 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?
God, that’s brilliantly put. 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?
Rick Spence
The Manson family. Well, you begin with Charles Manson, who’s the key element in this, and Charles Manson for most of his life up until the time that he’s around 33, is an unexceptional, petty criminal. In and out of prison, reform school from an early age, not really associated with violent crimes. He did stuff like steal cars, write bad checks, became an unsuccessful pimp and drug dealer. So around 1967, he gets out of his latest stint in federal lockup in Terminal Island near Los Angeles, California. By that time, he has learned how to play the guitar, has ambitions to become a musician, and also has proclaimed himself a Scientologist, not that he ever seems to have practiced, but that’s what he would claim that he was. Self-educated himself in prison to a certain degree. So when he gets out of prison in ’67, he was a model prisoner. He behaved himself and seemed… You can imagine his life is going in a completely different direction. And here, again, I’m going to say something good about Charles Manson, which is that he actually was a decent singer. If you really listened to some of the stuff he did… He’s not a great singer, but other people got recording contracts with less talent than he had, and he could play a guitar. The Beach Boys actually do record one of his songs without him.
The Manson family. Well, you begin with Charles Manson, who’s the key element in this, and Charles Manson for most of his life up until the time that he’s around 33, is an unexceptional, petty criminal. In and out of prison, reform school from an early age, not really associated with violent crimes. He did stuff like steal cars, write bad checks, became an unsuccessful pimp and drug dealer. So around 1967, he gets out of his latest stint in federal lockup in Terminal Island near Los Angeles, California. By that time, he has learned how to play the guitar, has ambitions to become a musician, and also has proclaimed himself a Scientologist, not that he ever seems to have practiced, but that’s what he would claim that he was. Self-educated himself in prison to a certain degree. So when he gets out of prison in ’67, he was a model prisoner. He behaved himself and seemed… You can imagine his life is going in a completely different direction. And here, again, I’m going to say something good about Charles Manson, which is that he actually was a decent singer. If you really listened to some of the stuff he did… He’s not a great singer, but other people got recording contracts with less talent than he had, and he could play a guitar. The Beach Boys actually do record one of his songs without him.
Lex Fridman
How would you evaluate Hitler’s painting compared to Charles Manson’s-
How would you evaluate Hitler’s painting compared to Charles Manson’s-
Rick Spence
Well, you’re supposed to say it’s terrible. It looks average to me.
Well, you’re supposed to say it’s terrible. It looks average to me.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s a landscape.
Yeah, it’s a landscape.
Rick Spence
If you didn’t know it was Hitler, I don’t know what people would say about it.
If you didn’t know it was Hitler, I don’t know what people would say about it.
Lex Fridman
I’m sorry for the distraction.
I’m sorry for the distraction.
Rick Spence
He’s an average painter. That’s what it was. It’s nothing like crazy, genocidal, maniac paintings. You don’t really have those. So Manson, he could have done that. He made certain inroads into the music industry, and if he hadn’t been such a weirdo, he might’ve gotten further with it. But his life could have taken a different turn. So this is one of the questions I have. Where did a guy who’s an unexceptional career petty criminal suddenly emerge into some sort of criminal mastermind, a Svengali who can bend all of these people to his will and get them to go out and commit murder? That’s a real shift that you have.
He’s an average painter. That’s what it was. It’s nothing like crazy, genocidal, maniac paintings. You don’t really have those. So Manson, he could have done that. He made certain inroads into the music industry, and if he hadn’t been such a weirdo, he might’ve gotten further with it. But his life could have taken a different turn. So this is one of the questions I have. Where did a guy who’s an unexceptional career petty criminal suddenly emerge into some sort of criminal mastermind, a Svengali who can bend all of these people to his will and get them to go out and commit murder? That’s a real shift that you have.
So the first thing that could tell you that something odd is going on is he gets out of prison in LA County and he’s on parole. Parolees are supposed to have a job, not supposed to leave the jurisdiction of their parole. He heads straight for the Bay Area, violates parole right off the bat. Two weeks later, he drifts into the parole office in the Bay Area, whereupon he should have been arrested and sent back to Terminal Island, but instead they just assign him a [inaudible 02:30:57]. I don’t know, maybe things were easier then in some way. So he gets assigned a parole officer, Michael Smith. Michael Smith is initially handling a number of parolees. But after a while, once he takes on Manson, he only has one parolee he’s supervising, Charlie Manson, which is odd. Then you also find out that Michael Smith, in addition to being a parole officer, is a graduate student at the University of California studying group dynamics, especially the influence of drugs on gangs in groups. He’s also connected to the Hayett Ashbury Free Clinic, which is a place where the influence of… Because Hayett Ashbury had lots of drugs and lots of groups. So Charlie Manson never gets a regular job, hangs around with young girls, ex-cons, engages in criminal activity. He is repeatedly arrested, but nothing ever sticks for the next couple of years.
Who gets that type of thing? Who gets a get out of jail free card? Informants. So here is what? Again, this is speculation, but Manson at some point after he got out of prison is getting this treatment because he is recruited as a confidential informant.
Lex Fridman
For who?
For who?
Rick Spence
For who? That’s the interesting question. So, probably not for any local police departments. My best suspicion is probably the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, precursor to the DEA. Federal parolee, federal parole officer, graduate student in drugs and group dynamics. And eventually with permission, he goes back down to LA. And what is he part of when he’s there? Well, he’s on the fringes of the music industry. The Wilsons and elsewhere, which also brings him to the fringes of the film industry. So one of the things, if you’re looking in terms of Hollywood music industry elites in the flow of… Oh, and he’s also dealing in drugs and girls. So an early version of Jeffrey Epstein. Manson attracted lots of underage runaways and trained them, used them, also associating with biker gangs who produced the drugs, et cetera.
For who? That’s the interesting question. So, probably not for any local police departments. My best suspicion is probably the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, precursor to the DEA. Federal parolee, federal parole officer, graduate student in drugs and group dynamics. And eventually with permission, he goes back down to LA. And what is he part of when he’s there? Well, he’s on the fringes of the music industry. The Wilsons and elsewhere, which also brings him to the fringes of the film industry. So one of the things, if you’re looking in terms of Hollywood music industry elites in the flow of… Oh, and he’s also dealing in drugs and girls. So an early version of Jeffrey Epstein. Manson attracted lots of underage runaways and trained them, used them, also associating with biker gangs who produced the drugs, et cetera.
So that’s part of it. He’s an informant in the movement of drugs basically within the film and music industries. And he’s given pretty much a free rein at that point. What then happens in August of 1969 is that there are these murders. First, Sharon Tate and her friends in Cielo Drive. I think everybody has probably pretty much heard that story before. And of course, the question is why Cielo Drive? Why Sharon, Tate, Frykowski and the rest of them? Manson was familiar with the place. He had been there before. Members of the family had been there before, so he knew where it was. It wasn’t an easy place to find. The original house is no longer there, but the same property and a house is built there. And if you didn’t know where it was… It’s not some place, “Let’s just go for a drive in the Hollywood Hills and murder people in a house.” Well, that isn’t the one that you would come across. There are lots of connections there. Wojciech Frykowski was one of the people killed at the Cielo Drive house, was involved in drug dealing. That’s a possible connection between the two, probably a fairly likely one. Probably not unfortunate Sharon Tate at all. She was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her husband might’ve been, you never know.
And then the next night after the slaughter there… Which by the way, Manson is not at. So this is one of the interesting things about it is, Charles Manson doesn’t kill any of these people. His crime is supposedly ordering the killings to be done. He supposedly thought that the killings at the Tate house were sloppy, and he was going to give everybody a crash course in how you apparently commit seemingly random murders. So the next night he takes a group of people over to the LaBianca’s house in a different section of LA. You’ve got Leno, Rosemary LaBianca, the guy is a grocer. His wife runs a dress shop, upper middle class, and they’re bound and gagged and hacked to death. As at the Tate residence, various things like piggy are written, various messages in blood, things that are supposed to look like cat’s paws. Because one of the groups trying to be framed for this was the idea was the Black Panthers.
So the general story that comes out in the subsequent trial is that this was all a part of something called Helter Skelter, which supposedly was an idea that… That sounds like a Beatles song. That’s where he got it from. He thought the Beatles were talking to him through their music and that there was going to be an apocalyptic race war, and this was all part of a plan to set this off. So this is why the Black Panthers were trying to be implicated in this. Although, how it was supposed to do that is never really explained.
Here is what I think was really happening, what really happened and how I think it fits together. Before Sharon Tate and her friends or the LaBiancas were killed, there was a murder by members of the family of some of the same people involved in the later killings of a musician, drug manufacturer by the name of Gary Hinman. So Manson, again was involved in the drug trade, and Hinman made them. He was a cook, basically, and he brewed them up in his basement, sold the drugs to Manson, who sold them to biker gangs like the Straight Satans, which was one of the groups that he used, and they distributed them elsewhere. Well, one day, the Straight Satans show up and complain that the last batch of meth or whatever it was that they got from Manson, had made some of their brothers very, very ill, and they were quite unhappy about that, and they wanted their $2,000 back. Manson had gotten those drugs from Gary Hinman. So he is unhappy, and he sends Bobby Beausoleil, and a couple of the girls over to Hinman’s place to get the money from him. As the story is later relayed, I think by Susan Atkins, Hinman denied that there was anything wrong with his drugs and refused to pay up, which led to a interrogation torture session in which he was killed.
And the idea was here, what are we going to do with that? Well, one of the other groups that Hinman had sold drugs to were, guess what? People associated with the Black Panthers. So we’ll leave these things up and they will do it. So it’s Bobby Beausoleil who then takes Hinman’s car and decides to drive it up the coast, by the way, with a bloody knife with Hinman’s blood and hair on it, and blood on the seats in the car, and then he pulls it off the road and decides to sleep it off, and he gets busted. So, find Hinman’s body, find Beausoleil in Hinman’s car with a bloody knife with him. He gets arrested. So Beausoleil was very popular with some of the girls. There’s consternation in the family that Bobby has been arrested. So how can we possibly get Bobby out of jail? Copycat killings. So if we go kill more people and we make it look the same, then see, Bobby couldn’t possibly have done it. Now, see, he just borrowed the car. Okay, he stole the car, but the knife was already in… He didn’t have anything to do with this. So that to me makes the most sense out of what followed.
Lex Fridman
How often do people talk about that theory? That’s an interesting theory.
How often do people talk about that theory? That’s an interesting theory.
Rick Spence
Well, it’s there. It’s just not the one that… Bugliosi obviously wanted to go with Helter Skelter because again, it was a story that people could understand. It was sensational and it would catch on. Also, another probable issue in that was that his star witness was Linda Kasabian. Linda Kasabian, she was present at both the Tate and LaBianca murders. She didn’t participate in the killings, according to her. She drives the car. But everybody else talked about what had happened. Well, okay, she turns [inaudible 02:40:19] evidence and gets total immunity, and it’s largely in her testimony that all the rest of the case is based. Now, if you start throwing into the equation that she proclaimed her love for Bobby Beausoleil, and that she, according to others, was the chief proponent of the copycat killings, well then that would get messy. Now, there’s one guy that’s at the center of this, it’s Charles Manson. He ordered all of this done to ignite a race war, even though, how would any of that do it?
Well, it’s there. It’s just not the one that… Bugliosi obviously wanted to go with Helter Skelter because again, it was a story that people could understand. It was sensational and it would catch on. Also, another probable issue in that was that his star witness was Linda Kasabian. Linda Kasabian, she was present at both the Tate and LaBianca murders. She didn’t participate in the killings, according to her. She drives the car. But everybody else talked about what had happened. Well, okay, she turns [inaudible 02:40:19] evidence and gets total immunity, and it’s largely in her testimony that all the rest of the case is based. Now, if you start throwing into the equation that she proclaimed her love for Bobby Beausoleil, and that she, according to others, was the chief proponent of the copycat killings, well then that would get messy. Now, there’s one guy that’s at the center of this, it’s Charles Manson. He ordered all of this done to ignite a race war, even though, how would any of that do it?
Lex Fridman
So that doesn’t make sense. But he is nevertheless at the center of this because he’s the glue of the family. Right?
So that doesn’t make sense. But he is nevertheless at the center of this because he’s the glue of the family. Right?
Rick Spence
He exerts a tremendous amount of psychological control over them.
He exerts a tremendous amount of psychological control over them.
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Rick Spence
He had a lot of access to LSD. Which he started getting at the free clinic in San Francisco. So lots of it floating around. Some descriptions of the family at Spahn Ranch is that people were basically taking acid on a daily basis, which by the way was also a potential problem with Linda Kasabian’s testimony since she also admitted to being high most of the time, and also thinking she was a witch. Where do you want to go with that? See, if Manson wasn’t Manson, if he hadn’t actually acted like the crazed hippie, psycho goofball that Bugliosi painted him as being, then Kasabian’s testimony wouldn’t have been as strong because you could… I mean, the first thing against her is you’ve got an immunity for telling the story the prosecution wants. That’s a little iffy, and we won’t even bring in the witch and the drugs and being in love with Bobby Beausoleil. So if Manson had been dressed like you, sitting there in a suit and tie, and behaved himself and spoken normally… This isn’t to say that he wasn’t guilty as hell.
He had a lot of access to LSD. Which he started getting at the free clinic in San Francisco. So lots of it floating around. Some descriptions of the family at Spahn Ranch is that people were basically taking acid on a daily basis, which by the way was also a potential problem with Linda Kasabian’s testimony since she also admitted to being high most of the time, and also thinking she was a witch. Where do you want to go with that? See, if Manson wasn’t Manson, if he hadn’t actually acted like the crazed hippie, psycho goofball that Bugliosi painted him as being, then Kasabian’s testimony wouldn’t have been as strong because you could… I mean, the first thing against her is you’ve got an immunity for telling the story the prosecution wants. That’s a little iffy, and we won’t even bring in the witch and the drugs and being in love with Bobby Beausoleil. So if Manson had been dressed like you, sitting there in a suit and tie, and behaved himself and spoken normally… This isn’t to say that he wasn’t guilty as hell.
So what he supposedly did to inspire all of these killings, and I think that’s probably beginning with the Hinman killing, he told him to go over there and get the money one way or the other. I don’t know whether he told him, “If you don’t get the money, kill him.” But, Hinman’s dead. And then he might also have seen the value in terms of having copycat killings as a way of throwing off any other blame. The other story you get is that one of the people who had lived at the Cielo house where Sharon Tate was before, was a record producer by the name of Terry Melcher. Melcher supposedly, as the general story goes, had welched on a deal with Manson in terms of a record contract. He screwed over Manson in some sort of a record deal, and Manson wanted to get revenge and sent them to kill everybody in the house, which again, doesn’t make much sense. One, Manson knew that Melcher wasn’t living there anymore. He probably knew where Melcher was living. If he wanted to get Melcher, he could have found him. It wasn’t that difficult to do.
And so it’s not revenge on Terry Melcher that drew him there. He was familiar with the house. So if the idea was to simply commit random killings that would muddy the whole waters with the Hinman killing, then you might pick some place you knew of. He knew the place was [inaudible 02:44:23]. There would be someone there, and you really didn’t care, in the same way that the LaBiancas seemed to have been. Manson was familiar with that because it supposedly had been the scene of creepy crawling. This is little interesting things that the family would be taught to do. Creepy crawling is when you sneak into somebody’s house at night while they’re there asleep, or when they’re not there, and you move things around. So when they get up in the morning or they come home, they’ll suddenly notice that someone has been in their house, which will freak them out, which is the whole point of that.
Lex Fridman
But it doesn’t seem like the murder or the creepy crawling was the… Well, creepy crawling maybe. 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 artistry to the murder that the Zodiac Killer had and the messaging behind that. But it seems like, at least the way you’re describing it with the Charles Manson family, the murder was just… They just had a basic disregard for human life, and the murder was a consequence of operating in the drug underworld.
But it doesn’t seem like the murder or the creepy crawling was the… Well, creepy crawling maybe. 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 artistry to the murder that the Zodiac Killer had and the messaging behind that. But it seems like, at least the way you’re describing it with the Charles Manson family, the murder was just… They just had a basic disregard for human life, and the murder was a consequence of operating in the drug underworld.
Rick Spence
So Manson set up a base, I think called the Spahn Movie Ranch, which was an old movie ranch out on the northwest edge of LA, and they just camped out there. He used the girls, in particular, “Squeaky” Fromme to get the owner or operator, George Spahn to let them hang out there. Basically, she slept with him, and he was perfectly happy to let them hang out. They also had a place out in the desert that they had. They dealt in credit card fraud, stolen cars. It was a chop shop that they ran out of the place. So he had a fairly good little criminal gig going, which with the protection he had probably would’ve… The one thing they couldn’t cover him on was murder.
So Manson set up a base, I think called the Spahn Movie Ranch, which was an old movie ranch out on the northwest edge of LA, and they just camped out there. He used the girls, in particular, “Squeaky” Fromme to get the owner or operator, George Spahn to let them hang out there. Basically, she slept with him, and he was perfectly happy to let them hang out. They also had a place out in the desert that they had. They dealt in credit card fraud, stolen cars. It was a chop shop that they ran out of the place. So he had a fairly good little criminal gig going, which with the protection he had probably would’ve… The one thing they couldn’t cover him on was murder.
Lex Fridman
So you think if he was an informer, you think there was still a connection between DEA, FBI, CIA, whatever with him throughout this until he committed murder?
So you think if he was an informer, you think there was still a connection between DEA, FBI, CIA, whatever with him throughout this until he committed murder?
Rick Spence
Well, the real question is… There is a book written on this by Tom O’Neill called Chaos. I’m not necessarily saying it’s the easiest thing to get through. There’s a lot of material there. I don’t think O’Neill necessarily knows what to make of some of the stuff he came up with, but he does a very good job of demolishing the whole Bugliosi narrative. One of the people he mentions is a name that I had run into elsewhere, and so I really paid attention to it when I saw it again. And the name is Reeve Whitson. Reeve Whitson shows up on the fringes, even though he has no judicial function. He hangs around Bugliosi in the prosecution. He’s just there. In the same way that he was one of these guys… He grew his hair long, wore bell-bottoms, hung around the music community and elsewhere in Hollywood, but no one could tell you exactly what he did. I know what he did later. A decade later, he shows up as a CIA officer in Central America.
Well, the real question is… There is a book written on this by Tom O’Neill called Chaos. I’m not necessarily saying it’s the easiest thing to get through. There’s a lot of material there. I don’t think O’Neill necessarily knows what to make of some of the stuff he came up with, but he does a very good job of demolishing the whole Bugliosi narrative. One of the people he mentions is a name that I had run into elsewhere, and so I really paid attention to it when I saw it again. And the name is Reeve Whitson. Reeve Whitson shows up on the fringes, even though he has no judicial function. He hangs around Bugliosi in the prosecution. He’s just there. In the same way that he was one of these guys… He grew his hair long, wore bell-bottoms, hung around the music community and elsewhere in Hollywood, but no one could tell you exactly what he did. I know what he did later. A decade later, he shows up as a CIA officer in Central America.
So Reeve Whitson, later in his career at least, is CIA. What was he in 1969? What is he doing in this? The other thing about it is he appears to have been the person who called… There’s a little question of when the bodies at Cielo Drive are discovered. So the general story is that Sharon Tate’s housekeeper shows up around 8:30 in the morning, finds the bloody scene and goes screaming next door. But there was another fellow who knew… I think the owner of the house is a photographer. Last name may be Hatami. He gets a call earlier in the morning saying that there’d been murders there, and the person he recalls calling him is Reeve Whitson. So someone had been at the house before the bodies were discovered, and they had not called the police. So I don’t know what’s going on there, but it’s a curious situation.
And Manson in a lot of ways, self-immolates himself. I mean, his behavior at the trial is bizarre. It’s threatening, it’s disruptive. He’s got his girls out on the street carving X’s in their forehead, carrying knives. One of the attorneys, initially, his attorney, Ron Hughes, becomes Van Houten’s attorney. And he figures out that the three girls, supposedly on Charlie’s insistence, are going to confess. They’ll confess that it was all their idea and Charlie had nothing to do with it. Hughes doesn’t like this because his defense for her is that she was under his influence and therefore not responsible for her own actions. He was having psychic control, so he refuses to go along with it. There’s a break in the trial. He goes camping up in the mountains with some friends, disappears during a rainstorm, and then some months later, his decomposed remains are found.
Rumors, always the rumors. What would history be without rumors? Members of the family, they were off at Ron Hughes because he messed up Charlie’s idea to get him off and so they killed him. Maybe they did. Maybe he drowned. That’s absolutely impossible to say. You’ve got that story. There’s a guy named Juan Flynn, who was an employee at the Spahn Ranch, didn’t like Manson, held Manson responsible for the murder of his boss. He would testify that Manson told him that he had ordered all the killings, and that Manson also admitted that he had killed 35 people. Maybe he did. On the other hand, Juan Flynn didn’t like him, and other than his word had no real proof of what he was saying.
So please understand me in this case, is that unlike some people who argue that Charles Manson got a raw deal, I don’t think that’s the case. I think that he influenced tremendous influence over the people there through drugs. Sex was another frequent component in it. He had a real whammy over a lot of these people’s minds. I’m not sure how. That still puzzles me. He was a scrawny guy and he wasn’t physically intimidating. I mean, even a lot of women wouldn’t be physically intimidated by him. But he nevertheless had this real psychological power. And if you look around him, the male followers he had were fairly big guys. So he could get people to do what he wanted. And again, to me, the simplest explanation for this is that it began with the Hinman killing, and probably on Manson’s instigation the others were copycat killings to throw off what was going on. If I was a cop, that’s what I would focus on because that seems to make the most sense.
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Rick Spence
Yes. The great focus on Charlie, the leader. The excessive devotion.
Yes. The great focus on Charlie, the leader. The excessive devotion.
Lex Fridman
But there’s not an ideology behind that, like something like Scientology or some kind of religious or some kind of… I don’t know, utopian ideology. Nothing like this?
But there’s not an ideology behind that, like something like Scientology or some kind of religious or some kind of… I don’t know, utopian ideology. Nothing like this?
Rick Spence
No. I think that Madison, again, was essentially a criminal. He had a sociopathic mindset, and he hit upon a pretty good deal.
No. I think that Madison, again, was essentially a criminal. He had a sociopathic mindset, and he hit upon a pretty good deal.
Lex Fridman
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 convince them that you love them in some deep sense. There’s a commune of love.
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 convince them that you love them in some deep sense. There’s a commune of love.
Rick Spence
You have a lot of people there in the cult. They have some sort of, what we like to call dysfunctional families. A lot of the females in particular seem to have come from more or less middle-class families, but those are full of dysfunction. Their parents didn’t love them. They were semi-runaways. And now they had this whole family. A lot of the younger women had children, some of them by Manson, some of them by the others. They bonded together.
You have a lot of people there in the cult. They have some sort of, what we like to call dysfunctional families. A lot of the females in particular seem to have come from more or less middle-class families, but those are full of dysfunction. Their parents didn’t love them. They were semi-runaways. And now they had this whole family. A lot of the younger women had children, some of them by Manson, some of them by the others. They bonded together.
Zodiac Killer
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Rick Spence
Well, California, where I’m from… I remember this period vividly. By the way, the Tate LaBianca killings occurred on my birthday, the year I graduated from high school. So I remember this.
Well, California, where I’m from… I remember this period vividly. By the way, the Tate LaBianca killings occurred on my birthday, the year I graduated from high school. So I remember this.
Lex Fridman
Happy birthday.
Happy birthday.
Rick Spence
A term which has been used for that… There’s a writer by the name of Todd Wood who’s [inaudible 02:54:34]… I wish I’d come up with this. Killerfornia. Which is a chronicle of these serial killers and disappearances in the late sixties and seventies. So you’ve got the Zodiac, you’ve got other ones. I mean, I hate to say it, I’m not trying to be flippant about it, but I mean, young female hitchhikers were disappearing at an alarming rate in Northern California. There are bodies that have never been attributed. Some think that they’re-
A term which has been used for that… There’s a writer by the name of Todd Wood who’s [inaudible 02:54:34]… I wish I’d come up with this. Killerfornia. Which is a chronicle of these serial killers and disappearances in the late sixties and seventies. So you’ve got the Zodiac, you’ve got other ones. I mean, I hate to say it, I’m not trying to be flippant about it, but I mean, young female hitchhikers were disappearing at an alarming rate in Northern California. There are bodies that have never been attributed. Some think that they’re-
Rick Spence
That have never been attributed. Some think that they’re the Zodiac’s victims, but it was a dangerous time. Edmund Kemper, the co-ed killer was another one. There were a lot of creepy psychopaths running around. I don’t know whether it was something in the water or what was going on, but it was a menacing in some cases. Hitchhiking, especially if you were alone and female, was not something you wanted to do in much of the Golden State, certainly not up around the Bay Area. So a lot of these strange killings that were going on, the Zodiac, it’s one of those things where you have these people who have theories about it, and if you don’t share their theory, then you’re part of the problem in some form or another. So I’m not sure, for instance, that the Zodiac killings were all committed by the same person. I think there might’ve been multiple people involved.
That have never been attributed. Some think that they’re the Zodiac’s victims, but it was a dangerous time. Edmund Kemper, the co-ed killer was another one. There were a lot of creepy psychopaths running around. I don’t know whether it was something in the water or what was going on, but it was a menacing in some cases. Hitchhiking, especially if you were alone and female, was not something you wanted to do in much of the Golden State, certainly not up around the Bay Area. So a lot of these strange killings that were going on, the Zodiac, it’s one of those things where you have these people who have theories about it, and if you don’t share their theory, then you’re part of the problem in some form or another. So I’m not sure, for instance, that the Zodiac killings were all committed by the same person. I think there might’ve been multiple people involved.
And the first killings are all of couples. It’s very clear that they… I remember in my examination of it, one of the things I was looking at specific, what else is there to say about this zodiac killings? What I was going to look at is that there are all of these accusations that there was an occult aspect to it, that there was some sort of ritualistic aspect. So I looked at different things, locations, victims, phases of the moon. That’s always worth looking at. I didn’t find much correspondence in any of those. In one of the killings, I think the one in Lake Berryessa, he does appear in this kind of weird hooded costume. He’s got his symbol that sort of compass or aiming reticle circle with a cross through it. It can mean a variety of things. He used guns and he used knives, but he certainly had to think for couples. Except in the last of the killings, which is of a cab driver in downtown San Francisco, who he shoots in full view of witnesses, which is completely atypical.
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Rick Spence
Yeah, he’s not particularly thorough about it. He seems to have had much more…. More of the violence seems to be directed at the females than the males.
Yeah, he’s not particularly thorough about it. He seems to have had much more…. More of the violence seems to be directed at the females than the males.
Lex Fridman
So I mean, there’s a couple of questions to ask here. First of all, did people see his face?
So I mean, there’s a couple of questions to ask here. First of all, did people see his face?
Rick Spence
There is a composite drawing of his face, which I think is based upon the Stine killing, the cab driver killing, where there were people who saw him or who claimed that they saw him. The other ones were all when it was fairly dark. I’m not sure that anyone else got a look at his face. The one that occurred in the daylight at Berryessa, he was wearing a mask. So there’s something in common initially in the targeting of victims, which doesn’t in the last case. Then after that, there’s just these different cases of where there’s a pretty good case to be made. A woman who claims, I think she and a small child were picked up. Her car broke down, she got a flat tire, and she was picked up by this guy who she got a very sort of strange vibe from who eventually just let her go. Well, that might’ve been the Zodiac. It might not have been.
There is a composite drawing of his face, which I think is based upon the Stine killing, the cab driver killing, where there were people who saw him or who claimed that they saw him. The other ones were all when it was fairly dark. I’m not sure that anyone else got a look at his face. The one that occurred in the daylight at Berryessa, he was wearing a mask. So there’s something in common initially in the targeting of victims, which doesn’t in the last case. Then after that, there’s just these different cases of where there’s a pretty good case to be made. A woman who claims, I think she and a small child were picked up. Her car broke down, she got a flat tire, and she was picked up by this guy who she got a very sort of strange vibe from who eventually just let her go. Well, that might’ve been the Zodiac. It might not have been.
Lex Fridman
You do this kind of rigorous look saying like, okay, what is the actual facts that we know? Reduce it to the thing that we know for sure. And in speaking about his motivation, he said that he was collecting souls.
You do this kind of rigorous look saying like, okay, what is the actual facts that we know? Reduce it to the thing that we know for sure. And in speaking about his motivation, he said that he was collecting souls.
Rick Spence
Souls for the afterlife.
Souls for the afterlife.
Lex Fridman
For the afterlife.
For the afterlife.
Rick Spence
That’s kind of a cultie.
That’s kind of a cultie.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean that’s what I believe. Is it the Vikings or the Romans? They believed this in battle.
Yeah, I mean that’s what I believe. Is it the Vikings or the Romans? They believed this in battle.
Rick Spence
You’re essentially making sacrificial victims, and they will be your ghostly servants in the afterlife.
You’re essentially making sacrificial victims, and they will be your ghostly servants in the afterlife.
Lex Fridman
Do you think he actually believed that?
Do you think he actually believed that?
Rick Spence
Who knows? I mean, here’s the question. Was he making that up just to be scary or is that what his actual? That’s what he’s saying his motivation is. So let’s take him at face value rather than trying to wish that into the cornfield to get rid of it. Let’s just take it at face. So he’s claiming that he’s killing these people in order to acquire slave servants in the afterlife. He will subsequently go on to claim many more victims, I’m not sure, 44 eventually he will have before he just kind of vanishes. One of the really interesting clues to me when I was looking at that case, which I didn’t find anybody else that tended to make much of it, is that it all has to do with this kind of Halloween card that he sends to the press in San Francisco. And it’s talking about sort of rope by gun by fire, and there’s this whole sort of wheel, like the zodiacs. But what this is drawn from, where he got this from is from a Tim Holt Western comic book published in 1951, and you see the same thing in the cover.
Who knows? I mean, here’s the question. Was he making that up just to be scary or is that what his actual? That’s what he’s saying his motivation is. So let’s take him at face value rather than trying to wish that into the cornfield to get rid of it. Let’s just take it at face. So he’s claiming that he’s killing these people in order to acquire slave servants in the afterlife. He will subsequently go on to claim many more victims, I’m not sure, 44 eventually he will have before he just kind of vanishes. One of the really interesting clues to me when I was looking at that case, which I didn’t find anybody else that tended to make much of it, is that it all has to do with this kind of Halloween card that he sends to the press in San Francisco. And it’s talking about sort of rope by gun by fire, and there’s this whole sort of wheel, like the zodiacs. But what this is drawn from, where he got this from is from a Tim Holt Western comic book published in 1951, and you see the same thing in the cover.
It’s Wheel of Fortune, but with different forms of grisly death on it. And all of the things that he mentioned are shown on the cover of this. So whoever put together that card saw that comic book. Well, that’s kind of an interesting clue. So does that mean he’s a comic book collector? When would he have… I mean, that one and also where he got the idea from, and so he’s incorporating these things from. Then there are of course his codes, which people have, which aren’t all that difficult to decipher probably because they weren’t meant to be. The other thing that you find often with serial or psychopathic killers is they’re toying with the press. I mean, this goes all the way back to Jack the Ripper. They get attention, and then he just disappears.
Lex Fridman
Why do you think he was never caught?
Why do you think he was never caught?
Rick Spence
I don’t think they knew who to look for. There was nothing much to go on. There was a guy who was long a suspect, and then eventually they tested his DNA and find it didn’t match any of the things that they’d found. Again, it goes back to, I’m not even sure that it’s one person who’s responsible for all of them.
I don’t think they knew who to look for. There was nothing much to go on. There was a guy who was long a suspect, and then eventually they tested his DNA and find it didn’t match any of the things that they’d found. Again, it goes back to, I’m not even sure that it’s one person who’s responsible for all of them.
Lex Fridman
So one of the interesting things you bring up here and our discussion of Manson inspires this, but there does seem to be a connection, a 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?
So one of the interesting things you bring up here and our discussion of Manson inspires this, but there does seem to be a connection, a 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?
Rick Spence
Well, take the Zodiac and you get his claim that he’s collecting souls for the afterlife. There are other things that are occult-ish connected to that. He may have picked some of the killing sites due to their physical location, to their position in a particular place. If you look at the Son of Sam case, of course, David Berkowitz will on and off claim that he was part of a Satanic cult that was carrying out, again, these killings mostly of couples and young women similar to the Zodiac, and that he had only committed some of them and was witnesses to others. And that has really created the whole idea that yes, there is this some kind of Satanic cult, which engages in ritual murders. Then if you go all the way to Florence, you’ve got murders who go on and off for a long period of time. Again, focusing on couples in isolated areas, which Italian prosecutors ultimately tried to connect to some kind of satanic cult, although I’m not sure they ever made a particularly strong case for that. But that element comes up in all three of them. So you can with a little imagination, argue that those similarities, that those things should come up in each of those cases in different places, either suggest that oddly enough, psychopathic criminals all sort of thinking the same way, or that there is some sort of higher element involved in this, that there’s some kind of common inspiration. Here you come back to something similar we were talking before about, do pedophiles exist? Okay, so do satanic cults exist? Well, they do. Okay. There was one in my hometown, apparently quite harmless as far as I know, never did anything. But there are people who robes. Here we come again, robes, cut the head off a chicken, naked woman as an altar. You can get off on that I suppose, if that’s your thing. So professed satanists exist, satanic cults exist, serial killers exist, ritual murders exist. Are those things necessarily connected? No. Could they be connected? Yes. There’s nothing. Don’t ever tell me that something is just too crazy for people to do because that’s crazy talk.
Well, take the Zodiac and you get his claim that he’s collecting souls for the afterlife. There are other things that are occult-ish connected to that. He may have picked some of the killing sites due to their physical location, to their position in a particular place. If you look at the Son of Sam case, of course, David Berkowitz will on and off claim that he was part of a Satanic cult that was carrying out, again, these killings mostly of couples and young women similar to the Zodiac, and that he had only committed some of them and was witnesses to others. And that has really created the whole idea that yes, there is this some kind of Satanic cult, which engages in ritual murders. Then if you go all the way to Florence, you’ve got murders who go on and off for a long period of time. Again, focusing on couples in isolated areas, which Italian prosecutors ultimately tried to connect to some kind of satanic cult, although I’m not sure they ever made a particularly strong case for that. But that element comes up in all three of them. So you can with a little imagination, argue that those similarities, that those things should come up in each of those cases in different places, either suggest that oddly enough, psychopathic criminals all sort of thinking the same way, or that there is some sort of higher element involved in this, that there’s some kind of common inspiration. Here you come back to something similar we were talking before about, do pedophiles exist? Okay, so do satanic cults exist? Well, they do. Okay. There was one in my hometown, apparently quite harmless as far as I know, never did anything. But there are people who robes. Here we come again, robes, cut the head off a chicken, naked woman as an altar. You can get off on that I suppose, if that’s your thing. So professed satanists exist, satanic cults exist, serial killers exist, ritual murders exist. Are those things necessarily connected? No. Could they be connected? Yes. There’s nothing. Don’t ever tell me that something is just too crazy for people to do because that’s crazy talk.
Illuminati
Lex Fridman
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 from everything from the Knights Templar to Illuminati, Freemasons, like we brought up. Freemasons lasted a long time. Illuminati, you’ve talked about in its sort of main form, lasted a short time, but its legend.
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 from everything from the Knights Templar to Illuminati, Freemasons, like we brought up. Freemasons lasted a long time. Illuminati, you’ve talked about in its sort of main form, lasted a short time, but its legend.
Rick Spence
Never gone away.
Never gone away.
Lex Fridman
Never gone away. So maybe Illuminati is a really interesting one. What was that?
Never gone away. So maybe Illuminati is a really interesting one. What was that?
Rick Spence
Well, the Illuminati that we know started in the 1776. In fact, you can pin it down to a day, the 1st of May, May Day, 1776 in Ingolstadt, Germany, founded by a professor Adam Weishaupt. It wasn’t initially called the Illuminati because that’s not really the name of the organization. It was called the Order Perfectibilists. Apparently that changed. Weishaupt would say things like never let our organization be known under its real name anywhere, which leaves wondering what’s its real name. So Illuminati is simply the plural of Illuminatus, which means one who is illuminated, one who has seen the light. So in Roman times, Christian converts were Illuminati because they had seen the light, anyone who thinks. And there have been organizations called Illuminati. The term is not trademarked, not copyrighted. Anybody who thinks they’ve seen the light about anything is an Illuminati. So it defines nothing.
Well, the Illuminati that we know started in the 1776. In fact, you can pin it down to a day, the 1st of May, May Day, 1776 in Ingolstadt, Germany, founded by a professor Adam Weishaupt. It wasn’t initially called the Illuminati because that’s not really the name of the organization. It was called the Order Perfectibilists. Apparently that changed. Weishaupt would say things like never let our organization be known under its real name anywhere, which leaves wondering what’s its real name. So Illuminati is simply the plural of Illuminatus, which means one who is illuminated, one who has seen the light. So in Roman times, Christian converts were Illuminati because they had seen the light, anyone who thinks. And there have been organizations called Illuminati. The term is not trademarked, not copyrighted. Anybody who thinks they’ve seen the light about anything is an Illuminati. So it defines nothing.
The symbol of the order was an owl, which interestingly enough is almost identical to the owl which is the emblem of the Bohemian Club.
Lex Fridman
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
Rick Spence
Make of that what you will. I don’t make that much out of it because one owl looks pretty much like another owl to me. But compare them, you got to kind of wonder about, there’s a little, just a little thing. Maybe there’s some kind of connection there. But that supposedly has to do with the connection to the goddess Minerva and the owl was sacred to her and the order was the Minerva of all, the person who was brought in. The number of levels changed over time. There was a higher level, so the order that people at the lower level didn’t know about, pretty typical for this. But the thing about Weishaupt was that he was a luminous correspondent with members with his Illuminati, both during the time that it legally existed in Bavaria and later on.
Make of that what you will. I don’t make that much out of it because one owl looks pretty much like another owl to me. But compare them, you got to kind of wonder about, there’s a little, just a little thing. Maybe there’s some kind of connection there. But that supposedly has to do with the connection to the goddess Minerva and the owl was sacred to her and the order was the Minerva of all, the person who was brought in. The number of levels changed over time. There was a higher level, so the order that people at the lower level didn’t know about, pretty typical for this. But the thing about Weishaupt was that he was a luminous correspondent with members with his Illuminati, both during the time that it legally existed in Bavaria and later on.
So Weishaupt himself lives, I think until 1830, dies in Gotha, which was ruled by an Illuminati prince. And so nothing ever happens to these. No Illuminati is ever put to death or arrested in prison for any period of time. What happens is that their plan… Well, what was his plan? His plan was to essentially replace all existing religions and governments in the world with a one world order governed by the Illuminati. So to do this, you had to subvert and destroy all the existing order. And he argued the purpose for this is we wish to make men happy and free, but first we must make them good.
Lex Fridman
Oh, right.
Oh, right.
Rick Spence
So that’s what the order is all about. Of course, he also said things like, oh man, is there nothing that you won’t believe? So myth would be used in that. Also thought women should be brought into it. He had a rather interesting view about that was that we should appeal to women in part because women have a chip on their shoulder because they’re left out of things. So we should appeal to their vanity on that point and offer that in the future, all things will be open and they will be emancipated. So we should hold out the prospect of female emancipation to attract them because he argued in the short term, there’s no better way to influence men than through women. Get women on our side by promising them emancipation, but made sure we’ll never actually deliver it to them because the future world will be a boys club.
So that’s what the order is all about. Of course, he also said things like, oh man, is there nothing that you won’t believe? So myth would be used in that. Also thought women should be brought into it. He had a rather interesting view about that was that we should appeal to women in part because women have a chip on their shoulder because they’re left out of things. So we should appeal to their vanity on that point and offer that in the future, all things will be open and they will be emancipated. So we should hold out the prospect of female emancipation to attract them because he argued in the short term, there’s no better way to influence men than through women. Get women on our side by promising them emancipation, but made sure we’ll never actually deliver it to them because the future world will be a boys club.
So he talks about these things fairly openly, and this is where you get this idea of some sort of a new world order, which is to be based upon the destruction of the existing order. So there are those who argue that there is a trail of descent that leads from Weishaupt’s Illuminati to the Communist manifesto, and in fact, communism itself, that Marxism was simply a further restating of this idea. And you can draw some sort of, I mean, the idea never entirely goes away. The Bavarian government gets a hold of the order’s, inner texts. So the story is they’re delivered to them. I think that Weishaupt gave them to him. I think he engineered the exposure of his order because it gave him publicity. By being exposed in Bavaria, you gained great renown. And they continued to recruit after this, and the Bavarian government actually bans the Illuminati four different times. Why? Because apparently the first three times didn’t work. So the fourth one does. You can notice that it’s like Papal bans on Freemasonry. They just go on and on and on because this clearly isn’t working.
Lex Fridman
And you actually highlight, speaking of publicity, that there’s a difference between visibility and transparency. That a secret society could be visible, it could be known about, it could be quite popular, but you could still have a secrecy within it.
And you actually highlight, speaking of publicity, that there’s a difference between visibility and transparency. That a secret society could be visible, it could be known about, it could be quite popular, but you could still have a secrecy within it.
Rick Spence
You have no idea what’s going on inside. It’s like a black box. If I set a black box on this table, we can see that there is a black box. What’s in the black box? A cat? Who knows?
You have no idea what’s going on inside. It’s like a black box. If I set a black box on this table, we can see that there is a black box. What’s in the black box? A cat? Who knows?
Lex Fridman
In fact, the secrecy might be the very thing that makes it even more popular.
In fact, the secrecy might be the very thing that makes it even more popular.
Rick Spence
Adam Weishaupt, again, there is no more convincing than a concealed mystery. Give people a concealed mystery in the thought. So we need to make the order mysterious for that exact reason. Always hold out the possibility that knowledge, special knowledge that no mere mortals have other than you will have in that way. So he senses a lot of things, the use of vanity and ego to recruit people to influence both men and women, it’s quite sophisticated and as you might expect from a professor of canon law trained by Jesuits. So I certainly don’t think that it ceased when it was banned in Bavaria because everybody just scatters and goes elsewhere like Paris. And then you have the French Revolution.
Adam Weishaupt, again, there is no more convincing than a concealed mystery. Give people a concealed mystery in the thought. So we need to make the order mysterious for that exact reason. Always hold out the possibility that knowledge, special knowledge that no mere mortals have other than you will have in that way. So he senses a lot of things, the use of vanity and ego to recruit people to influence both men and women, it’s quite sophisticated and as you might expect from a professor of canon law trained by Jesuits. So I certainly don’t think that it ceased when it was banned in Bavaria because everybody just scatters and goes elsewhere like Paris. And then you have the French Revolution.
Secret societies
Lex Fridman
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 adopt the branding.
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 adopt the branding.
Rick Spence
Anybody can call it. You can go out and form a club, and call it the Illuminati.
Anybody can call it. You can go out and form a club, and call it the Illuminati.
Lex Fridman
And if you are 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 it’s a gravitational force that pulls powerful people to these societies. It’s exclusive.
And if you are 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 it’s a gravitational force that pulls powerful people to these societies. It’s exclusive.
Rick Spence
Only certain. And you also notice something goes back to when we were talking about much earlier when we were talking about intelligence. Remember MEIS? Ego.
Only certain. And you also notice something goes back to when we were talking about much earlier when we were talking about intelligence. Remember MEIS? Ego.
Lex Fridman
Ego, yeah.
Ego, yeah.
Rick Spence
Ease of recruitment and control. That’s a great Achilles heel in human beings, the exploitation of ego.
Ease of recruitment and control. That’s a great Achilles heel in human beings, the exploitation of ego.
Lex Fridman
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 because that’s where the powerful people are.
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 because that’s where the powerful people are.
Rick Spence
Or the secret societies to infiltrate the intelligence agencies.
Or the secret societies to infiltrate the intelligence agencies.
Lex Fridman
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?
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?
Rick Spence
Well, I’ll give you my definition of secret societies, what they come down to. One is that generally their existence isn’t secret. It’s what they do is secret. It’s what’s in the box as opposed to the existence of the box. So one of the most important criteria is that they are self-selecting. You just don’t join. They pick you. They decide whether or not you’re going to, they admit you. And oftentimes they will sort of recruit you. Once you have been recruited, you have to pass tests and initiations, and you also have to swear oaths of loyalty. Those are always very, very critical. So broadly speaking, what the entrance into an intelligence organization does, they decide whether you get in. You just don’t automatically get the job. You have to pass tests, a lie detector test, for instance, field training tests, a whole variety of tests. And then you’re sworn to secrecy. You never talk about what you do ever. Or there will be dire consequences.
Well, I’ll give you my definition of secret societies, what they come down to. One is that generally their existence isn’t secret. It’s what they do is secret. It’s what’s in the box as opposed to the existence of the box. So one of the most important criteria is that they are self-selecting. You just don’t join. They pick you. They decide whether or not you’re going to, they admit you. And oftentimes they will sort of recruit you. Once you have been recruited, you have to pass tests and initiations, and you also have to swear oaths of loyalty. Those are always very, very critical. So broadly speaking, what the entrance into an intelligence organization does, they decide whether you get in. You just don’t automatically get the job. You have to pass tests, a lie detector test, for instance, field training tests, a whole variety of tests. And then you’re sworn to secrecy. You never talk about what you do ever. Or there will be dire consequences.
So the method is very much the same. And also this idea of creating a kind of insular group. The organization is us, and everyone else is outside of that. We are guardians of special knowledge. See, this is the type of thing that would generally happen if you question whatever any kind of intelligence agency did. Well, we know things that you don’t. Why? Because we’re the organization that knows things. We collect information, we know the secrets, we guard the secrets. Therefore, if we tell you, you must believe us.
Lex Fridman
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 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?
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 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?
Rick Spence
They’ll probably mislead you if you get too close. So I think the question is what’s the most powerful or important secret society? Probably the one you don’t know about, one that doesn’t advertise its existence, the one which is never known anywhere under its real name. You’ve got things like the Bohemian Club, you’ve got the Bilderbergers, which is another formed in the 1950s, largely the creation of a guy by the name of Josef Retinger, Polish, mysterious, appears out of who knows where, a schemer for years, a man expelled from Britain, France and the United States at one point or another, long active in the Mexican labor movement. Retinger is a mysterious figure. In fact, I think there was even a book written about him called Eminence Grise, Grey Eminence. The fellow who was the front man for the Bilderbergers was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who was at one point a Nazi and then a Dutch freedom fighter.
They’ll probably mislead you if you get too close. So I think the question is what’s the most powerful or important secret society? Probably the one you don’t know about, one that doesn’t advertise its existence, the one which is never known anywhere under its real name. You’ve got things like the Bohemian Club, you’ve got the Bilderbergers, which is another formed in the 1950s, largely the creation of a guy by the name of Josef Retinger, Polish, mysterious, appears out of who knows where, a schemer for years, a man expelled from Britain, France and the United States at one point or another, long active in the Mexican labor movement. Retinger is a mysterious figure. In fact, I think there was even a book written about him called Eminence Grise, Grey Eminence. The fellow who was the front man for the Bilderbergers was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who was at one point a Nazi and then a Dutch freedom fighter.
All right, take your pick. But Retinger is the moving hand behind the whole thing, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out who Retinger is. So the idea is that, well, you get like influential people in media, business, politics, and you bring them together just to talk, to try to find common answers or common questions. It’s all very much sort of Western Anglo-European. It’s all very closely sort of connected to NATO, the whole concept of a kind of Atlanticist world, which is essentially the Anglo-American combine combined with Western Europe. But you got a bunch of these things. I mean, the Council on Foreign Relations is very similar to that and the Bilderbergers, and there’s an overlap with the Bohemian Club. And then you’ve got the Pinay Cercle or Le Cercle, which is more military, but also linked to the so-called secret Gladio. The idea of the Soviets over around Western Europe, there would be a stay behind organization called Gladio. There’d be these freedom fighters.
So the question I have about that is that how many secret organizations do you need? I mean, why all these separate groups which often seem to have the same people into them?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. 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?
Yeah. 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?
Rick Spence
Well, I guess on one level I’m comforted that there’s somebody actually making decisions as opposed to, I mean, what do you want? Do you want chaos or do you want everything kind of rigidly controlled? And I don’t put much stock in the idea that there actually is some small group of people running everything, because if they were, it would operate more efficiently. I do think that there are various disparate groups of people who think that they’re running things or try to, and that’s what concerns me more than anything else.
Well, I guess on one level I’m comforted that there’s somebody actually making decisions as opposed to, I mean, what do you want? Do you want chaos or do you want everything kind of rigidly controlled? And I don’t put much stock in the idea that there actually is some small group of people running everything, because if they were, it would operate more efficiently. I do think that there are various disparate groups of people who think that they’re running things or try to, and that’s what concerns me more than anything else.
Well, I hate to go back to them again because what you’re bringing up, you go back to the Nazis. They had their whole idea about a new world order, and they only had 12 years to do it. And look what a mess they made. I mean, look at the damage, the physical damage that can be done by an idea inspiring a relatively small group of people controlling a nation based upon some sort of racial or ideological fantasy that has no real basis in reality and yet guides their actions. It’s this differentiation that I always make. And I would try to get across to students between always be clear about what you know and what you believe. You don’t know many things.
You know your name, you know when you were born, you probably know who your father is, but that’s not absolute unless you’ve had a DNA test and only if you trust DNA tests. So you know who your mother is. You believe this man is your father. Why? Because your mother told you he was. So you believe things generally because someone has told you this is to be true, but you don’t really know for sure.
Well, because we know so little, we tend to go by beliefs. So we believe in this. We believe in that. You believe that your cult leader is the answer to everything. And it seems to be very, very easy to get people to believe things. And then what happens is that whether or not those beliefs have any real basis in reality, they begin to influence your actions. So here again, regrettably in some ways to bring it back to the Nazis, what were the Nazis convinced of? They were convinced that Jews were basically evil aliens. That’s what it comes down to. They weren’t really humans. There’s some sort of evil contamination which we must eradicate. And they set out to do that.
Lex Fridman
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. It just never goes right. It seems like impossible to know the truth in it.
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. It just never goes right. It seems like impossible to know the truth in it.
Rick Spence
For some reason, not long ago, I was listening on YouTube to old Wobbly songs, the Workers of the World. I don’t know why. I know there was a whole album of Wobbly songs, and there was one of them called Commonwealth of Toil. And like most of them, they’re sort of taken from gospel songs. And it’s talking about in the future how wonderful everything will be in the Commonwealth of Toil that will be. And now these are revolutionary leftists, in this case, Wobblies. But nonetheless, it’s like a prayer for communism everything. Now in the future, everything will be good because the earth will be shared by the toilers. And from each abilities and to each according to his need. And it’s this kind of sweet little song in some way. But I’m just sort of imagining this. If I was going to stage that, I’d have this choir of children singing it with a huge hammer and sickle behind them because that’s what it’s combining. And you can think that the sentiments that express in that song, which are legitimate in some way of all the horrors that then leads to.
For some reason, not long ago, I was listening on YouTube to old Wobbly songs, the Workers of the World. I don’t know why. I know there was a whole album of Wobbly songs, and there was one of them called Commonwealth of Toil. And like most of them, they’re sort of taken from gospel songs. And it’s talking about in the future how wonderful everything will be in the Commonwealth of Toil that will be. And now these are revolutionary leftists, in this case, Wobblies. But nonetheless, it’s like a prayer for communism everything. Now in the future, everything will be good because the earth will be shared by the toilers. And from each abilities and to each according to his need. And it’s this kind of sweet little song in some way. But I’m just sort of imagining this. If I was going to stage that, I’d have this choir of children singing it with a huge hammer and sickle behind them because that’s what it’s combining. And you can think that the sentiments that express in that song, which are legitimate in some way of all the horrors that then leads to.
Lex Fridman
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 you see described.
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 you see described.
Rick Spence
The law of unintended consequences.
The law of unintended consequences.
Lex Fridman
And we learn from it. I mean, that’s why history is important. We learn from it hopefully.
And we learn from it. I mean, that’s why history is important. We learn from it hopefully.
Rick Spence
Do we?
Do we?
Lex Fridman
Slowly or slow learn.
Slowly or slow learn.
Rick Spence
I’m unconvinced of that, but perhaps.
I’m unconvinced of that, but perhaps.
Lex Fridman
Speaking of unconvinced, what gives you hope? If human beings are still here, maybe expanding out into the cosmos 1000, 5,000, 10,000 years from now, what gives you hope about that future, about even being a possible future about it happening?
Speaking of unconvinced, what gives you hope? If human beings are still here, maybe expanding out into the cosmos 1000, 5,000, 10,000 years from now, what gives you hope about that future, about even being a possible future about it happening?
Rick Spence
Most people are cooperative and kind most of the time. And that’s one of those things that can usually be depended upon. And usually you’ll get back to what you put into it. Another thing that I have a weird fascination of watching are people who have meltdowns on airplanes because it’s just bizarre.
Most people are cooperative and kind most of the time. And that’s one of those things that can usually be depended upon. And usually you’ll get back to what you put into it. Another thing that I have a weird fascination of watching are people who have meltdowns on airplanes because it’s just bizarre.
Lex Fridman
That’s fascinating to watch.
That’s fascinating to watch.
Rick Spence
The people who will, there’s some sort of psychotic break that occurs, and it’s always going to end the same way. The cops are going to come on and drag you off the plane. Now. True, and you’re going to inconvenience everybody there. And usually at some point, they don’t care about that. That’s the one little sense of power that they have. So they have some sort of sense of powerlessness. And if their only way of power is just to piss off everybody else on that plane, they’re going to go ahead and do it even though it’s going to lead nowhere for them.
The people who will, there’s some sort of psychotic break that occurs, and it’s always going to end the same way. The cops are going to come on and drag you off the plane. Now. True, and you’re going to inconvenience everybody there. And usually at some point, they don’t care about that. That’s the one little sense of power that they have. So they have some sort of sense of powerlessness. And if their only way of power is just to piss off everybody else on that plane, they’re going to go ahead and do it even though it’s going to lead nowhere for them.
Lex Fridman
And there’s similar sometimes psychological behavior in traffic.
And there’s similar sometimes psychological behavior in traffic.
Rick Spence
Well, the road rage thing.
Well, the road rage thing.
Lex Fridman
The road rage, yeah. It’s fascinating.
The road rage, yeah. It’s fascinating.
Rick Spence
And I bet that most, there again, those are all people who up to some point were cooperative and kind and polite, and then they snap. So those are all part of the human makeup as well.
And I bet that most, there again, those are all people who up to some point were cooperative and kind and polite, and then they snap. So those are all part of the human makeup as well.
Lex Fridman
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, some type of human.
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, some type of human.
Rick Spence
Well, human beings are just weird animals all year round. It’s just completely peculiar. I’m not sure that we’re all together natural.
Well, human beings are just weird animals all year round. It’s just completely peculiar. I’m not sure that we’re all together natural.
Lex Fridman
But I think we are all together 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. I hope this magical things that makes us human still persists.
But I think we are all together 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. I hope this magical things that makes us human still persists.
Rick Spence
Well, let us hope so.
Well, let us hope so.
Lex Fridman
Rick, you’re an incredible person. You have so much fascinating work, and it’s really an awesome.
Rick, you’re an incredible person. You have so much fascinating work, and it’s really an awesome.
Rick Spence
I’ve never had anybody ask me as many interesting questions as you have.
I’ve never had anybody ask me as many interesting questions as you have.
Lex Fridman
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Rick Spence
Or as many questions.
Or as many questions.
Lex Fridman
This was so fun. Thank you so much for talking today.
This was so fun. Thank you so much for talking today.
Rick Spence
Well, thank you.
Well, thank you.
Lex Fridman
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 words from John F. Kennedy. “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.”
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 words from John F. Kennedy. “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.
Transcript for Bernie Sanders Interview | Lex Fridman Podcast #450
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #450 with Bernie Sanders.
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And what we showed is, guess what? Running an outsider campaign, we took on the Democratic establishment, we came close to winning it, and we did win 23 states. And the ideas that we’re talking about are the ideas that working class people, young people believe in.
Incredible courage to do that. And by the way, when he was assassinated at a fighting for the rights of AFSCME workers, garbage, guys that delivered the garbage who were treated terribly, low wages, bad working conditions. And he went out to support their right to form a union. That’s when he got killed.
But at the end of the day, billionaires play an enormous role in terms of electing politicians and in Washington in determining what legislation gets seen and not seen.
They are, in a sense, your political base, so you’re very cognizant of what you do in terms of not upsetting them. So it’s not corruption in the sense of people taking envelopes with huge amounts of money to vote a certain way. That very, very rarely, if ever, happens. It is the power of big money to make politicians dependent on those folks. And that’s why when I ran for president, what I probably may be most proud of is the fact that we received millions and millions of campaign contributions averaging 27 bucks apiece, I think, in 2016.
We’ve got to end that. And in my view, we move to public funding of elections. That means you want to run for governing, you want to run for Senate, show that you have some support, get $5 contributions from X number of people to show you you’re not a flake. You have some support and the government will pay a certain amount more, and there’ll be a limit in the amount of money that can be spent. So it’ll be a real… You can run against me and I’m not going to outspend you 10 to one. That’s what we should be moving toward in my view.
If you got a car, go 50 miles north to Canada, walk into Canada and ask people, “When you go to the hospital, how much does it cost you, which kind of bill?” And they say, “What are you talking about? Doesn’t cost us anything. It doesn’t cost us a nickel.” That’s the case in virtually every country in Europe. So the idea that healthcare should be available to all or that there should be no out-of-pocket expense because it’s a human right is widespread around the world and very much agreed to in this country. Bottom line is that because of our corrupt political system, we have a healthcare system designed not to provide healthcare to all people, to make huge profits for the drug companies and the insurance companies. And that is what’s happening, and we got to change that system. So I’m a strong advocate, and I’ve led the effort on Medicare for all.
Then we’ll have everybody in the system. So I think in a four or five year period you can strengthen Medicare and have everybody in the system. And when you do that, and this is not just me talking, number of studies have pointed this out. When you take the profit motive out of it from the insurance companies and the drug companies, you can end up providing quality care to all people at no more than we’re spending right now. Because right now we are spending twice as much per personal healthcare as the people of any other nation. Incredibly wasteful system.
It is publicly funded like the police departments and libraries are like public education. This is publicly funded in a progressive way. So right now, rather than paying out of your own pocket, if you are a family, let’s just say you’re self-employed right now and you have a couple of kids and a wife, it could cost you 15, $20,000 a year in insurance costs. Well, that’s all eliminated. Will you have to pay more in taxes? Of course you will. Maybe it depends on your income level, but it could be that you’d be paying $12,000 more in taxes, but not $20,000 more in premiums, co-payments and deductibles, you save money. So it’s paying taxes rather than paying money to the insurance company. You got a better deal through the tax system.
One out of four Americans can’t afford the drugs their doctors prescribe. So you walk into the doctor’s office, they say, okay, Look, you got this, that, and the other thing. Here’s a prescription. You can’t afford to fill it. What happens? You get sicker. You end up in the emergency room, which is an extremely expensive proposition. Or you end up in the hospital, rather than dealing with the problem when it occurs. And what is not talked about… I mentioned earlier how we don’t talk about some of the major issues. The estimate is that some 60,000 people in America die every single year unnecessarily because they can’t get to a doctor when they need because of financial reasons. And you want to hear even crazier, one out of four people who get cancer treatment in this country either go bankrupt or deplete their financial resources of their family.
So your point is, right. If somebody diagnoses you with cancer, you’re scared to death. You’re worried about how you’re going to live, you’re going to die, what’s going to happen? And then on top of that, you got to worry about whether your family goes bankrupt. How insane and cruel is that? So to me, I think healthcare is what unites us all. Everybody has family. They get sick, we all get born, we all die, we all want care. And we all have got to come together to create a system that works for all of us, not just the drug companies or the insurance companies.
But we took on the whole political establishment and we did… We got millions of votes. And the ideas that we brought forth were ideas that they had to eventually deal with in one way or another. And if you look at the American Rescue Plan, which I’m proud to have helped write during the midst of COVID, a lot of the ideas that we fought forward were implemented in that bill. And I want to make them obviously permanent.
And this is an incredible fact that no one talks about. All right, I’m going to ask you a question. Are you ready for this Lex?
Yeah, what’s the alternative? Donald Trump? I think Donald Trump is an extremely dangerous person trying to undermine American democracy. So I can’t support him. Hillary Clinton, obviously his views are very, very different than mine. But that in that moment, that’s where politics becomes really tricky and it ain’t easy. And sometimes you have to do things that you’re not really all that excited about. But I think it was right to try to do what I could to prevent Trump from getting elected. And in 2020 I did the same with Biden and we had more success with Biden than we had with Clinton.
We have women governors and senators. Not so many years ago in the United States Senate, there were 98 men, two women. Even before that 1920, it was when women got the right to vote. How did that change? How did women’s role in society change? It changed because women and their male allies stood up in force. Gay rights, old enough to remember that anybody I knew who was gay, you think they would talk about it? Come out about it? No they wouldn’t. That’s changed. We have seen in terms of civil rights, massive changes. Change happens when people at the grassroots level demand that… We talked about a healthcare a moment ago, we will get universal Medicare for all when millions of people make it clear that’s what they want. So I believe politics starts at the grassroots level, and that’s how you got to bring about change.
He did it. And that is a huge accomplishment. And I think he has had some significant achievements in his presidential tenure. He and I did disagree on a number of issues. I think he will tell you, I think his public stance is that, yeah, if you have to start all over again, he would do Medicare for all single payer. But where we are right now, the best he could do is the Affordable Care Act. Well, we disagree on that and we disagree on other things, but I think he deserves an enormous amount of credit for what he has accomplished.
And this shocks people. In America right now, we have people who will get one week, two weeks off paid vacation. Sometimes people get nothing. You know that there are people out there who have vacation all. In Germany, you got six weeks paid vacation and other holidays as well. People are shocked by that. In America, we don’t have paid family and medical leave. The only major country not to do it. Other countries, your wife gets sick, you stay home with her, your kids get sick, not a big deal. You get a certain amount of paid family and medical leave. Cost of prescription drugs are far more affordable. So what you want to do is create what’s called a social safety net. That means I don’t care what your income is, of course you’re going to have healthcare is the human right. Of course you’re going to have housing that is affordable.
Of course your kids are going to have great quality education from child care to university without much cost. Every country has a little bit different. But there are countries in the world right now, I think in Germany, I think college is now tuition-free, as I recall, for obvious reasons. They want to have the best educated workforce they can. So in terms of government playing a role in a civilized democratic society of providing all basic needs, healthcare, education, housing, retirement benefits, yes, that is what we’ve got to do. Now, does that mean then that the government is going to run every mom and pop store on the corner? Of course not. You want innovation, you want to go out and start a business, produce a product, good luck to you. Make money. But on the other hand, in terms of even making money, we want you to be able to do that. Come up with good products, good services.
But do I think you should end up with $100 billion? No, I don’t. And you know what? It’s funny. I did an interview with Bill Gates, who’s I think the third-wealthiest guy in the country, struggling behind Musk and Bezos I think, and he’s only worth a hundred plus billion. But he gets by. And I said to him, “Bill,” he was supposed to ask me questions. I asked him the question, I said, “Bill, tell me something. You’re an innovator with Microsoft and all that stuff. Did you know that you’d become a multi-billionaire? And was that what motivated you?” And he said, “No.” And I believe he was honestly, “I loved doing whatever. I loved programming.” He was a kid. He started doing that. He loved it. He was motivated by it. Do you think that there are scientists out there who working day and night trying to develop drugs to deal with Alzheimer’s or cancer that they motivate? Boy, if I come up with this drug, I’m going to become a billionaire?
So I think we want to reward success. Fine, but you don’t need a billion dollars. We want people to get satisfaction from what they accomplish, the work they’re doing, whether it’s cleaning the street or developing a new drug. So I think we have gone a little bit far, and you’re right, in talking about the book was an attack on I call, you call hypercapitalism or ubercapitalism. But right now, and this is not an American issue, this is a global issue. It’s not an accident that Musk is over there in Saudi Arabia talking to the trillionaire families in the mid-East, these guys, Putin and his friends, you got probably not more than five, 10,000 extraordinarily wealthy families who have unbelievable economic power over 7 billion people on this planet.
So I hope we focus on some of the most important issues that impact humanity, but reward innovators. I don’t have a problem with that, but I do have a problem when three people end up owning more wealth at the bottom half of American society.
So the reporter said, what do you think about raising the federal minimum wage? And he’s, “Oh, these are great workers. I love McDonald’s and so forth.” He didn’t answer the question Well, I think that in the richest country in the history of the world, if you work 40 hours a week, you should not be living in poverty. And that means we should have a federal minimum wage, not absurdly seven and a quarter an hour, but in my view, $17 an hour. Will that solve all the economic problems for working-class people? No, it won’t. It’ll help. It’ll help.
I don’t stay up nights worrying. There was a time I have to worry about how to pay my electric bill. I don’t worry about that anymore. So what has happened that stress, that economic stress of not worrying about a financial disaster, that’s gone and that is enormous. I maybe as much or more than any other member of the Senate work hard not only for, but with working-class people. I’m chairman of the committee deals with labor issues. We have been involved probably in dozens of strikes all over this country. I’ve been on picket lines. So I do my best. It’s a very easy trap to fall into. You can get separated from ordinary people and their struggles. Not hard to do. I try as hard as I can not to do that.
But your point is, again, to me, I don’t like big fancy cars or big fancy homes, don’t go on… My wife will tell you we’ve not been on a real vacation for God knows how long, because I work pretty hard. But the major thing about having money, which is enormously important, is just what you said. I don’t have to worry. If somebody in my family gets sick, I don’t have to worry about that. I don’t have to worry about putting food on the table or paying the mortgage. So, that’s what money has done.
The struggle in the Democratic Party is between the corporate wing and the progressive wing. And the corporate wing takes a whole lot of money, sees its salvation in getting a whole lot of money from wealthy individuals and large corporations. And is not very vigorous in my view, in representing the needs of working-class people. If they were, we would have healthcare for all, we would have a minimum wage that was a living wage, we would not have a housing crisis. We would not have a tax system in which billionaires pay an effective tax rate that is lower than a truck driver or a nurse.
So, I think one of the reasons that Trump has had political success is, it’s not so much his ideas. Most working class people don’t think we should give tax breaks to billionaires or worry about the size of Arnold Palmer’s genitalia. But they are angry, people are angry. And the Democrats have not responded effectively to that anger. So, the struggle that we are waging right now is the future of the Democratic Party. Will it be a party of the working class and represent working class issues, whether you black or white or Latino or Asian or whatever you may be? Or will it be a corporately dominated party? That’s the struggle we’re in right now.
So sometimes in life, and I know that a lot of younger people don’t agree with me, but you got to make choices which are painful. So I strongly supported Biden, because I liked his domestic record. He’s done some good things against a lot of opposition. And I’m supporting Kamala right now. But I’m doing my best to see that a dangerous guy like Donald Trump does not become president.
A couple of years ago she came up here to Vermont to spent some time. She and her partner, Riley, came up. And we were out in the street and people saw her and they said, “Oh, Congresswoman.” and she just smiled. And she had an approach to people, which was beautiful. I mean, it wasn’t phony, it was real. But to be a politician, you got to know how to… You could be a great intellectual, but you can’t relate to people. She relates well to people. And so, I think both from a personality perspective, from an intellect perspective, from an ideological perspective, she helped create the Green New Deal concept, the need to create jobs as we transform our energy system away from fossil fuel. Strong advocate for Medicare for all workers rights. So, I’m a big fan of Alexandria.
But at the end of the day, I think what I have shown is that the ideas, gets back to the early part of this conversation, the ideas that I am talking about are ideas that are widely supported. So Donald Trump says, “Oh, Bernie Sanders is a far left.”, it’s like I’m some kind of extremist coming up with ideas that nobody supports. Everything that I talk about, raising the minimum wage, health care for all, a tax system which demands the billionaires pay their fair share, those are all popular ideas. But people didn’t know you got to run for president and have 20,000 people come out to your rallies and win 23 states. And they say, “Well, maybe those ideas are not so crazy after all.” And we’ve got to entertain them.
The establishment doesn’t like that. They really don’t. They want to tell you, and this is their main, this is how they succeed. What they say, Lex, is, “The world is the way it is. It always will be this way. We got the wealth, we got the power. And don’t think of anything else. This is the way it is. You have no power. Give up.” They don’t say it quite that way, but that’s really what the intent is.
And what we showed is, guess what? Running an outsider campaign, we took on the Democratic establishment, we came close to winning it. And we did win 23 states. And the ideas that we’re talking about are the ideas that working-class people, young people believe in.
I have a great deal of compassion for people as we speak, who are in nursing homes, having a hard time walking. Maybe your mental agility is slipping a little bit. That’s tough. That’s what worries me. We are all going to die, and that’s that. So I’m not afraid of that, but that aspect of getting older, and that does concern me.
I mean, I see that time and time, and I’ve just been on the campaign trail. And you see great people, really beautiful people who, not interested in becoming billionaires. They want to improve life for other people in this country. So, I am grateful that I… It sounds like a platitude. It’s what every politician says, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when you go out around the country, you go to Native American reservations and you go to factories and everything, and you see so many wonderful people. I have been able to see things that many others have not. I’ve been to every state in the country, and that inspires me.
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.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 1:40 – MLK Jr
- 4:33 – Corruption in politics
- 15:50 – Healthcare in US
- 24:23 – 2016 election
- 30:21 – Barack Obama
- 36:16 – Capitalism
- 44:25 – Response to attacks
- 49:22 – AOC and progressive politics
- 57:13 – Mortality
- 59:20 – Hope for the future
Introduction
Bernie Sanders
The ideas that I am talking about are ideas that are widely supported. Everything that I talk about raising them, minimum wage, health care for all, a tax system which demands the billionaires pay their fair share, those are all popular ideas, but people didn’t know. You got to run for president and have 20,000 people come out to your rallies and win 23 states. They say, “Hmm. Well, maybe those ideas are not so crazy after all, and we’ve got to entertain them.” The establishment doesn’t like that. They really don’t. They want to tell you, and this is their main… This is how they succeed. What they say, Lex, is, “The world is the way it is. It always will be this way. We got the wealth. We got the power. And don’t think of anything else. This is the way it is. You have no power. Give up.” They don’t say it quite that way, but that’s really what the intent is.
The ideas that I am talking about are ideas that are widely supported. Everything that I talk about raising them, minimum wage, health care for all, a tax system which demands the billionaires pay their fair share, those are all popular ideas, but people didn’t know. You got to run for president and have 20,000 people come out to your rallies and win 23 states. They say, “Hmm. Well, maybe those ideas are not so crazy after all, and we’ve got to entertain them.” The establishment doesn’t like that. They really don’t. They want to tell you, and this is their main… This is how they succeed. What they say, Lex, is, “The world is the way it is. It always will be this way. We got the wealth. We got the power. And don’t think of anything else. This is the way it is. You have no power. Give up.” They don’t say it quite that way, but that’s really what the intent is.
And what we showed is, guess what? Running an outsider campaign, we took on the Democratic establishment, we came close to winning it, and we did win 23 states. And the ideas that we’re talking about are the ideas that working class people, young people believe in.
Lex Fridman
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. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Bernie Sanders.
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. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Bernie Sanders.
MLK Jr
Lex Fridman
Growing up, did you ever think you’d be a politician?
Growing up, did you ever think you’d be a politician?
Bernie Sanders
Nope. Not in a million years.
Nope. Not in a million years.
Lex Fridman
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. You like talking about-
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. You like talking about-
Bernie Sanders
Yeah, I do. Everybody talks about themselves. It’s not about me. Nice guy, not a nice guy. What politics should be about? Is the issues facing the people of our country, the people of the world, and how we’re going to address it. That’s what it should be.
Yeah, I do. Everybody talks about themselves. It’s not about me. Nice guy, not a nice guy. What politics should be about? Is the issues facing the people of our country, the people of the world, and how we’re going to address it. That’s what it should be.
Lex Fridman
That said, there’s a 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?
That said, there’s a 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?
Bernie Sanders
It was extraordinary. Took a bus ride down with fellow students in the University of Chicago, and there was a zillion people there. I’m not sure if it was the first time I’d ever been in Washington in my life, but it was a very impressive moment. And what he was talking about, people very often forget about that, it was not only racial justice, it was jobs. Jobs and justice, that was the name of that rally. And so it’s something I’ve never forgotten.
It was extraordinary. Took a bus ride down with fellow students in the University of Chicago, and there was a zillion people there. I’m not sure if it was the first time I’d ever been in Washington in my life, but it was a very impressive moment. And what he was talking about, people very often forget about that, it was not only racial justice, it was jobs. Jobs and justice, that was the name of that rally. And so it’s something I’ve never forgotten.
Lex Fridman
What influence did he have on you? What’d you learn about the way he enacted change in the world?
What influence did he have on you? What’d you learn about the way he enacted change in the world?
Bernie Sanders
King was a very impressive guy, more impressive, I think, than people think that he was. And what he did is he created his movement from the bottom on up. So he developed real organization, grassroots organization which put pressure on communities and officials to end segregation, to open up voting patterns. And I think what has to also be remembered about King, which is really quite extraordinary, is he won the Nobel Peace Prize. And there was, oh, you’re great, you’re wonderful. But then to the end of his life, he took on Lyndon Johnson on the war in Vietnam. And as soon as he did that, suddenly the editorial pages throughout America, the establishment papers no longer thought he was so great. In fact, the message sent out, “You’re black. Deal with civil rights. Don’t worry about foreign policy. We’ll take care of that.” But he said, “If I talk about peace and nonviolence, I can’t sit back and allow what’s going on in Vietnam to continue without speaking out.”
King was a very impressive guy, more impressive, I think, than people think that he was. And what he did is he created his movement from the bottom on up. So he developed real organization, grassroots organization which put pressure on communities and officials to end segregation, to open up voting patterns. And I think what has to also be remembered about King, which is really quite extraordinary, is he won the Nobel Peace Prize. And there was, oh, you’re great, you’re wonderful. But then to the end of his life, he took on Lyndon Johnson on the war in Vietnam. And as soon as he did that, suddenly the editorial pages throughout America, the establishment papers no longer thought he was so great. In fact, the message sent out, “You’re black. Deal with civil rights. Don’t worry about foreign policy. We’ll take care of that.” But he said, “If I talk about peace and nonviolence, I can’t sit back and allow what’s going on in Vietnam to continue without speaking out.”
Incredible courage to do that. And by the way, when he was assassinated at a fighting for the rights of AFSCME workers, garbage, guys that delivered the garbage who were treated terribly, low wages, bad working conditions. And he went out to support their right to form a union. That’s when he got killed.
Corruption in politics
Lex Fridman
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 behind those speeches, behind voting no on the Patriot Act on the Iraq Resolution?
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 behind those speeches, behind voting no on the Patriot Act on the Iraq Resolution?
Bernie Sanders
It maybe ironically came out of maybe the war in Vietnam and the ease and lies that people told. We went into Vietnam under a lie. We lost close to 60,000 Americans. Millions of people in the Vietnam and Cambodia died as a result of that. So I think twice about it. And then the war in Iraq, you had people like Dick Cheney and others telling us, “Oh, they have nuclear weapons and all that stuff. It’s the only way we can resolve the issue.” I didn’t believe it. I didn’t agree with it. And you’re right, it turns out, historically, I was right.
It maybe ironically came out of maybe the war in Vietnam and the ease and lies that people told. We went into Vietnam under a lie. We lost close to 60,000 Americans. Millions of people in the Vietnam and Cambodia died as a result of that. So I think twice about it. And then the war in Iraq, you had people like Dick Cheney and others telling us, “Oh, they have nuclear weapons and all that stuff. It’s the only way we can resolve the issue.” I didn’t believe it. I didn’t agree with it. And you’re right, it turns out, historically, I was right.
Lex Fridman
What’s the way to fight this thing that Martin Luther King tried to fight, which is the military industrial complex?
What’s the way to fight this thing that Martin Luther King tried to fight, which is the military industrial complex?
Bernie Sanders
It’s huge. It gets to the broader issue of where we are as a nation. And what I almost uniquely in Congress talk about is the fact that we are moving, Lex, to an oligarchic form of society. And not a lot of people are familiar with that term, but what it means… We talk about oligarchy in Russia. Oh, Putin is surrounded by the oligarchs. Well, guess what? What do you think is happening in the United States? So what you have right now is an economy with more concentration of ownership than we’ve ever had. All right? That means whether it’s agriculture, transportation, healthcare, whatever it may be, fewer and fewer massively large corporations control what’s produced and the prices we pay. And then you look at our political system, and we don’t talk about it. What is the reality of the political system today? And that is that billionaires are spending huge amounts of money to buy this election. In Trump’s campaign, you got three multi-billionaires spending over $200 million, three people. Democrats have their billionaires. It’s not quite as concentrated.
It’s huge. It gets to the broader issue of where we are as a nation. And what I almost uniquely in Congress talk about is the fact that we are moving, Lex, to an oligarchic form of society. And not a lot of people are familiar with that term, but what it means… We talk about oligarchy in Russia. Oh, Putin is surrounded by the oligarchs. Well, guess what? What do you think is happening in the United States? So what you have right now is an economy with more concentration of ownership than we’ve ever had. All right? That means whether it’s agriculture, transportation, healthcare, whatever it may be, fewer and fewer massively large corporations control what’s produced and the prices we pay. And then you look at our political system, and we don’t talk about it. What is the reality of the political system today? And that is that billionaires are spending huge amounts of money to buy this election. In Trump’s campaign, you got three multi-billionaires spending over $200 million, three people. Democrats have their billionaires. It’s not quite as concentrated.
But at the end of the day, billionaires play an enormous role in terms of electing politicians and in Washington in determining what legislation gets seen and not seen.
Lex Fridman
But it’s not just single billionaires. It’s companies with lobbyists.
But it’s not just single billionaires. It’s companies with lobbyists.
Bernie Sanders
You got it. Let me give you one example, lobbyists. We pay, in the United States, by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. This is an issue I’ve been working hard on with some success. Take a wild and crazy guess how many lobbyists are there from the drug companies in Washington D.C.?
You got it. Let me give you one example, lobbyists. We pay, in the United States, by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. This is an issue I’ve been working hard on with some success. Take a wild and crazy guess how many lobbyists are there from the drug companies in Washington D.C.?
Lex Fridman
Over a thousand.
Over a thousand.
Bernie Sanders
Over a thousand. There are 100 members of the Senate, 435 members of the House, 535 members of Congress. There are 1800 well-paid lobbyists representing the drug companies, including former leaders of the Republican and Democratic Party. That is why, one of the reasons why we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Military-industrial complex, you’ve got a revolving door. People go from the military into the General Dynamics, into Lockheed Martin, and the other large companies, and what we see there is an institution in the Pentagon. We spend a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon. It is the only federal agency that is not able to submit to an independent audit. So if you think there’s not massive fraud and waste and cost overruns in the Pentagon, you would be sorely mistaken.
Over a thousand. There are 100 members of the Senate, 435 members of the House, 535 members of Congress. There are 1800 well-paid lobbyists representing the drug companies, including former leaders of the Republican and Democratic Party. That is why, one of the reasons why we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Military-industrial complex, you’ve got a revolving door. People go from the military into the General Dynamics, into Lockheed Martin, and the other large companies, and what we see there is an institution in the Pentagon. We spend a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon. It is the only federal agency that is not able to submit to an independent audit. So if you think there’s not massive fraud and waste and cost overruns in the Pentagon, you would be sorely mistaken.
Lex Fridman
Do you think most politicians are corrupt in accepting the money, or is the system corrupt? Or is it a bit of both?
Do you think most politicians are corrupt in accepting the money, or is the system corrupt? Or is it a bit of both?
Bernie Sanders
If the corrupt means that, “Hey, here’s $10,000, vote this way,” it doesn’t work like that. Very, very rare. Occasionally. Very, very rare. That’s corruption. What happens is that if you are in a campaign… And right now, the amount of money that people have to raise, you’re running for Senate in Ohio, you’re talking about 50, $60 million. Where the hell are you going to get that money? It’s not going to be $10 donations. You’re going to be surrounding yourself with people who have the money. You’re going to go $5,000 [inaudible 00:09:02], etc. So you surround yourself with those people who say, “Oh, these are my problems. This is what I need, and this is… I need a tax break for billionaires,” blah, blah, blah, blah. So you live in that world. They are your financial support.
If the corrupt means that, “Hey, here’s $10,000, vote this way,” it doesn’t work like that. Very, very rare. Occasionally. Very, very rare. That’s corruption. What happens is that if you are in a campaign… And right now, the amount of money that people have to raise, you’re running for Senate in Ohio, you’re talking about 50, $60 million. Where the hell are you going to get that money? It’s not going to be $10 donations. You’re going to be surrounding yourself with people who have the money. You’re going to go $5,000 [inaudible 00:09:02], etc. So you surround yourself with those people who say, “Oh, these are my problems. This is what I need, and this is… I need a tax break for billionaires,” blah, blah, blah, blah. So you live in that world. They are your financial support.
They are, in a sense, your political base, so you’re very cognizant of what you do in terms of not upsetting them. So it’s not corruption in the sense of people taking envelopes with huge amounts of money to vote a certain way. That very, very rarely, if ever, happens. It is the power of big money to make politicians dependent on those folks. And that’s why when I ran for president, what I probably may be most proud of is the fact that we received millions and millions of campaign contributions averaging 27 bucks apiece, I think, in 2016.
Lex Fridman
Have companies, lobbyists ever tried to buy you, tried to influence you?
Have companies, lobbyists ever tried to buy you, tried to influence you?
Bernie Sanders
We don’t welcome them into our office. I do deal with these guys, but it’s usually on a confrontational tone. No, so they don’t come into my office very often telling me their problems.
We don’t welcome them into our office. I do deal with these guys, but it’s usually on a confrontational tone. No, so they don’t come into my office very often telling me their problems.
Lex Fridman
So how do we fix the system? How do we get money out of politics?
So how do we fix the system? How do we get money out of politics?
Bernie Sanders
Like many other issues, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. It exists in other countries. If you go to… Every country has their own election system, but nobody has a system where billionaires can spend unlimited sums of money through super PACs to elect the candidates of their choice. So first thing you got to do… One of the things, Lex, I found that the more important the issue, the less discussion there is. The less important the issue, the more discussion there is. A number of years ago, the United States Supreme Court, in one of its more pathetic decisions, passed the Citizens United decision. What Citizens United Decisions said is you’re a multi-billionaire. You want the freedom. You’re a free person in a free country. You want the freedom to buy the government, and how terrible it would be to deny you the freedom to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a campaign to elect the candidates. And they said that’s your freedom, and that’s what Citizens United is about.
Like many other issues, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. It exists in other countries. If you go to… Every country has their own election system, but nobody has a system where billionaires can spend unlimited sums of money through super PACs to elect the candidates of their choice. So first thing you got to do… One of the things, Lex, I found that the more important the issue, the less discussion there is. The less important the issue, the more discussion there is. A number of years ago, the United States Supreme Court, in one of its more pathetic decisions, passed the Citizens United decision. What Citizens United Decisions said is you’re a multi-billionaire. You want the freedom. You’re a free person in a free country. You want the freedom to buy the government, and how terrible it would be to deny you the freedom to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a campaign to elect the candidates. And they said that’s your freedom, and that’s what Citizens United is about.
We’ve got to end that. And in my view, we move to public funding of elections. That means you want to run for governing, you want to run for Senate, show that you have some support, get $5 contributions from X number of people to show you you’re not a flake. You have some support and the government will pay a certain amount more, and there’ll be a limit in the amount of money that can be spent. So it’ll be a real… You can run against me and I’m not going to outspend you 10 to one. That’s what we should be moving toward in my view.
Lex Fridman
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?
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?
Bernie Sanders
But you’re right. You raised exactly the question. If I’m getting a huge amount of money from billionaires, do you think I’m going to go out and announce, “I think billionaires should not be involved in buying elections”? I doubt that very much. So what you’re going to need, and you tell me if I’m missing something, but I pay attention, you don’t hear either of the major candidates talking about that issue, do you?
But you’re right. You raised exactly the question. If I’m getting a huge amount of money from billionaires, do you think I’m going to go out and announce, “I think billionaires should not be involved in buying elections”? I doubt that very much. So what you’re going to need, and you tell me if I’m missing something, but I pay attention, you don’t hear either of the major candidates talking about that issue, do you?
Lex Fridman
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. But there has to be kind of a mass movement of it.
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. But there has to be kind of a mass movement of it.
Bernie Sanders
Yes, it does. And every place I go, I always speak about the issue, and it always… People understand it. You’re a Republican, you’re a Democrat, you’re progressive, you’re conservative, who really believes that we are a democracy when billionaires can spend tens and tens of millions of dollars to buy elections? So it is a very popular issue. It’s important. You’re right. We need political leaders to be speaking out on that, but we need a grassroots movement to say, when somebody is at a town meeting, you’re running for the Senate, you’re running for the House, what’s your view on Citizens United? Are you prepared to vote to overturn that decision and move to public funding of elections? Extraordinarily important.
Yes, it does. And every place I go, I always speak about the issue, and it always… People understand it. You’re a Republican, you’re a Democrat, you’re progressive, you’re conservative, who really believes that we are a democracy when billionaires can spend tens and tens of millions of dollars to buy elections? So it is a very popular issue. It’s important. You’re right. We need political leaders to be speaking out on that, but we need a grassroots movement to say, when somebody is at a town meeting, you’re running for the Senate, you’re running for the House, what’s your view on Citizens United? Are you prepared to vote to overturn that decision and move to public funding of elections? Extraordinarily important.
Lex Fridman
So many of your policy proposals are quite radical.
So many of your policy proposals are quite radical.
Bernie Sanders
No, they’re not. I beg to differ.
No, they’re not. I beg to differ.
Lex Fridman
Okay, great.
Okay, great.
Bernie Sanders
[inaudible 00:13:26]
[inaudible 00:13:26]
Lex Fridman
Well, they’re popular. So what I mean is relative to what 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 policies?
Well, they’re popular. So what I mean is relative to what 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 policies?
Bernie Sanders
Okay, let’s talk about it. Fair enough. We talked about one issue, very important, money in politics.
Okay, let’s talk about it. Fair enough. We talked about one issue, very important, money in politics.
Lex Fridman
Money, yes.
Money, yes.
Bernie Sanders
Getting big money out of politics, do you think that’s a radical idea?
Getting big money out of politics, do you think that’s a radical idea?
Lex Fridman
Well, yeah. It’s a popular idea. It’s an idea that makes sense. But in order to implement it and actually make it happen, it requires to flip the system upside down, right? In that sense, it’s radical.
Well, yeah. It’s a popular idea. It’s an idea that makes sense. But in order to implement it and actually make it happen, it requires to flip the system upside down, right? In that sense, it’s radical.
Bernie Sanders
In that sense, it’s radical. But if you go walk down the street here and you say, “Do you think billionaires should be able to spend as much money as they want to buy politicians?” I would say nine out of 10 people will say, “That’s crazy. That’s not what America’s supposed to be about.” So in that sense, it’s certainly not radical. Let’s talk about healthcare. Go out on the street, do it, or do a poll, and I’ve done the polling, is healthcare a human right? Should every American be able to go to a doctor when they need, regardless of their income? Do you know what people say? I would say about 85, 90% of the people say, “Of course.” The idea that healthcare is a human right available to all exists, Lex, in every major country on earth except the United States. So you’re here with me in Burlington, Vermont, right?
In that sense, it’s radical. But if you go walk down the street here and you say, “Do you think billionaires should be able to spend as much money as they want to buy politicians?” I would say nine out of 10 people will say, “That’s crazy. That’s not what America’s supposed to be about.” So in that sense, it’s certainly not radical. Let’s talk about healthcare. Go out on the street, do it, or do a poll, and I’ve done the polling, is healthcare a human right? Should every American be able to go to a doctor when they need, regardless of their income? Do you know what people say? I would say about 85, 90% of the people say, “Of course.” The idea that healthcare is a human right available to all exists, Lex, in every major country on earth except the United States. So you’re here with me in Burlington, Vermont, right?
If you got a car, go 50 miles north to Canada, walk into Canada and ask people, “When you go to the hospital, how much does it cost you, which kind of bill?” And they say, “What are you talking about? Doesn’t cost us anything. It doesn’t cost us a nickel.” That’s the case in virtually every country in Europe. So the idea that healthcare should be available to all or that there should be no out-of-pocket expense because it’s a human right is widespread around the world and very much agreed to in this country. Bottom line is that because of our corrupt political system, we have a healthcare system designed not to provide healthcare to all people, to make huge profits for the drug companies and the insurance companies. And that is what’s happening, and we got to change that system. So I’m a strong advocate, and I’ve led the effort on Medicare for all.
Healthcare in US
Lex Fridman
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?
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?
Bernie Sanders
Well, we have a pretty good system.
Well, we have a pretty good system.
Lex Fridman
What would that look like?
What would that look like?
Bernie Sanders
Well, we have a pretty good system, not great, but a pretty good system in Medicare. So it’s there for the elderly and Lyndon Johnson passed that in the 1960s, a huge step forward. It is being chopped away by the private insurance companies through Medicare Advantage. But if you strengthen Medicare and you do away with the kind of deductibles that seniors now have to pay and you do away with other stuff, and you say basically right now you’re a senior in America, go to any doctor you want when you’re in the hospital, Medicare will pay the entire bill if you expand Medicare to cover dental hearing and vision, which it doesn’t now cover. You do all of those things and then the next thing you do is say, okay, to be eligible for Medicare, now you have to be 65. First year we’re going to lower it to 55, then we’ll lower it to 45, then we’ll lower it to 35.
Well, we have a pretty good system, not great, but a pretty good system in Medicare. So it’s there for the elderly and Lyndon Johnson passed that in the 1960s, a huge step forward. It is being chopped away by the private insurance companies through Medicare Advantage. But if you strengthen Medicare and you do away with the kind of deductibles that seniors now have to pay and you do away with other stuff, and you say basically right now you’re a senior in America, go to any doctor you want when you’re in the hospital, Medicare will pay the entire bill if you expand Medicare to cover dental hearing and vision, which it doesn’t now cover. You do all of those things and then the next thing you do is say, okay, to be eligible for Medicare, now you have to be 65. First year we’re going to lower it to 55, then we’ll lower it to 45, then we’ll lower it to 35.
Then we’ll have everybody in the system. So I think in a four or five year period you can strengthen Medicare and have everybody in the system. And when you do that, and this is not just me talking, number of studies have pointed this out. When you take the profit motive out of it from the insurance companies and the drug companies, you can end up providing quality care to all people at no more than we’re spending right now. Because right now we are spending twice as much per personal healthcare as the people of any other nation. Incredibly wasteful system.
Lex Fridman
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-
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-
Bernie Sanders
Here’s the story, and I’ve gotten my share of 30 second ads attacking me on this. Bernie Sanders wants to raise your taxes on healthcare. It’s true, in a progressive way. But right now, do you have health insurance?
Here’s the story, and I’ve gotten my share of 30 second ads attacking me on this. Bernie Sanders wants to raise your taxes on healthcare. It’s true, in a progressive way. But right now, do you have health insurance?
Lex Fridman
Yes.
Yes.
Bernie Sanders
Okay. Somebody’s paying for your health insurance. It depends, if you are working, most people get their health insurance through their jobs, okay? So if you’re working for a large company, your employer is paying your health insurance, and by the way, that comes out of your wages. Healthcare costs in America are very high. And your employer will tell you, honestly, look, I can’t give you more than a 3% wage increase because I got a 10% increase in your healthcare costs. You want that? Or if you’re union negotiating, you know what? They’ll say, Hey, you want decent wages? We’re going to have to cut back on your healthcare. That’s what every union has to deal with every negotiating session. So we’re paying for it through employers out of pocket. We pay through it through Medicare, Medicaid, veterans Administration, et cetera. What I am proposing is really not radical. It’s what exists in Canada and other countries.
Okay. Somebody’s paying for your health insurance. It depends, if you are working, most people get their health insurance through their jobs, okay? So if you’re working for a large company, your employer is paying your health insurance, and by the way, that comes out of your wages. Healthcare costs in America are very high. And your employer will tell you, honestly, look, I can’t give you more than a 3% wage increase because I got a 10% increase in your healthcare costs. You want that? Or if you’re union negotiating, you know what? They’ll say, Hey, you want decent wages? We’re going to have to cut back on your healthcare. That’s what every union has to deal with every negotiating session. So we’re paying for it through employers out of pocket. We pay through it through Medicare, Medicaid, veterans Administration, et cetera. What I am proposing is really not radical. It’s what exists in Canada and other countries.
It is publicly funded like the police departments and libraries are like public education. This is publicly funded in a progressive way. So right now, rather than paying out of your own pocket, if you are a family, let’s just say you’re self-employed right now and you have a couple of kids and a wife, it could cost you 15, $20,000 a year in insurance costs. Well, that’s all eliminated. Will you have to pay more in taxes? Of course you will. Maybe it depends on your income level, but it could be that you’d be paying $12,000 more in taxes, but not $20,000 more in premiums, co-payments and deductibles, you save money. So it’s paying taxes rather than paying money to the insurance company. You got a better deal through the tax system.
Lex Fridman
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 stress in debt.
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 stress in debt.
Bernie Sanders
You got it.
You got it.
Lex Fridman
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. 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 just not just financial, psychological-
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. 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 just not just financial, psychological-
Bernie Sanders
You got it. Look, and I think you said it very well. I’m chairman of the committee that deals with this stuff. So I talk to a lot of doctors. And doctors in Vermont and all over this country tell me that they’re astounded at people walk into their offices much sicker than they should have been. And the doctor said, why didn’t you come here six months ago when you first felt your symptoms? And they said, well, I have a high deductible. I’ve a $10,000 deductible. I don’t have any money to pay. I’m uninsured. Some of those people don’t make it. Other people, and this is what is totally crazy, they end up in the hospital at huge expense to the system rather than getting the care they need when they needed it. So that is how… I’ll give you another example of it. We pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
You got it. Look, and I think you said it very well. I’m chairman of the committee that deals with this stuff. So I talk to a lot of doctors. And doctors in Vermont and all over this country tell me that they’re astounded at people walk into their offices much sicker than they should have been. And the doctor said, why didn’t you come here six months ago when you first felt your symptoms? And they said, well, I have a high deductible. I’ve a $10,000 deductible. I don’t have any money to pay. I’m uninsured. Some of those people don’t make it. Other people, and this is what is totally crazy, they end up in the hospital at huge expense to the system rather than getting the care they need when they needed it. So that is how… I’ll give you another example of it. We pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
One out of four Americans can’t afford the drugs their doctors prescribe. So you walk into the doctor’s office, they say, okay, Look, you got this, that, and the other thing. Here’s a prescription. You can’t afford to fill it. What happens? You get sicker. You end up in the emergency room, which is an extremely expensive proposition. Or you end up in the hospital, rather than dealing with the problem when it occurs. And what is not talked about… I mentioned earlier how we don’t talk about some of the major issues. The estimate is that some 60,000 people in America die every single year unnecessarily because they can’t get to a doctor when they need because of financial reasons. And you want to hear even crazier, one out of four people who get cancer treatment in this country either go bankrupt or deplete their financial resources of their family.
So your point is, right. If somebody diagnoses you with cancer, you’re scared to death. You’re worried about how you’re going to live, you’re going to die, what’s going to happen? And then on top of that, you got to worry about whether your family goes bankrupt. How insane and cruel is that? So to me, I think healthcare is what unites us all. Everybody has family. They get sick, we all get born, we all die, we all want care. And we all have got to come together to create a system that works for all of us, not just the drug companies or the insurance companies.
Lex Fridman
There’s just so many stories and not even the horrific stories. There’s countless horrific stories, but just basic stories of cost. 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. And he has really good insurance and the insurance covered $ 4,000 of it. So he had at the end paid $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.
There’s just so many stories and not even the horrific stories. There’s countless horrific stories, but just basic stories of cost. 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. And he has really good insurance and the insurance covered $ 4,000 of it. So he had at the end paid $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.
Bernie Sanders
And you know what? People know that, and you know what they say? I don’t feel well today. Something’s wrong. I ain’t going to go to that emergency room because I don’t want a $6,000 bill. And what happens? He had insurance that paid two thirds of it, right?
And you know what? People know that, and you know what they say? I don’t feel well today. Something’s wrong. I ain’t going to go to that emergency room because I don’t want a $6,000 bill. And what happens? He had insurance that paid two thirds of it, right?
Lex Fridman
Yes.
Yes.
Bernie Sanders
So what happens if he didn’t? What happens if he didn’t have money? He’d be handed by bill collectors for the rest of his life. So it is a disgusting system. It is an inhumane system, but the insurance companies and the drug companies are very powerful and they make a lot of campaign contributions, have a lot of lobbyists than we are where we are. But I think the American people want fundamental changes there.
So what happens if he didn’t? What happens if he didn’t have money? He’d be handed by bill collectors for the rest of his life. So it is a disgusting system. It is an inhumane system, but the insurance companies and the drug companies are very powerful and they make a lot of campaign contributions, have a lot of lobbyists than we are where we are. But I think the American people want fundamental changes there.
Lex Fridman
So that’s another good example of a really popular idea that is not implemented because of the money in politics.
So that’s another good example of a really popular idea that is not implemented because of the money in politics.
Bernie Sanders
You got it. That’s wonderful. And I’ll tell you that not only that, not only is it not implemented because of money, it’s not even discussed. All right? So I’m saying here and no one disputes me, we are spending twice as much per person on healthcare, right? And yet 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and our life expectancy is lower than virtually every other major country. Do you think that might be an issue that we’d be discussing?
You got it. That’s wonderful. And I’ll tell you that not only that, not only is it not implemented because of money, it’s not even discussed. All right? So I’m saying here and no one disputes me, we are spending twice as much per person on healthcare, right? And yet 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and our life expectancy is lower than virtually every other major country. Do you think that might be an issue that we’d be discussing?
2016 election
Lex Fridman
Again, if a single politician discusses it to 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. 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, especially the WikiLeaks emails showed. What’s your just looking back feelings about that? And you’re angry, are upset?
Again, if a single politician discusses it to 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. 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, especially the WikiLeaks emails showed. What’s your just looking back feelings about that? And you’re angry, are upset?
Bernie Sanders
Yeah, of of course I’m angry and of course I’m upset. But when you take on, in this case, the democratic establishment who have controlled that party forever, moneyed interests of the Democratic Party, you’re taking on corporate America when you’re taking on the corporate media. And when you’re calling for a political revolution that creates the government that works for all and not just the few, the opposition is going to be extraordinary. But what I am extremely proud of from that campaign in 2020 as well, is that we took on the anointed candidate of the establishment and we showed, despite the fact the entire establishment I had in the Senate, I had one supporter, there were 50 Democrats, I had one supporter, I had no governor supporting me. I think maybe a few people in the house.
Yeah, of of course I’m angry and of course I’m upset. But when you take on, in this case, the democratic establishment who have controlled that party forever, moneyed interests of the Democratic Party, you’re taking on corporate America when you’re taking on the corporate media. And when you’re calling for a political revolution that creates the government that works for all and not just the few, the opposition is going to be extraordinary. But what I am extremely proud of from that campaign in 2020 as well, is that we took on the anointed candidate of the establishment and we showed, despite the fact the entire establishment I had in the Senate, I had one supporter, there were 50 Democrats, I had one supporter, I had no governor supporting me. I think maybe a few people in the house.
But we took on the whole political establishment and we did… We got millions of votes. And the ideas that we brought forth were ideas that they had to eventually deal with in one way or another. And if you look at the American Rescue Plan, which I’m proud to have helped write during the midst of COVID, a lot of the ideas that we fought forward were implemented in that bill. And I want to make them obviously permanent.
Lex Fridman
And you almost won. And a lot of people thought that you would win against Donald Trump.
And you almost won. And a lot of people thought that you would win against Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders
I think we would’ve. I think would’ve. Trump is a very… I think he’s a little bit crazy between you and me, but he is a smart politician. And he’s appealing to a lot of the anger that working class people feel. And you know what? Working class people should feel angry, but they should make sure that their anger is directed in the right direction and not against people who are even worse off the nail, which is what demagogues like Trump always do. So I think we had, as I went around the country then, and now we have a lot of support from working class people who understand that there is something wrong.
I think we would’ve. I think would’ve. Trump is a very… I think he’s a little bit crazy between you and me, but he is a smart politician. And he’s appealing to a lot of the anger that working class people feel. And you know what? Working class people should feel angry, but they should make sure that their anger is directed in the right direction and not against people who are even worse off the nail, which is what demagogues like Trump always do. So I think we had, as I went around the country then, and now we have a lot of support from working class people who understand that there is something wrong.
And this is an incredible fact that no one talks about. All right, I’m going to ask you a question. Are you ready for this Lex?
Lex Fridman
Let’s go.
Let’s go.
Bernie Sanders
Here we go. Over the last 50 years, there’s been a massive increase in worker productivity as a result of technology, right? Everyone agrees to that. And I don’t know exactly what is, but the worker today is producing a lot more than the work of 50 years ago doing something similar. Is the worker today in real inflation accounted for dollars making more money than that work 50 years ago?
Here we go. Over the last 50 years, there’s been a massive increase in worker productivity as a result of technology, right? Everyone agrees to that. And I don’t know exactly what is, but the worker today is producing a lot more than the work of 50 years ago doing something similar. Is the worker today in real inflation accounted for dollars making more money than that work 50 years ago?
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Bernie Sanders
That is the point. So you would think that if a worker is producing a lot more, that worker would be better off, would be working lesser hours, et cetera. That hasn’t been the case. And what happened in that 50 years is according to the RAND Corporation, there has been a 50 trillion, trillion with a T, redistribution of wealth in the bottom 90% to the top 1%. So you got CEOs today making 300 times more than their workers. You got three people on top owning more wealth on the bottom half of American society. So that’s why people are angry and they’re worried that their kids may have a lowest standard of living than they in the country in the history of the world. So there’s a lot of anger out there, and I think we tap some of that anger in a constructive way, essentially saying, you know what? We don’t need so few to have so much in wealth and power. Let’s distribute it more fairly in America.
That is the point. So you would think that if a worker is producing a lot more, that worker would be better off, would be working lesser hours, et cetera. That hasn’t been the case. And what happened in that 50 years is according to the RAND Corporation, there has been a 50 trillion, trillion with a T, redistribution of wealth in the bottom 90% to the top 1%. So you got CEOs today making 300 times more than their workers. You got three people on top owning more wealth on the bottom half of American society. So that’s why people are angry and they’re worried that their kids may have a lowest standard of living than they in the country in the history of the world. So there’s a lot of anger out there, and I think we tap some of that anger in a constructive way, essentially saying, you know what? We don’t need so few to have so much in wealth and power. Let’s distribute it more fairly in America.
Lex Fridman
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 to keep fighting for a takeover, for a progressive takeover, the Democratic Party. If you just look back and had to do it all over again, what would you do different?
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 to keep fighting for a takeover, for a progressive takeover, the Democratic Party. If you just look back and had to do it all over again, what would you do different?
Bernie Sanders
Well, by the way, in terms of a takeover of the Democratic Party, we did try, we ran… Do you know who Keith Ellison is? Keith is now the Attorney General of the state of Minnesota. He’s doing a great job. Really one of the outstanding attorneys generals in the country. And Keith was then a member of Congress and we ran Keith to become the head of the DNC and the establishment for the President of the United States on down went crazy. And they beat him by a few votes, not a whole lot. Look you faced… And that’s the exact same position that many of us are in right today. So people say, well, why did you support Hillary Clinton?
Well, by the way, in terms of a takeover of the Democratic Party, we did try, we ran… Do you know who Keith Ellison is? Keith is now the Attorney General of the state of Minnesota. He’s doing a great job. Really one of the outstanding attorneys generals in the country. And Keith was then a member of Congress and we ran Keith to become the head of the DNC and the establishment for the President of the United States on down went crazy. And they beat him by a few votes, not a whole lot. Look you faced… And that’s the exact same position that many of us are in right today. So people say, well, why did you support Hillary Clinton?
Yeah, what’s the alternative? Donald Trump? I think Donald Trump is an extremely dangerous person trying to undermine American democracy. So I can’t support him. Hillary Clinton, obviously his views are very, very different than mine. But that in that moment, that’s where politics becomes really tricky and it ain’t easy. And sometimes you have to do things that you’re not really all that excited about. But I think it was right to try to do what I could to prevent Trump from getting elected. And in 2020 I did the same with Biden and we had more success with Biden than we had with Clinton.
Barack Obama
Lex Fridman
Well, there’s this interesting story about a long time coming meeting between you and Obama in 2018, I believe. So Ari Rabin-Havt, 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. 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? Basically Obama’s making the case that you have to sort of moderate your approach in order to win. So was Obama right?
Well, there’s this interesting story about a long time coming meeting between you and Obama in 2018, I believe. So Ari Rabin-Havt, 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. 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? Basically Obama’s making the case that you have to sort of moderate your approach in order to win. So was Obama right?
Bernie Sanders
Look, and again, that’s why politics is very, very fascinating. Sometimes you can run and lose and you really win if your goal is not just individual power, but transforming society. One of my heroes, you mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. who is one of my heroes. Another one of my heroes is Eugene Victor Debs. Does that ring a bell?
Look, and again, that’s why politics is very, very fascinating. Sometimes you can run and lose and you really win if your goal is not just individual power, but transforming society. One of my heroes, you mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. who is one of my heroes. Another one of my heroes is Eugene Victor Debs. Does that ring a bell?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yes.
Yeah. Yes.
Bernie Sanders
Okay.
Okay.
Lex Fridman
For many reasons, yes.
For many reasons, yes.
Bernie Sanders
All right. Many listeners may not know who Debs was. Debs was a union organizer in the early 1900s, helped form the American Railway Union, ran for president, I think five times. Ran the last time while he was in a jail cell because of his opposition to World War I and got a million…
All right. Many listeners may not know who Debs was. Debs was a union organizer in the early 1900s, helped form the American Railway Union, ran for president, I think five times. Ran the last time while he was in a jail cell because of his opposition to World War I and got a million…
Bernie Sanders
… while he was in a jail cell because of his opposition to World War I and got a million votes doing that. Debs lost badly in every race that he ran. In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for president. And much of what Roosevelt ended up doing was at least some of what Debs had talked about. Debs helped lay the groundwork for ideas. So sometimes you can lose and win if you’re into transforming society. What my view is, where I disagree with Obama, is I think you have got to raise consciousness among ordinary people. And when people know what’s going on and are prepared in an organized way to fight for change, they can make incredible changes. And we’ve seen that in recent years. Today, we take for granted we have a woman running for president of the United States I’m supporting. We have had other women running for president.
… while he was in a jail cell because of his opposition to World War I and got a million votes doing that. Debs lost badly in every race that he ran. In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for president. And much of what Roosevelt ended up doing was at least some of what Debs had talked about. Debs helped lay the groundwork for ideas. So sometimes you can lose and win if you’re into transforming society. What my view is, where I disagree with Obama, is I think you have got to raise consciousness among ordinary people. And when people know what’s going on and are prepared in an organized way to fight for change, they can make incredible changes. And we’ve seen that in recent years. Today, we take for granted we have a woman running for president of the United States I’m supporting. We have had other women running for president.
We have women governors and senators. Not so many years ago in the United States Senate, there were 98 men, two women. Even before that 1920, it was when women got the right to vote. How did that change? How did women’s role in society change? It changed because women and their male allies stood up in force. Gay rights, old enough to remember that anybody I knew who was gay, you think they would talk about it? Come out about it? No they wouldn’t. That’s changed. We have seen in terms of civil rights, massive changes. Change happens when people at the grassroots level demand that… We talked about a healthcare a moment ago, we will get universal Medicare for all when millions of people make it clear that’s what they want. So I believe politics starts at the grassroots level, and that’s how you got to bring about change.
Lex Fridman
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 would be remembered for a long time. What do you admire most about Obama?
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 would be remembered for a long time. What do you admire most about Obama?
Bernie Sanders
Well, I know him. We’re not best friends, but I know him well and we chat every once in a while. First of all, don’t underestimate what it was in 2008 to be the first black president in the history of this country. And I think few would deny that he’s an extraordinarily intelligent guy. Very, very articulate, one of the best speakers that there is in America, and that he and his family, and again, it’s a lot harder than it looks. He and his family for eight years, that’s his wife Michelle and his kids, really held that office in a way that earned I think the respect of the American people, even if people disagreed him politically. So he deserves… And again, don’t underestimate. I think years ago there were people who said, “A black president in our lifetimes never going to happen. Can’t happen. Too racist the country.”
Well, I know him. We’re not best friends, but I know him well and we chat every once in a while. First of all, don’t underestimate what it was in 2008 to be the first black president in the history of this country. And I think few would deny that he’s an extraordinarily intelligent guy. Very, very articulate, one of the best speakers that there is in America, and that he and his family, and again, it’s a lot harder than it looks. He and his family for eight years, that’s his wife Michelle and his kids, really held that office in a way that earned I think the respect of the American people, even if people disagreed him politically. So he deserves… And again, don’t underestimate. I think years ago there were people who said, “A black president in our lifetimes never going to happen. Can’t happen. Too racist the country.”
He did it. And that is a huge accomplishment. And I think he has had some significant achievements in his presidential tenure. He and I did disagree on a number of issues. I think he will tell you, I think his public stance is that, yeah, if you have to start all over again, he would do Medicare for all single payer. But where we are right now, the best he could do is the Affordable Care Act. Well, we disagree on that and we disagree on other things, but I think he deserves an enormous amount of credit for what he has accomplished.
Lex Fridman
And he, like you, also gave a damn good speech opposing the Iraq war before running for president. And that takes courage.
And he, like you, also gave a damn good speech opposing the Iraq war before running for president. And that takes courage.
Bernie Sanders
Yes, it does.
Yes, it does.
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Bernie Sanders
It is very hard. People do not fully appreciate how powerful the establishment is, whether it is the healthcare industry, whether it’s the military industrial complex, whether it’s the fossil fuel industry. These people have unlimited amounts of money. They’re very smart lobbyists in Washington D.C, and they’re very, very greedy people. They want it all.
It is very hard. People do not fully appreciate how powerful the establishment is, whether it is the healthcare industry, whether it’s the military industrial complex, whether it’s the fossil fuel industry. These people have unlimited amounts of money. They’re very smart lobbyists in Washington D.C, and they’re very, very greedy people. They want it all.
Capitalism
Lex Fridman
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 hypercapitalism, 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, decrease in poverty, decrease in infant mortality, increase in expected life expectancy. So how do you see the tension, the pros of capitalism and the cons of capitalism?
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 hypercapitalism, 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, decrease in poverty, decrease in infant mortality, increase in expected life expectancy. So how do you see the tension, the pros of capitalism and the cons of capitalism?
Bernie Sanders
Some of my European friends, they say Bernie, in the United States, you’re considered to be very radical. If you were here in France or Denmark or someplace, you’d be kind of mainstream left guy. Not all that radical. So this is what I think. I mean, I think the best that we could do right now, where we are right now, it’s the great a society which does two things. It encourages innovation, but at the same time, it makes sure that all people in a wealthy nation have a decent standard of living. And some countries, if you look at Scandinavia, and this shocks people because we don’t talk about this at all. So in Scandinavia it has been the case, Denmark, Finland, Norway for years that people have healthcare. That’s not a big thing. You end up in the hospital. So what? They don’t pay a bill.
Some of my European friends, they say Bernie, in the United States, you’re considered to be very radical. If you were here in France or Denmark or someplace, you’d be kind of mainstream left guy. Not all that radical. So this is what I think. I mean, I think the best that we could do right now, where we are right now, it’s the great a society which does two things. It encourages innovation, but at the same time, it makes sure that all people in a wealthy nation have a decent standard of living. And some countries, if you look at Scandinavia, and this shocks people because we don’t talk about this at all. So in Scandinavia it has been the case, Denmark, Finland, Norway for years that people have healthcare. That’s not a big thing. You end up in the hospital. So what? They don’t pay a bill.
And this shocks people. In America right now, we have people who will get one week, two weeks off paid vacation. Sometimes people get nothing. You know that there are people out there who have vacation all. In Germany, you got six weeks paid vacation and other holidays as well. People are shocked by that. In America, we don’t have paid family and medical leave. The only major country not to do it. Other countries, your wife gets sick, you stay home with her, your kids get sick, not a big deal. You get a certain amount of paid family and medical leave. Cost of prescription drugs are far more affordable. So what you want to do is create what’s called a social safety net. That means I don’t care what your income is, of course you’re going to have healthcare is the human right. Of course you’re going to have housing that is affordable.
Of course your kids are going to have great quality education from child care to university without much cost. Every country has a little bit different. But there are countries in the world right now, I think in Germany, I think college is now tuition-free, as I recall, for obvious reasons. They want to have the best educated workforce they can. So in terms of government playing a role in a civilized democratic society of providing all basic needs, healthcare, education, housing, retirement benefits, yes, that is what we’ve got to do. Now, does that mean then that the government is going to run every mom and pop store on the corner? Of course not. You want innovation, you want to go out and start a business, produce a product, good luck to you. Make money. But on the other hand, in terms of even making money, we want you to be able to do that. Come up with good products, good services.
But do I think you should end up with $100 billion? No, I don’t. And you know what? It’s funny. I did an interview with Bill Gates, who’s I think the third-wealthiest guy in the country, struggling behind Musk and Bezos I think, and he’s only worth a hundred plus billion. But he gets by. And I said to him, “Bill,” he was supposed to ask me questions. I asked him the question, I said, “Bill, tell me something. You’re an innovator with Microsoft and all that stuff. Did you know that you’d become a multi-billionaire? And was that what motivated you?” And he said, “No.” And I believe he was honestly, “I loved doing whatever. I loved programming.” He was a kid. He started doing that. He loved it. He was motivated by it. Do you think that there are scientists out there who working day and night trying to develop drugs to deal with Alzheimer’s or cancer that they motivate? Boy, if I come up with this drug, I’m going to become a billionaire?
So I think we want to reward success. Fine, but you don’t need a billion dollars. We want people to get satisfaction from what they accomplish, the work they’re doing, whether it’s cleaning the street or developing a new drug. So I think we have gone a little bit far, and you’re right, in talking about the book was an attack on I call, you call hypercapitalism or ubercapitalism. But right now, and this is not an American issue, this is a global issue. It’s not an accident that Musk is over there in Saudi Arabia talking to the trillionaire families in the mid-East, these guys, Putin and his friends, you got probably not more than five, 10,000 extraordinarily wealthy families who have unbelievable economic power over 7 billion people on this planet.
Lex Fridman
Well, Elon Musk is actually an interesting case because he’s investing all the money back into the businesses. So 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. 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.
Well, Elon Musk is actually an interesting case because he’s investing all the money back into the businesses. So 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. 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.
Bernie Sanders
That’s right. Look, I am no great fan of Elon Musk, especially in the role that he’s playing right now in Trump’s campaign. But is he a brilliant guy? Of course he is. Does he work like a dog? Of course he does. Does he come up with these incredible innovations in companies? Yes, he does. Does he deserve credit for that? Yeah, he does. But even in terms of encouraging innovation, I would hope that we are focusing on the important issues. I would love to see great innovators figure out how we build the affordable housing that we need, come up with the great drugs that we need to solve many of the terrible illnesses that plague people. Climate change for God’s sakes. All right, do we need innovation? We’re making some progress in this country. Should we do more? What kind of technologies out there can really cut back on carbon emissions?
That’s right. Look, I am no great fan of Elon Musk, especially in the role that he’s playing right now in Trump’s campaign. But is he a brilliant guy? Of course he is. Does he work like a dog? Of course he does. Does he come up with these incredible innovations in companies? Yes, he does. Does he deserve credit for that? Yeah, he does. But even in terms of encouraging innovation, I would hope that we are focusing on the important issues. I would love to see great innovators figure out how we build the affordable housing that we need, come up with the great drugs that we need to solve many of the terrible illnesses that plague people. Climate change for God’s sakes. All right, do we need innovation? We’re making some progress in this country. Should we do more? What kind of technologies out there can really cut back on carbon emissions?
So I hope we focus on some of the most important issues that impact humanity, but reward innovators. I don’t have a problem with that, but I do have a problem when three people end up owning more wealth at the bottom half of American society.
Lex Fridman
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?
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?
Bernie Sanders
Look, nothing new. Trump didn’t invent it. It’s called a photo opportunity. I’ve done one or two in my life too. So you go to a place. He puts on an apron. Good old Donald Trump, just another McDonald’s worker. But anyhow, he was a… So fine, he did his photo op. That’s fine. Kamala Harris was in North Carolina handing out food to people who were victims of the hurricane. Fine. That’s what politicians do. But some reporter asked him, they said, “Mr. Trump, are you for raising the minimum wage?” And that was a fair question because you got, I don’t know how many, but many, many thousands of McDonald’s workers and millions of other American workers right now are trying to get by on 9, 10, 11 bucks an hour. Federal minimum wage is seven and a quarter. You have people working at McDonald’s right now for sure who are working with 12, 13 bucks an hour.
Look, nothing new. Trump didn’t invent it. It’s called a photo opportunity. I’ve done one or two in my life too. So you go to a place. He puts on an apron. Good old Donald Trump, just another McDonald’s worker. But anyhow, he was a… So fine, he did his photo op. That’s fine. Kamala Harris was in North Carolina handing out food to people who were victims of the hurricane. Fine. That’s what politicians do. But some reporter asked him, they said, “Mr. Trump, are you for raising the minimum wage?” And that was a fair question because you got, I don’t know how many, but many, many thousands of McDonald’s workers and millions of other American workers right now are trying to get by on 9, 10, 11 bucks an hour. Federal minimum wage is seven and a quarter. You have people working at McDonald’s right now for sure who are working with 12, 13 bucks an hour.
So the reporter said, what do you think about raising the federal minimum wage? And he’s, “Oh, these are great workers. I love McDonald’s and so forth.” He didn’t answer the question Well, I think that in the richest country in the history of the world, if you work 40 hours a week, you should not be living in poverty. And that means we should have a federal minimum wage, not absurdly seven and a quarter an hour, but in my view, $17 an hour. Will that solve all the economic problems for working-class people? No, it won’t. It’ll help. It’ll help.
Response to attacks
Lex Fridman
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. And you are one of the most famous politicians in the world. 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?
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. And you are one of the most famous politicians in the world. 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?
Bernie Sanders
Do I own three residences? Yeah, I do. I live here in Burlington, Vermont. We live in a middle-class neighborhood. Nice house. Guess what? I’m a United States senator and I own a home in Washington DC as do most senators. You live there year after year. Actually when I was in Congress for 16 years, I rented all the time, but I got elected. Okay, got a six-year term. You know what? Let’s buy a house. So we bought a house and guess what? Like many thousands of people in the state of Vermont, I have a summer camp. It’s a nice one on Lake Champlain. That’s it. Now how did I get the money? You’re right. I wrote two best-selling books, including this book on capitalism. It was New York Times bestseller for a while. And also another book was a youth book. I make, I don’t know, $175,000 a year. And that’s more or less how I became the zillionaire that I am.
Do I own three residences? Yeah, I do. I live here in Burlington, Vermont. We live in a middle-class neighborhood. Nice house. Guess what? I’m a United States senator and I own a home in Washington DC as do most senators. You live there year after year. Actually when I was in Congress for 16 years, I rented all the time, but I got elected. Okay, got a six-year term. You know what? Let’s buy a house. So we bought a house and guess what? Like many thousands of people in the state of Vermont, I have a summer camp. It’s a nice one on Lake Champlain. That’s it. Now how did I get the money? You’re right. I wrote two best-selling books, including this book on capitalism. It was New York Times bestseller for a while. And also another book was a youth book. I make, I don’t know, $175,000 a year. And that’s more or less how I became the zillionaire that I am.
Lex Fridman
Well, I should also mention that sometimes the word mansion is used and I think your residences are quite modest, at least-
Well, I should also mention that sometimes the word mansion is used and I think your residences are quite modest, at least-
Bernie Sanders
Normal houses and they’re not… They’re middle-class houses. Very nice house.
Normal houses and they’re not… They’re middle-class houses. Very nice house.
Lex Fridman
So when you started in politics I read you are worth $1,100.
So when you started in politics I read you are worth $1,100.
Bernie Sanders
That much.
That much.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that much. That’s right. Has the increase in wealth changed your ability to relate to the working class?
Yeah, that much. That’s right. Has the increase in wealth changed your ability to relate to the working class?
Bernie Sanders
Well, it’s a good question. And obviously growing up in a working-class family has been maybe the most singularly significant aspect of my politics. I grew up without money in a family that lived in a rent controlled apartment in Brooklyn New York. So that has impacted me. I’ll tell you, I don’t really give a damn about money. I drive a car that’s 11 years old. It’s an old car and money… Here is my jewelry. It’s a solar watch and my wedding ring. That’s about it. I don’t have a Rolex watch, would not be interested in it. But I’ll tell you what has impacted me, my wife who also grew up in a working-class family will tell you the same. We don’t worry… You raise that issue. If we have to go to the doctor, if our kids have to go to the doctor, we go to the doctor.
Well, it’s a good question. And obviously growing up in a working-class family has been maybe the most singularly significant aspect of my politics. I grew up without money in a family that lived in a rent controlled apartment in Brooklyn New York. So that has impacted me. I’ll tell you, I don’t really give a damn about money. I drive a car that’s 11 years old. It’s an old car and money… Here is my jewelry. It’s a solar watch and my wedding ring. That’s about it. I don’t have a Rolex watch, would not be interested in it. But I’ll tell you what has impacted me, my wife who also grew up in a working-class family will tell you the same. We don’t worry… You raise that issue. If we have to go to the doctor, if our kids have to go to the doctor, we go to the doctor.
I don’t stay up nights worrying. There was a time I have to worry about how to pay my electric bill. I don’t worry about that anymore. So what has happened that stress, that economic stress of not worrying about a financial disaster, that’s gone and that is enormous. I maybe as much or more than any other member of the Senate work hard not only for, but with working-class people. I’m chairman of the committee deals with labor issues. We have been involved probably in dozens of strikes all over this country. I’ve been on picket lines. So I do my best. It’s a very easy trap to fall into. You can get separated from ordinary people and their struggles. Not hard to do. I try as hard as I can not to do that.
Lex Fridman
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 a-
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 a-
Lex Fridman
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, I’ve been poor most of my life, but I’ve been very fortunate recently to have enough wealth to not worry about healthcare, to have insurance, and be able to afford an emergency room visit. And that worry is just such a giant lift off your shoulders.
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, I’ve been poor most of my life, but I’ve been very fortunate recently to have enough wealth to not worry about healthcare, to have insurance, and be able to afford an emergency room visit. And that worry is just such a giant lift off your shoulders.
Bernie Sanders
Lex, I think you said it very well. I remember even I saw this change in myself. When I used to go out, and I do the grocery shopping. My wife does a lot of the cooking, I do the grocery shopping. And I used to look at the prices of everything, I do that less now. I said, “What the hell? So what? It costs 50 cents more for this can of stuff. So, what?” But that’s a luxury you have when you don’t have to worry about that. And I don’t have to worry about that.
Lex, I think you said it very well. I remember even I saw this change in myself. When I used to go out, and I do the grocery shopping. My wife does a lot of the cooking, I do the grocery shopping. And I used to look at the prices of everything, I do that less now. I said, “What the hell? So what? It costs 50 cents more for this can of stuff. So, what?” But that’s a luxury you have when you don’t have to worry about that. And I don’t have to worry about that.
But your point is, again, to me, I don’t like big fancy cars or big fancy homes, don’t go on… My wife will tell you we’ve not been on a real vacation for God knows how long, because I work pretty hard. But the major thing about having money, which is enormously important, is just what you said. I don’t have to worry. If somebody in my family gets sick, I don’t have to worry about that. I don’t have to worry about putting food on the table or paying the mortgage. So, that’s what money has done.
AOC and progressive politics
Lex Fridman
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 in 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?
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 in 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?
Bernie Sanders
That is the most important question, regarding to my mind, American politics. One of the successes that we’ve had, and I’m proud to have played a role in this, is that if you go to the House of Representatives right now, you’ll see almost a hundred members of the Progressive Caucus led very well by a woman from Washington, Pramila Jayapal. Does a great job. That’s people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar and many others. Many of them are young, often women, people of color. And many of them come from working-class backgrounds. So, what we have been able to do in recent years, elect a number of strong progressives who represent working families very, very effectively.
That is the most important question, regarding to my mind, American politics. One of the successes that we’ve had, and I’m proud to have played a role in this, is that if you go to the House of Representatives right now, you’ll see almost a hundred members of the Progressive Caucus led very well by a woman from Washington, Pramila Jayapal. Does a great job. That’s people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar and many others. Many of them are young, often women, people of color. And many of them come from working-class backgrounds. So, what we have been able to do in recent years, elect a number of strong progressives who represent working families very, very effectively.
The struggle in the Democratic Party is between the corporate wing and the progressive wing. And the corporate wing takes a whole lot of money, sees its salvation in getting a whole lot of money from wealthy individuals and large corporations. And is not very vigorous in my view, in representing the needs of working-class people. If they were, we would have healthcare for all, we would have a minimum wage that was a living wage, we would not have a housing crisis. We would not have a tax system in which billionaires pay an effective tax rate that is lower than a truck driver or a nurse.
So, I think one of the reasons that Trump has had political success is, it’s not so much his ideas. Most working class people don’t think we should give tax breaks to billionaires or worry about the size of Arnold Palmer’s genitalia. But they are angry, people are angry. And the Democrats have not responded effectively to that anger. So, the struggle that we are waging right now is the future of the Democratic Party. Will it be a party of the working class and represent working class issues, whether you black or white or Latino or Asian or whatever you may be? Or will it be a corporately dominated party? That’s the struggle we’re in right now.
Lex Fridman
Did you consider running in 2024? From my perspective, I would’ve loved it if you ran. I think you would’ve had a great chance of winning. Not just the primary, but the presidency.
Did you consider running in 2024? From my perspective, I would’ve loved it if you ran. I think you would’ve had a great chance of winning. Not just the primary, but the presidency.
Bernie Sanders
I gave about five minutes thought to it. And the reason was we have a slogan of the progressive movement, it’s not about me, it’s about us. And to have taken on Biden, who in my view on domestic issues, has been quite strong, would’ve really split the Democratic Party and laid the groundwork for an easy Trump victory. And that I did not want to see.
I gave about five minutes thought to it. And the reason was we have a slogan of the progressive movement, it’s not about me, it’s about us. And to have taken on Biden, who in my view on domestic issues, has been quite strong, would’ve really split the Democratic Party and laid the groundwork for an easy Trump victory. And that I did not want to see.
So sometimes in life, and I know that a lot of younger people don’t agree with me, but you got to make choices which are painful. So I strongly supported Biden, because I liked his domestic record. He’s done some good things against a lot of opposition. And I’m supporting Kamala right now. But I’m doing my best to see that a dangerous guy like Donald Trump does not become president.
Lex Fridman
And the hope for you is that there will be future candidates that are populist, that are progressive?
And the hope for you is that there will be future candidates that are populist, that are progressive?
Bernie Sanders
Yes, absolutely.
Yes, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
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 to you is most impressive about her?
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 to you is most impressive about her?
Bernie Sanders
I really like Alexandria a whole lot. She is a young woman who comes from a working class background. She helped a mother clean houses. She was a bartender in the Bronx, New York. And I’m very proud that my campaign for president inspired her to run. And she ran on a progressive working class program. And she took on one of the more powerful guys, a guy named Joe Crowley, who was pretty high up in the Democratic Party. And she knocked on doors, she had no money. She did a very strong grassroots effort, and I appreciate that. So, that’s number one. I like what she stands for, she’s incredibly smart. And she has that certain charisma that maybe you’re born with it, maybe you develop it. I don’t know.
I really like Alexandria a whole lot. She is a young woman who comes from a working class background. She helped a mother clean houses. She was a bartender in the Bronx, New York. And I’m very proud that my campaign for president inspired her to run. And she ran on a progressive working class program. And she took on one of the more powerful guys, a guy named Joe Crowley, who was pretty high up in the Democratic Party. And she knocked on doors, she had no money. She did a very strong grassroots effort, and I appreciate that. So, that’s number one. I like what she stands for, she’s incredibly smart. And she has that certain charisma that maybe you’re born with it, maybe you develop it. I don’t know.
A couple of years ago she came up here to Vermont to spent some time. She and her partner, Riley, came up. And we were out in the street and people saw her and they said, “Oh, Congresswoman.” and she just smiled. And she had an approach to people, which was beautiful. I mean, it wasn’t phony, it was real. But to be a politician, you got to know how to… You could be a great intellectual, but you can’t relate to people. She relates well to people. And so, I think both from a personality perspective, from an intellect perspective, from an ideological perspective, she helped create the Green New Deal concept, the need to create jobs as we transform our energy system away from fossil fuel. Strong advocate for Medicare for all workers rights. So, I’m a big fan of Alexandria.
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Bernie Sanders
Well, I don’t know that I can give you a singular answer. I was mayor of this city and proud of what we accomplished here, proud of my accomplishments as a U.S. Senator. When COVID was devastating this country and we had a massive economic downturn, as chairman of the budget committee, I helped write the American Rescue Plan, which put a lot of money into people’s pockets. We cut childhood poverty by 40% by providing a child tax credit. We kept hospitals going, we kept colleges going, kept people from getting evicted, helped get public health out there, people getting the vaccines. I’m proud of that.
Well, I don’t know that I can give you a singular answer. I was mayor of this city and proud of what we accomplished here, proud of my accomplishments as a U.S. Senator. When COVID was devastating this country and we had a massive economic downturn, as chairman of the budget committee, I helped write the American Rescue Plan, which put a lot of money into people’s pockets. We cut childhood poverty by 40% by providing a child tax credit. We kept hospitals going, we kept colleges going, kept people from getting evicted, helped get public health out there, people getting the vaccines. I’m proud of that.
But at the end of the day, I think what I have shown is that the ideas, gets back to the early part of this conversation, the ideas that I am talking about are ideas that are widely supported. So Donald Trump says, “Oh, Bernie Sanders is a far left.”, it’s like I’m some kind of extremist coming up with ideas that nobody supports. Everything that I talk about, raising the minimum wage, health care for all, a tax system which demands the billionaires pay their fair share, those are all popular ideas. But people didn’t know you got to run for president and have 20,000 people come out to your rallies and win 23 states. And they say, “Well, maybe those ideas are not so crazy after all.” And we’ve got to entertain them.
The establishment doesn’t like that. They really don’t. They want to tell you, and this is their main, this is how they succeed. What they say, Lex, is, “The world is the way it is. It always will be this way. We got the wealth, we got the power. And don’t think of anything else. This is the way it is. You have no power. Give up.” They don’t say it quite that way, but that’s really what the intent is.
And what we showed is, guess what? Running an outsider campaign, we took on the Democratic establishment, we came close to winning it. And we did win 23 states. And the ideas that we’re talking about are the ideas that working-class people, young people believe in.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, you showed that it’s possible to win. And that’s an idea that will resonate for decades to come.
Yeah, you showed that it’s possible to win. And that’s an idea that will resonate for decades to come.
Bernie Sanders
And out of that came dozens of candidates now in the House of Representatives, people on city council, people on state legislature who did win.
And out of that came dozens of candidates now in the House of Representatives, people on city council, people on state legislature who did win.
Mortality
Lex Fridman
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?
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?
Bernie Sanders
Well, when you’re 83, it does come across.
Well, when you’re 83, it does come across.
Lex Fridman
All right.
All right.
Bernie Sanders
Yeah, of course I do. And-
Yeah, of course I do. And-
Lex Fridman
Are you afraid of it?
Are you afraid of it?
Bernie Sanders
No, I’m not afraid of death. What I am afraid of, I think, is infirmity. I have been, knock on wood, this is wood, I think, reasonably healthy with an exception. I had a heart attack five years ago. And what blew me away was that my body failed me for the very first time in my life. That was stunning to me, that suddenly, I was in a hospital bed.
No, I’m not afraid of death. What I am afraid of, I think, is infirmity. I have been, knock on wood, this is wood, I think, reasonably healthy with an exception. I had a heart attack five years ago. And what blew me away was that my body failed me for the very first time in my life. That was stunning to me, that suddenly, I was in a hospital bed.
I have a great deal of compassion for people as we speak, who are in nursing homes, having a hard time walking. Maybe your mental agility is slipping a little bit. That’s tough. That’s what worries me. We are all going to die, and that’s that. So I’m not afraid of that, but that aspect of getting older, and that does concern me.
Lex Fridman
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-
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-
Bernie Sanders
Oh, thank you.
Oh, thank you.
Lex Fridman
… just as a human being. So, you still got it. After all that, after all those speeches, after all those houses, after all of it, there’s still the humility and just the sharpness, the wit is all there. So Bernie, yeah, like I said, I wish you would’ve ran this year, but I also wish that there’s future candidates.
… just as a human being. So, you still got it. After all that, after all those speeches, after all those houses, after all of it, there’s still the humility and just the sharpness, the wit is all there. So Bernie, yeah, like I said, I wish you would’ve ran this year, but I also wish that there’s future candidates.
Bernie Sanders
Yeah. And there will be, Lex. I absolutely do. And I think you asked about my legacy, the idea that they’re all wonderful, really, really wonderful people who are now, got involved in the political process that are fighting for justice. That’s a great legacy.
Yeah. And there will be, Lex. I absolutely do. And I think you asked about my legacy, the idea that they’re all wonderful, really, really wonderful people who are now, got involved in the political process that are fighting for justice. That’s a great legacy.
Hope for the future
Lex Fridman
What gives you hope about the future of this country, about the future of the world?
What gives you hope about the future of this country, about the future of the world?
Bernie Sanders
Sometimes one can become very cynical. You look at the terrible wars that are going on right now, you look at the divisiveness in this country, the ugliness, the poverty, you look at climate change. You can get depressed from all that. But I am lucky in this sense, in that I’ve had the opportunity… People often, “What inspires you? How do you keep going?” And I remember, actually it was in California where it really crystallized me. I was at a rally in the agricultural area of California. And we did a rally, it was sunset, thousands of people were out. And you looked around the crowd and there were young people, black and white and Latino and Asian American, huge cross section. There were older people, and they all wanted to make America a very much better country. And it really moved me.
Sometimes one can become very cynical. You look at the terrible wars that are going on right now, you look at the divisiveness in this country, the ugliness, the poverty, you look at climate change. You can get depressed from all that. But I am lucky in this sense, in that I’ve had the opportunity… People often, “What inspires you? How do you keep going?” And I remember, actually it was in California where it really crystallized me. I was at a rally in the agricultural area of California. And we did a rally, it was sunset, thousands of people were out. And you looked around the crowd and there were young people, black and white and Latino and Asian American, huge cross section. There were older people, and they all wanted to make America a very much better country. And it really moved me.
I mean, I see that time and time, and I’ve just been on the campaign trail. And you see great people, really beautiful people who, not interested in becoming billionaires. They want to improve life for other people in this country. So, I am grateful that I… It sounds like a platitude. It’s what every politician says, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when you go out around the country, you go to Native American reservations and you go to factories and everything, and you see so many wonderful people. I have been able to see things that many others have not. I’ve been to every state in the country, and that inspires me.
Lex Fridman
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.
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.
Bernie Sanders
Well, thank you very much for what you’re doing. Let me just say a word about what you’re doing.
Well, thank you very much for what you’re doing. Let me just say a word about what you’re doing.
Lex Fridman
Okay. Let’s go.
Okay. Let’s go.
Bernie Sanders
Return the compliments here.
Return the compliments here.
Lex Fridman
Okay.
Okay.
Bernie Sanders
I think there is a growing dissatisfaction with corporate media. And not because it’s fake news or the reporters lie all the time, that’s nonsense. They don’t. But I think people want to hear folks really talk about in a calm manner, about some of the very important issues which are not discussed in corporate media. And I think that’s what you and some others are doing. So, I thank you very much. It’s a very important service to the country.
I think there is a growing dissatisfaction with corporate media. And not because it’s fake news or the reporters lie all the time, that’s nonsense. They don’t. But I think people want to hear folks really talk about in a calm manner, about some of the very important issues which are not discussed in corporate media. And I think that’s what you and some others are doing. So, I thank you very much. It’s a very important service to the country.
Lex Fridman
And thank you from a mayor perspective, for creating a wonderful town. And I look forward to looking at the fall leaves walking around tonight.
And thank you from a mayor perspective, for creating a wonderful town. And I look forward to looking at the fall leaves walking around tonight.
Bernie Sanders
Well, I did quite great the leaves. I did create some other things.
Well, I did quite great the leaves. I did create some other things.
Lex Fridman
Okay. Thank you so much, Bernie.
Okay. Thank you so much, Bernie.
Bernie Sanders
Thank you, Lex.
Thank you, Lex.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bernie Sanders. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bernie Sanders. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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.
Transcript for Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #449 with Graham Hancock.
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A topic I recently discussed with the archeologist Ed Barnhart. Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archeologist scholar I love talking to on the podcast, extremely knowledgeable, humble, open minded, and respectful in disagreement. I’ll do many more podcasts on history, including ancient history. Our distant past is full of mysteries, and I find it truly exciting to explore those mysteries with people both on the inside and the outside of the mainstream in the various disciplines involved. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Graham Hancock.
And then we have anatomically modern humans. And I think the earliest anatomically modern human skeletal remains are from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco and date to about 310,000 years ago. So the question is what were our ancestors doing after that? And I think we can include the Neanderthals and the Denisovans in that general picture. And why did it take so long? This is one of the puzzles, one of the questions that bother me. Why did it take so long? When we have creatures who are physically identical to us, we cannot actually weigh and measure their brains. But from the work that’s been done on the crania, it looks like they had the same brains that we do with the same wiring. So if we’ve been around for 300,000 plus years at least, and if ultimately in our future was the process to create civilization or civilizations, why didn’t it happen sooner?
Why did it take so long? Why was it such a long time? Even the story of anatomically modern humans has kept on changing. I remember a time when it was said that there hadn’t been anatomically modern humans before 50,000 years ago, and then it became 196,000 years ago with the findings in Ethiopia and then 310,000 years ago. There’s a lot of missing pieces in the puzzle there. But the big question for me in that timeline is why didn’t we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago to start seeing what are selected as the beginnings of civilization in places like Turkey, for example. And then there’s a relatively slow process of adopting agriculture. And by 6,000 years ago, we see ancient Sumer emerging as a civilization. And we’re then in the pre-dynastic period in ancient Egypt as well 6,000 years ago, beginning to see definite signs of what will become the dynastic civilization of Egypt about 5,000 years ago.
And interestingly round about the same time, you have the Indus Valley civilization popping up out of nowhere. And by the way, the Indus Valley civilization was a lost civilization until the 1920s when railway workers accidentally stumbled across some ruins. I’ve been to Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, and these are extraordinarily beautifully centrally planned cities. Clearly they’re the work of an already sophisticated civilization. One of the things that strikes me about the Indus Valley Civilization is that we find a steatite seal of an individual seated in a recognizable yoga posture. And that seal is 5,000 years old, and the yoga posture is Mulabandhasana, which involves a real contortion of the ankles and twisting the feet back. It’s an advanced yoga posture. So there it is, 5,000 years ago. And that then raises the question, well, how long did yoga take to get to that place when it was already so advanced 5,000 years ago?
What’s the background to this? China, the Yellow River Civilization again, it’s around about the same period, five to 6,000 years ago. You get these first signs of something happening. So it’s very odd that all around the world we have this sudden upsurge of civilization about 6,000 years ago, preceded by what seems like a natural evolutionary process that would lead to a civilization. And yet certain ideas being carried down and manifested and expressed in many of these different civilizations. I just find that that whole idea very puzzling and very disturbing, especially when I look at this radical break that takes place in not just the human story, but the story of all life on Earth, which was the last great cataclysm that the Earth went through, which was the Younger Dryas event. It was an extinction level event. That’s when all the great megafauna of the Ice Age went extinct.
It’s after that. It’s after event that we start seeing this what had taken to be the beginnings of the first gradual steps towards civilization, we come out of the upper Paleolithic as it’s defined the end of the old Stone Age and into the Neolithic. And that’s when the wheels are supposedly set in motion to start civilization rolling. But what happened before that and why did that suddenly happen then? And I can’t help feeling, and I’ve felt this for a very long while, that there are major missing pieces in our story. It’s often said that I’m claiming to have proved that there was an advanced lost civilization in the Ice Age. And I am not claiming to have proved that. That is a hypothesis that I’m putting forward to answer some of the questions that I have about prehistory. And I think it’s worthwhile to inquire into those possibilities because the Younger Dryas event was a massive global cataclysm, whatever caused it.
And it’s strange that just after it we start seeing these first signs.
I really don’t have much more to say about it. And I turned in another direction and I wrote a book called Supernatural Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind recently retitled Visionary. And that was about the role of fundamentally about the role of psychedelics in the evolution of human culture. And I didn’t think that I would go back to the lost civilization issue, but Göbekli Tepe in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me the more and more discoveries there, the 11,600 year date from Enclosure D, which is the two largest megalithic pillars. And I reached a point where I realized I have to get back in the water and I have to investigate this again. And Göbekli Tepe was a game changer, but I think it’s a game changer for everything because Göbekli Tepe, the extraordinary nature of it. We are looking at a major megalithic site, which is at least five and a half thousand years older than Ä gantija in Malta, which was previously considered to be the oldest megalithic site in the world.
And this led of course to a huge amount of interest and attention, both from the Turkish government who see the potential tourism potential of having the world’s oldest megalithic site and from archeologists. And this in turn has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region. And what they’re finding throughout that whole region around Göbekli Tepe and going down into Syria and further down into the Jordan Valley as far as Jericho and even across a bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus, is what Turkish archeologists are now calling the TaÅŸ Tepeler civilization. They’re calling it a civilization, the Stone Hills Civilization with very definite identifying characteristics, semi-subterranean circular structures, the use of T-shaped megalithic pillars, sometimes not anywhere near as big as those at Göbekli Tepe. It’s clear that Göbekli Tepe now was not the beginning of this process. It was actually in a way, the end of this process.
It was the summation of everything that Stone Hills Civilization had achieved. But what is becoming clear is that this is a period between before the foundation of Göbekli Tepe, as far as we know, that date of 11,600 years ago is the oldest date for Göbekli Tepe. But of course there’s a lot of Göbekli Tepe still underground, so we can’t say for sure that that’s the oldest, but it’s the oldest so far excavated. What we’re seeing is that in that whole region around there, there was something was in motion and it began to go into motion round about the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And this is where these two dates are really important. The Younger Dryas, I’ll round the figures off, begins around 12,800 years ago, and it ends around 11,600 years ago.
So Göbekli Tepe’s construction date, if it is 11,600 years ago, if they don’t find older materials, marks the end of the Younger Dryas, but the beginning of the Younger Dryas, we are already seeing the stirrings of the kind of culture that manifests in full form at Göbekli Tepe and after the construction of Göbekli Tepe, in fact, even during the construction of Göbekli Tepe, we see agriculture beginning to be adopted. The people who created Göbekli Tepe were all hunter-foragers at the beginning. But by the time Göbekli Tepe was finished, and it was definitely deliberately finished, closed off, closed down, deliberately buried, covered with earth, covered with rubble, and then topped off with a hill, which is why Göbekli Tepe is called what it is, Göbekli Tepe means pot-bellied hill or the hill of the navel. For a long time, Göbekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill that looked a bit like a pot belly.
And then inside them you have pairs of megalithic pillars. And the archetypal part of that site is Enclosure D, which contains the two largest upright megaliths, about 18 feet tall and reckoned to weigh somewhere in the range of 20 tons, if I have my memory correct, they’re substantial hefty pieces of stone. It isn’t some kind of extraordinary feat to create a 20 foot tall or 20 ton megalith, nor is it an extraordinary feat to move it. There’s nothing magical or really weird about that. Human beings can do that and always have, besides the quarry for the megaliths is right there. It’s within 200 meters of the main enclosures. So that’s not a mystery, but the mystery is, the mystery is why suddenly this new form of architecture, this massive, massive megalithic pillars appear, and the pillars, one of the things that interests me about the pillars is their alignment.
And there is good work that’s been done, which suggests that Enclosure D aligns to the rising of the star Sirius. And the rising points of the star Sirius appear to be mapped by the other enclosures, which are all oriented in slightly different directions. It was the work entirely of hunter-foragers. But by the time Göbekli Tepe was completed, agriculture was being introduced and was taking place there. Now you asked how Göbekli Tepe was found. The answer to that is that there was a survey of that pot-bellied hill in the 1960s by some American archeologists, and they were looking absolutely looking for Stone Age material, for material from the Paleolithic. And they had found some Paleolithic flints, upper Paleolithic flints around there. So it looked like a good place to look. But then they noticed sticking out of the side of the hill, some very finely cut stone, bits of very large and very finely cut stone.
And looking at that, the workmanship was so good that those archeologists were confident that it had nothing to do with the Stone Age, and they thought they were looking at perhaps some Byzantine remains, and they abandoned the site and never looked at it further. And it wasn’t until the German Archaeological Institute got involved, and particularly Klaus Schmidt, who I think was a genius, had real insight into this and started to dig at Göbekli Tepe that they’d realized what they’d found, that they’d found potentially the oldest megalithic site in the world. And they’d found it at a place where agriculture, according to the established historical timeline, that’s where agriculture, at any rate in Europe and Western Asia begins. It begins in Anatolia, in Turkey, and then it gradually disseminates westward from there.
But agriculture has taken a firm root by then. Actually, one other thing, I’ll just say this in passing. When I talk about a lost civilization introducing ideas to people, I’m often accused of stealing credit from the indigenous people who had those ideas in the first place. So I do find it slightly hypocritical that archeology fully accepts that the idea of agriculture was introduced to Western Europe from Turkey, and that Western Europeans didn’t invent agriculture. It was absolutely introduced by Anatolian farmers who traveled west. So the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn’t be so annoying to archeologists as it is.
There’s no doubt that human beings, our deep origins are in Africa. But then as you rightly say, there were these very early migrations out of Africa by species that are likely ancestral to anatomically modern humans, including definitely Homo erectus and the astonishingly distant travels that they undertook. Yes, I think there is an urge to explore in all of humanity. I think there is an urge to find out what’s around the next corner, what’s over the brow of the next hill. And I think that goes very deep into human character. And I think it was being manifested in those early adventures of people who left Africa and traveled all around the world and then settling in different parts of the world. I think a lot of anatomically modern human evolution took place outside Africa as well, not only in Africa.
They don’t necessarily occur at the same time. And this is where I think that archeology is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas as well as just a history of things. Because an idea can manifest again and again throughout the human story. So there are particular issues, for example, the notion of the afterlife, destiny of the soul, what happens to us when we die? And believe me, when you reach my age, that’s something you do think about what happens. I used to feel immortal when I was in my forties, but now that I’m 74, I definitely know that I’m not. Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same feeling, that same idea. But why would they all decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way, that it makes a journey along the Milky Way, that there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates.
The course of the life that that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey. And this idea, the path of souls, the Milky Way is called the path of souls. It’s very strongly found in the Americas right from South America through Mexico, through into North America. But it’s also found in ancient Egypt, in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia, the same idea. And I don’t feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we are looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that’s been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and that has taken on a life of its own within those cultures. So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences in the expression of these ideas. The other thing, very puzzling thing, is the sequence of numbers that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes.
At least I think that’s the best theory to explain them. Here, I think it’s important to pay tribute to the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. Giorgio de Santillana was professor of history of science actually at MIT, where you are based, back in the sixties. And Hertha von Dechend was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University, and they wrote an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet’s Mill, and Hamlet’s Mill differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession. And I’ll explain what precession is in a moment. Generally, it’s held that it was the Greeks who discovered the precession and the dating on that is put back not very far, maybe 2,300 years ago or so. Santillana and von Dechend are pointing out that knowledge of precession is much, much older than that, thousands of years older than that.
And they do actually trace it. I think I’m quoting them pretty much correctly to some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization. Reading that book was one of the several reasons that I got into this mystery in the first place. Okay, now, the precession of the equinoxes, to give it its full name, results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars. And our planet, of course, is rotating on its own axis at roughly a thousand miles an hour at the equator. But what’s less obvious is that it’s also wobbling on its axis. So if you imagine the extended North Pole of the earth pointing up at the sky in our time, it’s pointing at the star Polaris, and that is our pole star. But Polaris has not always been the pole star precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the Earth.
Other stars have occupied the pole position, and sometimes the extended North Pole of the earth points at empty space. There is no pole star. That’s one of the obvious results of the wobble on the Earth’s axis. The other one is that there are 12 well-known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the zodiac that lie along what is referred to as the path of the sun. The earth is orbiting the sun, and we are seeing what’s behind it, what’s in direct line with the sun in our view. And the zodiacal constellations all lie along the path of the sun. So at different times of the year, the sun will rise against the background of a particular zodiacal constellation. Today we live in the age of Pisces, and it’s definitely not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol. This is another area where I differ from archeology.
Think the constellations of the zodiac were recognized as such much earlier than we suppose. Anyway, to get to the point, the key marker of the year, certainly in the northern hemisphere, was the spring equinox. The question was, what constellation is rising behind the sun? What constellation is housing the sun at dawn on the spring equinox? Right now it’s Pisces. In another 150 years or so, it’ll be Aquarius. We do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Back in the time of the late ancient Egyptians, it was Aries going back to the time of Ramesses or before. Before that it was Taurus and so on and so forth. It’s backwards through the zodiac until 12,500 years ago. You come to the age of Leo when the constellation of Leo houses the sun on the spring equinox. Now this process unfolds very, very, very, very slowly, the whole cycle, and it is a cycle.
It repeats itself roughly every 26,000 years. Put a more exact figure on it, 25,920 years. That may be a convention. Some scholars would say it was a bit less than that, a bit more. But you’re talking fractions. It’s in that area, 25,920 years. And to observe it, you really need more than one human lifetime because it unfolds very, very slowly at a rate of one degree every 72 years. And the parallel that I often give is hold your finger up to the horizon, the distant horizon. The movement in one lifetime, in a period of 72 years is about the width of your finger. It’s not impossible to notice in a lifetime, but it’s difficult. You’ve got to pass it on. And what seems to have happened is that some ancient culture, the culture that Santillana and von Dechend call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture, worked out the entire process of precession and selected the key numbers of precession, of which the most important number, the governing number is the number 72. But we also have numbers related to the number 72. 72 plus 36 is 108, 108 divided by two.
And at Angkor, in Cambodia, for example, you have the bridge to Angkor Thom. And on that bridge you have figures on both sides, sculpted figures, which are holding the body of a serpent. That serpent is Vasuki, and what they’re doing is they’re churning the milky ocean. It’s the same metaphor of churning and turning that’s defined in the story of Hamlet’s Mill, of Amlodhi’s mill. There are 54 on each side. 54 plus 54 is 108. 108 is 72 plus 36. It’s a precessional number according to the work that Santillana and von Dechend did.
And the fascination with this numbers system and its discovery all around the world is one of the puzzles that intrigue me. And suggest to me that we are looking at ancestral knowledge that was passed down, and probably was passed down from a specific single common source at one time, but then was spread out very widely around the world.
And that’s one of the reasons why I’m really confident that the constellations that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier, because it’s hard to miss when you pay attention to the sky, that the sun over the course of the solar year is month by month rising against the background of different constellations. And then there’s a much longer process, the process of precession, which takes that journey backwards and where we have a period of 2,160 years for each sign of the zodiac.
I think it would’ve been hard for the ancients to have missed that. They might not have identified the constellations in exactly the same way we do today. That may well be a Babylonian or Greek convention, but that the constellations were there I think was very clear. And that they were special constellations, unlike other ones higher up in the sky which were not on the path of the sun, that people paid attention to.
Actually, there’s a nice story from Ancient Egypt about the god Thoth, the god of wisdom, who is very proud of himself because he has invented writing. “Look at this gift,” he says to a mythical pharaoh of that time, “Look at the gift that I’m giving humanity, writing. This is a wonderful thing. It’ll enable you to preserve so much that you would otherwise lose.” And the pharaoh in this story replies to him, “No, you have not given us a wonderful gift. You have destroyed the art of memory. We will forget everything. Words will roam free around the world, not accompanied by any wise advice to set them into context.” And actually that’s a very interesting point. And we do know that cultures that still do have oral traditions are able to preserve information for very long periods of time.
One thing I think is clear in any time, in any period of history, is human beings love stories. We love great stories. And one way to preserve information is to encode it, embed it in a great story. And so carefully done that actually, it doesn’t matter whether the storyteller knows that they’re passing on that information or not. The story itself is the vehicle. And as long as it’s repeated faithfully, the information contained within it will be passed on. And I do think this is part of the story of the preservation of knowledge.
But has there been such a cataclysm in the lifetime of the human species? Yeah, the Mount Toba eruption about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad. But a global cataclysm, the Younger Dryas really ticks all the boxes as a worldwide disaster, which definitely involved sea level rise, both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas. It definitely involved the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water.
And I think it’s an excellent candidate for this worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm, of which one of, but not the only, distinguishing characteristics was a flood, an enormous flood, and the submergence of lands that had previously been above water, underwater. The fact that this story is found all around the world suggests to me that the archeological explanation is, look, people suffer local floods all the time. I mean, as we’re talking, there’s flooding in Florida, but I don’t think anybody in Florida is going to make the mistake of believing that that’s a global flood. They know it’s local.
But that’s the argument largely of archeology, dealing with the flood myths, or that some local population experienced a nasty local flooding event and they decided to say that it affected the whole world. I’m not persuaded by that, particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch, the Younger Dryas, when flooding did occur, and when the Earth was subjected to events cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the ice age.
And they are collectively puzzled by the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas, and by the fact that it is accompanied 12,800 years ago by a distinct layer in the Earth. You can see it most clearly at Murray Springs in Arizona, for example. You can see, it’s about the width of a human hand, and there’s a draw there that’s been cut by flash flooding at some time. And that draw has revealed the sides of the draw.
And you can see the cross-section. And in the cross-section is this distinct dark layer that runs through the Earth. And it contains evidence of wildfires, there is a lot of soot in it. There are also nanodiamonds in it. There is shocked quartz in it. There is quartz that’s been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees centigrade. There are carbon microspherules. All of these are proxies for some kind of cosmic impact.
I talked a moment ago about the extinction of the dinosaurs. Luis and Walter Alvarez, who made that incredible discovery, initially their discovery was based entirely on impact proxies, just as the Younger Dryas is. There was no crater. And for a long time they were disbelieved because they couldn’t produce a crater. But when they finally did produce that deeply buried Chicxulub crater, that’s when people started to say, “Yeah, they have to be right.” But they weren’t relying on the crater, they were relying on the impact proxies. And they’re the same impact proxies that we find in what’s called the Younger Dryas boundary layer all around the world.
So it’s the fact that at the moment when the Earth tips into a radical climate shift, it’s been warming up for at least 2,000 years before 12,800 years ago, people at the time must have been feeling a great sense of relief. “We’ve been living through this really cold time, but it’s getting better. Things are getting better.” And then suddenly, around 12,800 years ago, some might say 12, 860 years ago, there’s a massive global plunge in global temperatures, and the world suddenly gets as cold as it was at the peak of the ice age. And it’s almost literally overnight. It’s very, very, very rapid.
Normally in an epoch, when the Earth is going into a freeze, you would not expect sea levels to rise. But there is a sea level rise, a sudden one, right at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And then you have this long frozen period from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. And then equally, dramatically and equally suddenly the Younger Dryas comes to an end and the world very rapidly warms up. And you have a recognized pulse of meltwater at that time as the last of the glaciers collapse into the sea, called meltwater pulse 1B, around about 11,600 years ago.
This is a period which is very tightly defined, it’s a period when we know that human populations were grievously disturbed. That’s when the so-called Clovis culture of North America vanished entirely from the record during the Younger Dryas. And it’s the time when the mammoths and the saber-toothed tigers vanished from the record as well.
But what’s not really been addressed before is why that happened, why the Gulf Stream was cut, why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean, and it was so much of it and it was so cold that it actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks. And that’s where the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem.
Now, the hypothesis, of course, is broader than that. Amongst the scientists working on it are, for example, Bill Napier, an astrophysicist and astronomer. They have assembled a great deal of evidence, which suggests that the culprit in the Younger Dryas impact event or events was what we now call the Taurid meteor stream, which the Earth still passes through twice a year. It’s now about 30 million kilometers wide, takes the Earth a couple of days to pass through it on its orbit. It passes through it in June, and it passes through it at the end of October.
The suggestion is that the Taurid meteor stream is the end product of a very large comet that entered the solar system round about 20,000 years ago. Came in from the Oort cloud, got trapped by the gravity of the Sun, and went into orbit around the Sun, an orbit that crossed the orbit of the Earth. However, when it was one object, the likelihood of a collision with the Earth was extremely small.
But as it started to do what all comets do, which was to break up into multiple fragments because these are chunks of rock held together by ice, and as they warm up, they split and disintegrate and break into pieces, as it passed through that its debris stream became larger and larger and wider and wider. And the theory is that 12,800 years ago, the Earth passed through a particularly dense part of the Taurid meteor stream and was hit by multiple impacts all around the planet, certainly from the west of North America, as far east as Syria.
And that we are by and large not talking about impacts that would’ve caused craters, although there certainly were some, we are talking about air bursts. When an object is 100 or 150 meters in diameter and it’s coming in very fast into the Earth’s atmosphere, it is very unlikely to reach the earth, it’s going to blow up in the sky. And the best known recent example of that is the Tunguska event in Siberia, which took place on the 30th of June 1908.
The Tunguska event was, nobody disputes, it was definitely an air burst of a cometary fragment. And the date is interesting because the 30th of June is the height of the Beta Taurids. It’s one of the two times when the Earth is going through the Taurid meteor stream. Well, luckily that part of Siberia wasn’t inhabited, but 2,000 square miles of forest were destroyed. If that had happened over a major city, we would all be thinking very hard about objects out of the Taurid meteor stream and about the risk of cosmic impact.
So the suggestion is that it wasn’t one impact, it wasn’t two impacts, it wasn’t three impacts, it was hundreds of air bursts all around the planet. Coupled with a number of bigger objects, which the scientists working on this think hit the North American ice cap largely. Some of them may also have hit the Northern European ice cap, resulting in that sudden otherwise unexplained flood of meltwater that went into the world ocean and caused the cooling that then took place.
But this was a disaster for life all over the planet. And it’s interesting that one of the sites where they find the Younger Dryas boundary and where they find overwhelming evidence of an air burst and where they find all the shocked quartz, the carbon microspherules, the nanodiamonds, the trinitite, and so on and so forth, all of those impact proxies are found at Abu Hureyra. That was a settlement within 150 miles of Gobekli Tepe, and it was hit 12,800 years ago and it was obliterated. Interestingly, it was re-inhabited by human beings within probably five years, but it was completely obliterated at that time. And it is difficult to imagine that the people who lived in that area would not have been very impressed by what they saw happening by these massive explosions in the sky and the obliteration of Abu Hureyra.
Now this is a theory, the Younger Dryas impact. It’s a hypothesis actually, it’s not even a theory. A theory is, I think, considered a higher level than a hypothesis. That’s why it’s the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. And of course it has many opponents and there are many who disagree with it. And there have been a series of peer-reviewed papers that have been published supposedly debunking the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. One, I think was in 2011, it was called a Requiem for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. And there’s one just been published a few months ago or a year ago called a Complete Refutation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, something like that, some lengthy title.
So it’s a hypothesis that has its opponents, and even within those of us who are looking at the alternative side of history, there are different points of view. Robert Schoch from Boston University, the geologist who demonstrated that the erosion on the Sphinx may well have been caused by exposure to a long period of very heavy rainfall, he doesn’t go for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. He fully accepts that the Younger Dryas was a global cataclysm and that the extinctions took place, but he thinks it was caused by some kind of massive solar outburst.
What everybody’s agreed on is the Younger Dryas was bad, but there is dispute about what caused it. I personally have found the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis to be the most persuasive, which most effectively explains all the evidence.
And that word, advanced civilization, this is another word that is easily misunderstood. And I’ve tried to make clear many, many times that when we consider the possibility of something like a civilization in the past, we shouldn’t imagine that it’s us, that it’s something like us. We should expect it to be completely different from us, but that it would’ve achieved certain things.
Amongst the clues that intrigue me are those precessional numbers that are found all around the world, and are a category of ancient maps called Portolanos, which suddenly started to appear just after the crusade that entered Constantinople and sacked Constantinople, the Portolanos suddenly start to appear. And they’re extremely accurate maps. The most of the ones that have survived are extremely accurate maps of the Mediterranean alone, but some of them show much wider areas.
For example, on these Portolano-style maps, you do find a depiction of Antarctica again and again. And another thing that these maps have in common is that many of the mapmakers state that they base their maps on multiple older source maps, which have not survived. These maps are intriguing because they have very accurate relative longitudes.
Our civilization did not crack the longitude problem until the mid-18th century with Harrison’s chronometer, which was able to keep accurate time at sea so you could have the time in London and you could have the local time at sea at the same time. And then you could work out your longitude. There might be other ways of working out longitude as well, but there it is. The fact is these Portolanos have extremely accurate relative longitudes.
Secondly, some of them show the world, to my eye, as it looked during the ice age. They show a much extended Indonesia and Malaysian peninsula and the series of islands that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together into one landmass. And that was the case during the ice age. That was the Sunda Shelf. And the presence of Antarctica on some of these maps also puzzles and intrigues me and is not satisfactorily explained in my view by archeology, which says, “Oh, those mapmakers, they felt that the world needed something underneath it to balance it so they put a fictional landmass there.”
I don’t think that makes sense. I think somebody was mapping the world during the last ice age, but that doesn’t mean that they had our kind of tech. It means that they were following that exploration instinct. That they knew how to navigate. They’d been watching the stars for thousands of years before, they knew how to navigate and they knew how to build seagoing ships. And they explored the world and they mapped the world.
Those maps were made a very, very long time ago. Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved in the Library of Alexandria. I think even then they were being copied and recopied. We don’t know exactly what happened to the Library of Alexandria, except that it was destroyed. I suggest it’s likely this was during the period of the Roman Empire. I suggest it’s likely that some of those maps were taken out of the library and taken to Constantinople, and that’s where they were liberated during the crusade and entered world culture again and started to be copied and recopied.
Actually, he got that idea from a philosopher called Schwaller de Lubicz, who’d noticed what he thought was water erosion on the body of the Sphinx. John West picked that up, and he was a great amateur Egyptologist himself. He spent most of his life in Egypt and he was hugely versed in Ancient Egypt. And when he looked at the Sphinx and at the strange scalloped erosion patterns and the vertical fissures, particularly in the trench around the Sphinx, he began to think maybe Schwaller was right, maybe there was some of some sort of flooding here.
And that’s when he brought Robert Shoch, second person I’d like to recognize, geologist at Boston University. He brought Shoch to Giza, and Shock was the first geologist to stick his neck out, risk the ire of Egyptologists, and say, “Well, it looks to me like the Sphinx was exposed to at least a thousand years of heavy rainfall.” And as Shoch’s calculations have continued, as he’s continued to be immersed in this mystery, he’s continuously pushed that back. And he’s now, again, looking at the date of around 12,000, 12,500 years ago during the Younger Dryas for the creation of the Great Sphinx.
And then, of course, this is the period of the wet Sahara, the humid Sahara. The Sahara was a completely different place during the ice age. There were rivers in it, there were lakes in it, it was fertile, it was possibly densely populated, and there was a lot of rain. There’s not no rain in Giza today, but there’s relatively little rain. Not enough rain to cause that erosion damage on the Sphinx.
The next person who needs to be mentioned in this context is Robert Bauval. Robert and I have co-authored a number of books together. Unfortunately, Robert has been very ill for the last seven years. He’s got a very bad chest infection. And I think also that Robert became very demoralized by the attacks of Egyptologists on his work. But Robert is the genius, and it does take a genius sometime to make these connections because nobody noticed it before, that the three pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion’s belt.
And skeptics will say, “Well, you can find any buildings and line them up with any stars you want,” but Orion actually isn’t any old constellation. Orion was the god Osiris in the sky. The ancient Egyptians called the Orion constellation Sahu, and they recognized it as the celestial image of the god Osiris. So what’s being copied on the ground is the belt of a deity, of a celestial deity. It’s not just a random constellation.
And then when we take precession into account, you find something else very intriguing happening. First of all, you find that the exact orientation of the pyramids as it is today, and pretty much as it was when they’re supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago, it’s not precisely related to how Orion’s Belt looked at that time. There’s a bit of a twist, they’re not quite right. But as you precess the stars backwards, as you go back and back and back and you come to around 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago in the Younger Dryas, you find that suddenly they lock perfectly. They match perfectly with the three pyramids on the ground.
And that’s the same moment that the Great Sphinx, an equinoctial monument, aligned perfectly to the rising sun on the spring equinox. Anybody can test this through themselves. Just go to Giza on the 21st of March, be there before dawn, stand behind the Sphinx, and you will see the sun rising directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. But the question is what constellation was behind the Sphinx? And 12,500 years ago it was the constellation of Leo. And actually the constellation of Leo has a very Sphinx-like look. And I and my colleagues are pretty sure that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely. And that over the thousands of years, it became damaged, it became eroded, particularly the part of it that sticks out the head. There were periods when the Sphinx was completely covered in sand, but still the head stuck out.
By the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty, when the Great Pyramids are supposedly built, by the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty, the lion, original lion head, would’ve been a complete mess. And we suggest that it was then re-carved into a pharaonic head. Egyptologists think it was the pharaoh Khafre, but there’s no real strong resemblance, but it’s definitely wearing the nemes headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. And we think that that’s a result of a recarving of what was originally not only a lion-bodied, but also a lion-headed monument.
It wouldn’t make sense if you create an equinoctial marker in the time of Khafre 4,500 years ago, and the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker. I mean, it’s 270 feet long and 70 feet high and it’s looking directly at the rising sun on the equinox. If you create it then, you’d be more likely to create it in the shape of a bull, because that was the age of Taurus, when the constellation of Taurus housed the sun on the spring equinox. So why is it a lion? And again, we think that’s because of that observation of the skies and putting on the ground as above, so below, putting on the ground an image of the sky at a particular time.
Now, the fact that the Giza Plateau, it’s a fact, of course, that Egyptologists completely dispute, but the fact that the principle monuments of the Giza Plateau, the three Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx, all lock astronomically on the date of around 10,500 BC, to me, is most unlikely to be an accident. And actually, if you look at computer software at the sky at that time, you’ll see that the Milky Way is very prominent and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the river Nile-
We are pretty sure that the Sphinx, at least, does date back to 12 and a half thousand years ago and with it, the megalithic temples, the so-called Valley Temple, which stands just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx and the Sphinx temple, which stands directly in front of the Sphinx. The Sphinx temple has largely been destroyed. But the Valley Temple, attributed to Khafre on no good grounds whatsoever, is a huge megalithic construction with blocks of limestone that weigh up to 100 tons each. Yet, it has been remodeled/refaced with granite. There are granite blocks that are placed on top of the core limestone blocks. Those core limestone blocks were already eroded when the granite blocks were put there. Why? Because the granite blocks have actually been purposefully and deliberately cut to fit into the erosion marks on the, we believe, much older megalithic blocks there.
I think Giza is a very complicated site. I would never seek to divorce the dynastic ancient Egyptians from the Great Pyramids. They were closely involved in the construction of the Great Pyramids as we see them today. But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older and that when we look at the three Great Pyramids, we are looking at a renovation and a restoration and a enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that. Actually, the Great Pyramid is built around a natural hill. That natural hill might’ve been seen as the original primeval mound to the ancient Egyptians.
Then, within that same 100-year span, we have the Giza pyramids being built. This is according to the Orthodox chronology. Then, suddenly, once the Giza project is finished, pyramid building goes into a massive slump in Ancient Egypt. The pyramids of the Fifth Dynasty are, frankly speaking, a mess outside. They’re very inferior constructions. You can hardly recognize them as pyramids at all. But what happens when you go inside them is you find that they’re extensively covered in hieroglyphs and imagery, repeating the name of the king who was supposedly buried in that place. Whereas, the Giza pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever. What we do have is one piece of graffiti about which there is some controversy.
Basic statistics: it’s a 6 million-ton structure. Each side is about 750 feet long. It’s aligned almost perfectly to true north, south, east, and west within 3/60ths of a single degree, the 06ths, because degrees are divided into 60s. It’s the precision of the orientation and the absolute massive size of the thing plus its very complicated internal passageways that are involved in it. In the ninth century, the Great Pyramid still had its facing stones in place, but there was an Arab Caliph, Khalifa al-Mamun, who had already realized that other pyramids did have their entrances in the north face. Nobody knew where the entrance to the Great Pyramid was. But he figured if there’s an entrance to this thing, it’s going to be in the north face somewhere. He put together a team of workers. They went in with sledgehammers. They started smashing where he thought would be the entrance. They cut their way into the Great Pyramid for a distance of maybe 100 feet. Then, the hammering that they did dislodged something. They heard a little bit further away, something big falling, and they realized there was a cavity there. They started heading in that direction. Then, they joined the internal passageway of the Great Pyramid, the descending and the ascending corridors that go up.
When you go up the ascending corridor, every one of the internal passageways in the Great Pyramid that people can walk in slopes at an angle of 26 degrees. That’s interesting because the angle of slope of the exterior of the Great Pyramid is 52 degrees. We know mathematicians were at work as well as geometers in the creation of the Great Pyramid.
If you go up the Grand Gallery, which is at the end of the so-called ascending corridor, and it’s above the so-called Queen’s Chamber… You go up the Grand Gallery. You’re eventually going to come to what is known as the King’s Chamber in which there is a sarcophagus. That sarcophagus is a little bit too big to have been got in through the narrow entrance passageway. It’s almost as though the so-called King’s Chamber was built around the sarcophagus, already in place.
Above the King’s Chamber are five other chambers. These are known as relieving chambers. The theory was that they were built to relieve the pressure on the King’s Chamber of the weight of the monument. But I think what makes that theory dubious is the fact that even lower down, where more weight was involved, you have the Queen’s Chamber, and there are no such relieving chambers above that.
In the top of these five chambers, a British adventurer and vandal called Howard Vyse, who dynamited his way into those chambers in the first place, allegedly found… Well, he claims he found a piece of graffiti left by a work-gang naming the Pharaoh Khufu. It’s true. I’ve been in that chamber, and there is the cartouche of Khufu there. Quite recognizable. But the dispute around it is whether that is a genuine piece of graffiti dating from the Old Kingdom or whether Howard Vyse actually put it there himself because he was in desperate need of money at the time. I’m not sure what the answer to that question is. But it’s one of the reasons that Egyptologists feel confident in saying that the pyramid is the work of Khufu. Another is what is called the Wadi al-Jarf Papyri, where, on the Red Sea, the diary of an individual Merer was found. He talks about bringing highly polished limestone to the Great Pyramid. It’s clear that what he’s talking about is the facing stones of the Great Pyramid. He’s not talking about the body of the Great Pyramid. He’s talking about the facing stones of the Great Pyramid during the reign of Khufu. That’s another reason why the Great Pyramid is attributed to Khufu. But I think that Khufu was undoubtedly involved in the Great Pyramid and in a big way. But I think he was building upon and elaborating a much older structure.
I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there. You’ve got to go down a 26-degree sloping corridor until a distance of about 300 feet. It’s 100 feet vertically, but the slope means you’re going to walk a distance of… Not walk. You’ve got to ape walk. You’re almost going to have to crawl. I’ve learned from long experience that the best way to go down these corridors is actually backwards. If you go forward, you keep bumping your head on them because they’re only three feet five inches high. You get down to the bottom. You have a short horizontal passage, and then you get into the subterranean chamber.
The theory of Egyptology is that this was supposed to be the burial place of Khufu, but after cutting out that 300-foot long, 26-degree sloping passage, a lot of which passes through bedrock, and having cut the subterranean chamber out of bedrock, gone to all that trouble, they decided they wouldn’t bury him there. They built what’s now known as the Queen’s Chamber as his burial chamber. But then they decided that wouldn’t do either. They then built the King’s chamber, and that’s where the Pharaoh is supposed to have been buried. Those Arab raiders under Khalifa al-Mamun didn’t find anything in the Great Pyramid at all.
Now, what you also have in Egypt are what might almost be described as secret societies. The followers of Horus are one of those specifically tasked with bringing forward the knowledge from the first time into later periods. The souls of Pe and Nekhen are another one of these mysterious secret society groups who are possessors of knowledge that they transmit to the future. What I’m broadly suggesting is that those survivors of the Younger Dryas cataclysm, who settled in Giza may have been relatively small in number. It’s interesting that they’re referred to in the Edfu Building Texts as seven sages because that repeats again and again. It’s also in Mesopotamia.
It’s seven sages, seven Apkallu, who come out of the waters of the Persian Gulf and teach people all the skills of agriculture and of architecture and of astronomy. It’s found all around the world that there was a relatively small number of people who took refuge in Giza, who benefited from the survival skills of the hunter-foragers who lived at Giza at that time, and who also passed on their knowledge to those hunter-foragers. But it was not knowledge that was ready to be put into shape at that time. That knowledge was then preserved and kept and handled within very secretive groups that passed it down over thousands of years. Finally, it burst into full form in the fourth dynasty in Ancient Egypt.
The notion that knowledge might be transferred over thousands of years shouldn’t be absurd. We know, for example, in the case of ancient Israel… It goes back to the time of Abraham, which is pretty much, I think, around 2000 BC. Knowledge has been preserved from that time right up to the present day. If you can preserve knowledge for 4,000 years, you can probably preserve it for eight.
The Amazon rainforest is another example of this. I think the Sahara is about 9 million square kilometers. The Amazon that’s left under dense canopy rainforest is about 5 million square kilometers, maybe closer to six. Then, you have the continental shelves that were submerged by sea level rise at the end of the ice age. Now, it’s well established that sea level rose by 400 feet, but it didn’t rise by 400 feet overnight. It came in dribs and drabs. There were periods of very rapid, quite significant sea level rise, and there were periods when the sea level was rising much more slowly. That 400-foot sea level rise is spread out over a period of about 10,000 years. But there are episodes within it like meltwater pulse 1B like meltwater pulse 1A when the flooding was really immense.
Then, I can only speculate. Maybe there was a cultural value where it was felt that it was not appropriate to interfere with the lives of hunter-foragers at that time. Maybe it was felt that they should keep their distance from them, just as, even today, there is a feeling that we shouldn’t be interfering too much with the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest. Although interestingly, some of those tribes are now using cell phones. That possibility may have been there in the past. Only when we come to a global cataclysm does it become essential to have outreach and, actually, to take refuge amongst those hunter-forager populations. That is the hypothesis that I’m putting forward. I’m not claiming that it’s a fact. But, for me, it helps to explain the evidence.
But I think in a way that’s what Göbekli Tepe is. Göbekli Tepe is a hall of records. It’s interesting that just as I’ve tried to outline, I hope reasonably clearly, that the three great pyramids of Giza match Orion’s belt in 10,500 BC just as the Sphinx matches Leo in 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago or so. Pillar 43 in Enclosure D at Göbekli Tepe contains what a number of researchers, myself included, regard as an astronomical diagram. Martin Sweatman of Edinburgh University has brought forward the best work in this field. But it was initially started by a gentleman called Paul Burley who noticed that one of the figures on Pillar 43 is a scorpion, very much like we represent the constellation of Scorpio today and that above it is a vulture with outstretched wings, which is in a posture very similar to the constellation that we call Sagittarius. On that outstretched wing is a circular object, and the suggestion is that it’s marking the time when the sun was at the center of the dark rift in the Milky Way at the summer solstice 12 and a half thousand years ago. That’s what it’s marking.
It’s interesting that the same date can be deduced from Pillar… Of course, it’s controversial. Martin Sweatman’s ideas are by no means accepted by archeology. But he’s done very, very thorough, detailed, statistical work on this. I’m personally convinced. We have a time capsule at Göbekli Tepe, which is memorializing a date that is at least 1,200 years before Göbekli Tepe was built if that dating of 11,600 years ago proves to be absolutely the oldest date as it is at present. The date memorialized on Pillar 43 is 12,800 years ago, the beginning of the Younger Dryas, the beginning of the impact event.
Then, Giza does the same thing but in much larger scale. It uses massive megalithic architecture, which is very difficult to destroy, and a profound knowledge of astronomy to encode a date in a language that any culture which is sufficiently literate in astronomy will be able to decode. We don’t have to have a script that we can’t read like we do with the Indus Valley civilization or with the Easter Island script. We don’t have to have a script that can’t be interpreted. If you use astronomical language, then any astronomical literate civilization will be able to give you a date.
Hoover Dam has a star map built into it. That star map is part of an exhibition that was put there at the founding of the Hoover Dam. What it does is it freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam at the moment of its completion. Oscar Hansen, the artist who created that piece said so specifically that this would be so that any future culture would be able to know the time of the dam’s construction. You can use astronomy and architecture to memorialize a particular date.
That is the case today. That is why Ancient Apocalypse Season 1 was defined as the most dangerous show on Netflix. It’s why the Society for American Archeology wrote an open letter to Netflix asking Netflix to reclassify the series of science fiction. It’s why they accused the series of antisemitism, misogyny, white supremacism, and… I don’t know, a whole bunch of other things like that, that have nothing to do with anything that’s in the series. It was like, “We must shut this down. This is so dangerous to us.” There are many more dangerous things in the world than a television series going on right now. But maybe it was seen as a danger to archeology, that this non-archeologist was in archeological terrain and being viewed and seen and read by large numbers of people. Maybe that was part of the problem.
Human nature being what it is, I noticed that two of my principal critics, John Hoopes from the University of Kansas and Flint Dibble, who’s now teaching at the University of Cardiff in Wales in the UK, are both people who like to have media exposure. John Hoopes has just recently started a YouTube channel. Flint Dibble has had one for quite a while. A pretty small number of followers. I think that they feel that they should be the ones who are getting the global attention and that it’s not right that I am and that the best way to stop that is to stop me, to shut me down, to get me canceled and basically requiring Netflix to relabel my series from a documentary to a science fiction, which is what they actually had the temerity to suggest to Netflix.
If that had gone through, if Netflix had listened to them, that would’ve effectively been the cancellation of my documentary series. It would no longer have been ranked under documentaries. It was a deliberate attempt to shut me down. I see that going on again and again, and it’s so unfortunate and so unnecessary. I’ve become very defensive towards archeology. I hit back. After 30 years of these attacks on my work, I’m tired of it. I do defend myself. Sometimes, I’m perhaps over-vigorous in that defense. Maybe I was a little bit too strong in my critique of archeology in the first season of Ancient Apocalypse. Maybe I should have been a bit gentler and a bit kinder. I’ve tried to reflect that in the second season and to bring also many more Indigenous voices into the second season, as well as the voices of many more archeologists.
But basically, I think majority of archeologists are in complete good faith on this. I don’t think that anybody’s really seeking to frame me. I think that what we are hearing from most archeologists… some much more vicious than others. But what we’re hearing from most archeologists is this is what we found, and we don’t see evidence for a lost civilization in it. To that, I…
And I didn’t know that. I thought, “My God. If Flint has a point here. If there’d been three million shipwrecks found and mapped, if that’s the case, the absence of any shipwreck from a lost civilization of the ice age is a problem.” But then I discovered that it isn’t three million shipwrecks that have been mapped. It’s much, much less than that. And maybe it’s 250,000. Still a large number, but most of them from the last 1,000 years. And unfortunately, what Flint didn’t go into, and perhaps he should have shared with the audience … And again I go into this in the video, is that there is indisputable evidence that human beings were seafarers as much as 50 or 60,000 years ago. The peopling of Australia involved a relatively short 90 kilometers, 100-kilometer ocean voyage. But nevertheless, it was an ocean voyage.
And it must have involved a large enough people, a large enough number of people to create a permanent population that wouldn’t go extinct. The settlement of Cyprus is the same thing. It was always an island even during the ice age. And no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Australia, and no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Cyprus either. But that doesn’t mean that that thing didn’t happen.
So Sahul was New Guinea joined to Australia. So they would’ve made landfall in New Guinea. And then they think, “Well, here is this vast open, incredible land. We need to bring more people here.” And that would’ve involved larger craft. You need to bring people with resources and you need to bring enough of them, both men and women in order to produce a population that will not rapidly become extinct. And it’s the same in Cyprus. There the work that’s been done suggests very strongly that we’re looking at planned migrations of groups of people in excess of 1,000 at a time, bringing animals with them. And this certainly would’ve involved multiple boats and boats of a significant size.
But the end result of those statements is that people all around the world came to the conclusion that Graham Hancock is a racist and a white supremacist. And that really got under my skin and it really upset me. And I felt angry about it and I felt that I was there to defend Ancient Apocalypse, season one, whereas in fact, what I was there to do was to listen to a series of lectures where an archaeologist tells me what archaeologists have found. And that somehow I’m to deduce that from what they have found, they’re not going to find anything else. At least not anything to do with the lost civilization.
I was definitely up against a superior debater in that debate. I’m not sure that I have those debating skills and I certainly didn’t have them on that particular day. I also admire about Flint something else, which is that he was willing to be there. Most archaeologists don’t want to talk to me at all. They want to insult me from the sidelines. They want to make sure that Wikipedia keeps on calling me a pseudo-archaeologist, or a purveyor of pseudo-archaeological theories. They want to make sure that the hints of racism are there, but they actually don’t want to sit down and confront me.
At least Flint was willing to do that and I’m grateful to him for that. And I think in that sense it is an important encounter between people with, let’s say, an alternative view of history and those with the very much mainstream view of history that archaeology gives us. And he’s also a very determined character. He doesn’t give up. So all of those things about him I admire and respect. But, I think he fought dirty during the debate, and I’ve said exactly why in this video that I now have up on YouTube.
At Gobekli Tepe, I’m not really looking at what archaeologists look at, I’m looking at the alignments of the megaliths and how they seem to track precession of the star Sirius over a period of time. Archaeologists aren’t interested in any of that. So I value and respect archeology. I think it’s an incredible tool for investigating our past, but I wish archaeologists would bring a slightly gentler frame of mind to it and a slightly opener perspective. And also that archaeologists would be willing to trust the general public to make up their own minds. It’s as though certain archaeologists are afraid of the public being presented with an alternative point of view, which they regard as quote, unquote, “dangerous,” because they somehow underestimate the intelligence of the general public and think the general public are just going to accept that.
Actually by condemning those alternative point of view, archaeologists make it much more likely that the general public will accept those alternative point of view, because there is a great distrust of experts in our society today. And behaving in a snobbish arrogant way, we archaeologists are the only people who are really qualified to speak about the past and anybody else who speaks about the past is dangerous. That actually is not helpful to archaeology in the long term. There could be a much more positive and a much more cooperative relationship. And I can see that relationship with a gentleman like Ed Barnhart. Was very much the case with archaeologist Martti Parssinen from the University of Helsinki and with geographer Alcio Arranzi, Brazilian geographer. Very, very senior figure who I worked with in the Amazon for season two of Ancient Apocalypse, looking at these astonishing earthworks that have emerged from the Amazon jungle and which more and more are now being found with LiDAR. Indeed, we found some of them ourselves with LiDAR while we were there.
But it was actually Francis Crick who pointed out something odd, that within 100 million years of the earth being cool enough to support life, there’s bacterial life all over the planet. And Crick wrote a book called Life Itself that was published in 1981, and he suggested that life had been brought here by a process of panspermia. Now that’s an idea that’s around in circulation that comets may carry bacteria, which can seed life on planets. But, Crick actually in Life Itself was talking about directed panspermia. He envisaged … This is Crick, not me. He envisaged an alien civilization far away across the galaxy, which faced extinction. Perhaps a supernova was going to go off in the neighborhood.
They were highly advanced. Their first thought it might’ve been, “Let’s get ourselves off the planet and go and populate some other planet,” but the distances of interstellar space were so great. So their second thought was, “Let’s preserve our DNA. Let’s put genetically engineered bacteria into cryogenic chambers and fire them off into the universe in all directions.” And bottom line of Crick’s theory in Life Itself is one of those cryogenic containers containing bacterial life from another solar system crashed into the early Earth. And that’s why life began so suddenly here on Earth.
And the same. For us to be selfish and self-obsessed for us humans, what was the magic leap to Homo sapiens from the other hominids? And why did Homo sapiens win out against the Neanderthals and the other competitors? Why are they not around anymore? So those are all fascinating mysteries and it feels like the more we propose radical ideas about our past and take it seriously and explore the more we’ll be able to figure out that puzzle that leads all the way back to Homo sapiens and maybe all the way back to the origin of life on Earth.
There’s lots of possibilities that have been put forward. Maybe we just out-competed them. Maybe anatomically modern humans had some brain connections that they didn’t have. Even though the Neanderthal brain was bigger than the brain of anatomically modern human beings, as the old saying goes, size isn’t everything. Maybe we just had a more compact, more efficient brain. The fact of the matter is that Neanderthals and Denisovans did not survive the rise of Homo sapiens.
So I think all civilization arises out of shamanism. And shamanism is a naturally scientific endeavor, where experimentation is undertaken an exploration and investigation of the environment around us. And what I’m suggesting is that one group, perhaps more than one group, went a bit further than other groups did, and used that study of the skies and developed navigational techniques and we’re able to sail and explore the Earth. But that ultimately what lies behind it is the same curiosity and investigative skill that shamans are still using in the Amazon to this day. And I do see them as scientists in a very proper use of the word.
But then unleashes these extraordinary experiences. And it isn’t just pretty visuals. It’s the sense of encounters with sentient others, that there are sentient beings, that somehow we are surrounded by a realm of sentience that is not normally accessible to us. And that what the ayahuasca brew and certain other psychedelics, like some psilocybin mushrooms in a high enough dose can do it as well. LSD can do it. But Ayahuasca is the master in this of lowering the veil to what appears to be a seamlessly convincing other realm, other world. And of course the hard line, rational scientists will say that’s just all fantasies of your brain. But I don’t think we fully understand,
Or even close to understanding exactly what consciousness is. And I remain open to two possibilities that consciousness is generated by the brain, is made by the brain in the way that a factory makes cars. But I also am open to the possibility that the brain is a receiver of consciousness, just as a television set is the receiver of television signals. And that if that is the case, then we locked into the physical realm. We need our everyday alert, problem-solving state of consciousness, and that’s the state of consciousness that western civilization values and highly encourages. But these other states of consciousness that allow us to access alternative realities are possibly more important. It may be apocryphal, but it was reported after Francis Crick’s role-
These sentient others that are encountered, what are they? Are they just figments of our brain on drugs or are we actually gaining access to a parallel reality, which is inhabited by consciousness which is in a non-physical form? And I’m equally open to that idea. I think that may be what is going on here with ayahuasca.
But the other thing is that there is a presence within the ayahuasca brew, and she is present both in ayahuasca and in yachay. And that’s one of the reasons why the shamans say that actually the master of the process is the ayahuasca vine, not the leaves. It’s as though the vine has harnessed the leaves to gain access to human consciousness. And there, if you have sufficient exposure to ayahuasca or yachay, you drink it enough times, I’ve had maybe 75 or 80 journeys with ayahuasca, you definitely start to feel an intelligent presence with a definite personality, which I interpret as feminine, and which most people in the West interpret it as feminine and they call her Mother Ayahuasca. There are some tribes in the Amazon who interpret the spirit of ayahuasca as male, but in all cases, that spirit is seen as a teacher. That’s fundamentally what ayahuasca is. It’s a teacher. And it teaches moral lessons.
And that’s fascinating, that a mixture of two plants should cause us to reflect on our own behavior and how it may have hurt and damaged and affected others and fill us with a powerful wish not to repeat that negative behavior again in the future. The more baggage you carry in your life, the harder the beating the ayahuasca is going to give you, until it forces you to confront and take responsibility for your own behavior. And that is an extraordinary thing to come from a plant brew in that way.
And I think yes, I think ayahuasca is the most powerful of all the plant medicines for accessing these mysterious realms. But there’s no doubt you can access them. They’re all tryptamines. They’re all related to one another in one way. You can access them through LSD and you certainly can access them through psilocyb mushrooms as well in large enough dose.
I like to give credit where credit is due, and there are two names that need to be mentioned here. One is the late, great Terence McKenna and his book Food of the Gods, where he proposed the idea very strongly that it was our ancestral encounters with psychedelics that made us fully human. That’s what switched on the modern human mind.
And very much the same idea began to be explored a bit earlier by Professor David Lewis-Williams at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, fabulous book called The Mind in the Cave, where he is again arguing that these astonishing similarities in cave art and rock art all around the world can only be properly explained by people in deeply altered states of consciousness attempting to remember, when they return to a normal everyday state of consciousness, attempting to remember their visions and document them on permanent media like the wall of a cave.
So, typically you get a lot of geometric patterns, but you also got entities. And those entities often are therianthropes, part animal, part human in form. Might have the head of a wolf and the body of a human being, might have the head of a bird and the body of a human being, and so on and so forth. And that they communicate with us in the visionary state.
Interestingly, although this sounds like woo-woo, and it is an area that most scientists would steer clear of at risk of their careers, there is very serious work now being done at Imperial College in London and at the University of California at San Diego, where volunteers are being given extended DMT. There’s a new technology, DMTx, where the DMT is fed directly into the bloodstream by drip, and it’s possible to keep the individual in the peak DMT state. Which normally when you smoke or vape DMT, you’re looking, if you’re lucky, at 10 minutes, or if you’re unlucky, if it’s a bad journey, because those 10 minutes can seem like forever. But with DMTx, with the drip-feeding of DMT into the bloodstream, these volunteers actually could be kept in the peak state for hours.
And unlike LSD where you rapidly build up tolerance, nobody ever builds up tolerance to DMT. It always hits you with the same power. Even if you took it yesterday and the day before and you’re taking it tomorrow as well, it’s still going to have that same power. There’s no tolerance there. So that’s how they can use that lack of tolerance to keep volunteers in this state.
And then when they debrief those volunteers… They’re also putting them in MRI scanners and looking at what’s happening in the brain. But when they debrief them, they’re all talking about encounters with sentient others. There’s even a group now called Sentient Others, where volunteers are now exchanging their experiences. They weren’t allowed to do so at the beginning of the experiment, but now that most of them have left it, they’re exchanging their experiences, and it’s all about encounters with sentient others who wish to teach them moral lessons.
Now, to me, that’s wild. What is going on here? How do we account for this? Yeah, I get the notion of hallucinations and brightly colored visuals, but the moral lessons that come with it, those are very odd.
But in the case of even cannabis, I know, this is one of the great things that’s happening in America. It’s happening state by state where cannabis is being legalized and that draconian hand of government is being taken off the back of people who are consuming a medicine that is far less harmful than alcohol, which is glorified in our society.
We cannot say that we are free if we allow our government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness, while doing no harm to others. And the point there is we already have a whole raft of laws that deal with us when we do harm to others. Do we really need laws that tell us what we may or may not experience in the inner sanctum of our own consciousness? I think it’s a fundamental violation of adult sovereignty. And we would have much less drug problems if these drugs were all legalized and made available to people without shaming them, without punishing them in any way, but just part of normal social life. And then you could be sure that you were getting good product rather than really shitty product, which has been cut with all sorts of other things.
Ultimately, the way forward is for adults to take responsibility for their own behavior, and for society to allow that to happen, and not to have big government taking responsibility for decisions that should be in the hands of individuals.
I often think that the Great Pyramid is partly designed to do that. It’s designed to invite its own initiates. Some people aren’t interested in the Great Pyramid at all, but some people are fascinated by it and they’re drawn towards it. And when they’re drawn towards it, it immediately starts raising questions in their minds, and they seek answers to their questions.
So it’s like saying, ” Here I stand. Investigate me. Find out about me. Figure out what I am. Why have I got these two shafts cut into the side of the so-called Queen’s Chamber?” Why do they slope up through the body of the Great Pyramid? Why do they not exit on the outside of the Great Pyramid? Why, when we send a robot up those shafts, do we find them after about 160 feet blocked by a door with metal handles. Why when we drill through that door to see what’s beyond it, three or four feet away, we see another door. It’s very frustrating. But it’s saying to us, “Keep on exploring. If you’re persistent enough, we’ll eventually give you the answer.”
So I’m hoping that that answer will come as to how this most mysterious of monuments was actually built and the inspiration that lay behind it. Certainly, I’m sure it was never a tomb, or a tomb only. The later pyramids might’ve been. Actually no pharaonic burial has been discovered in any pyramid. But nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that the later pyramids with the pyramid texts written on the walls, like the pyramid of Unas, Fifth Dynasty pyramid at Saqqara, were tombs.
But the Great Pyramid, to go to that length to create a tomb, to make it a scale model of the earth, to orient it perfectly to true north, to make it 6 million tons. This is not a tomb. This is something else. This is a curiosity device. This is something that is asking us to understand it. And I hope we will understand it. And I hope Egyptologists will be willing to set aside that prejudice that they’re only looking at a tomb and consider other possibilities. And as new tech is revealing these previously unknown inner spaces within the Great Pyramid, I think that’s going to become more and more likely.
Now, yeah, ramps are proposed as the solution, but where are the remains of those ramps? If you’re going to carry blocks weighing up to two or three tons right to the top of the Great Pyramid to complete your work, you’re going to need a ramp that’s going to extend out into the desert for more than a mile at a 10 degree slope. And it’s calculated that a 10 degree slope is about the maximum slope that human labor can haul objects up a ramp. And that ramp can’t just be compacted sand, since heavy objects are being hauled up. It’s going to have to be made of very solid material, almost as solid as the pyramid itself. Where is it? We don’t see any trace of those so-called ramps that are supposed to have been involved in the construction of the pyramid. I think we don’t know. I think we have no idea it’s built. That’s why there’s so many different theories. We haven’t got the answer yet. But the how of it is one of the big mysteries from our past.
And there are a few cultures that really intensely, deeply studied that mystery. We are not one of them. The general view of science, I think, is that we’re accidents of evolution. When we die, the light blinks out. There’s no more of us. There’s no such thing as the soul. But that’s not a proven point. There’s no experiment that proves that’s the case. We know we die, but we don’t know whether there’s such a thing as a soul or not.
But death is going to come to all of us. I accept it. It’s going to come to me. I’m not going to say I’m looking forward to it, but when it happens, I’m going to approach it, I hope, with a sense of curiosity and a sense of adventure, that there’s something beyond this life. It isn’t heaven, it isn’t hell, but there’s something. The soul goes on. I think reincarnation is a very plausible idea. Again, modern science would reject that. But there’s the excellent work of Ian Stevenson, Children Who Remember Past Lives, who found that children up to the age of seven often have memories of past lives.
And in cultures where memories of past lives are discouraged, they tend not to express that much. But in cultures where memories of past lives are encouraged, like India, they do express it. And he found several subjects, children under the age of seven in India, who were able to remember specific details of a past life, and he was able to go to the place where that past life unfolded and validate those details. So if consciousness is the basis of everything, if it’s the essence of everything, and consciousness benefits in some way from being incarnated in physical form, then reincarnation makes a lot of sense. All the investment that the universe has put into creating this home for life may have a much bigger purpose than just accident.
And now let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 1:34 – Lost Ice Age civilization
- 8:39 РG̦bekli Tepe
- 20:43 – Early humans
- 25:43 – Astronomical symbolism
- 37:11 – Younger Dryas impact hypothesis
- 55:31 – The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx of Giza
- 1:16:04 – Sahara Desert and the Amazon rainforest
- 1:25:25 – Response to critics
- 1:49:31 – Panspermia
- 1:56:58 – Shamanism
- 2:20:58 – How the Great Pyramid was built
- 2:28:17 – Mortality
Introduction
Graham Hancock
The big question for me in that timeline is why didn’t we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago to start seeing the beginnings of civilization?
The big question for me in that timeline is why didn’t we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago to start seeing the beginnings of civilization?
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last ice age and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series, Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which has just been released and it’s focused on the distant past of the Americas.
The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last ice age and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series, Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which has just been released and it’s focused on the distant past of the Americas.
A topic I recently discussed with the archeologist Ed Barnhart. Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archeologist scholar I love talking to on the podcast, extremely knowledgeable, humble, open minded, and respectful in disagreement. I’ll do many more podcasts on history, including ancient history. Our distant past is full of mysteries, and I find it truly exciting to explore those mysteries with people both on the inside and the outside of the mainstream in the various disciplines involved. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Graham Hancock.
Lost Ice Age civilization
Lex Fridman
Let’s start with a big foundational idea that you have about human history. That there was an advanced Ice Age civilization that came before and perhaps seeded what people now call the sixth cradles of Civilization, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Indies, and Mesoamerica. So let’s talk about this idea that you have. Can you at the highest possible level describe it?
Let’s start with a big foundational idea that you have about human history. That there was an advanced Ice Age civilization that came before and perhaps seeded what people now call the sixth cradles of Civilization, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Indies, and Mesoamerica. So let’s talk about this idea that you have. Can you at the highest possible level describe it?
Graham Hancock
It would be better to describe it as a foundational sense of puzzlement and incompleteness in the story that we are taught about our past, which envisages more or less, there have been a few ups and downs, but more or less a straightforward evolutionary progress. We start out as hunter-foragers, then we become agriculturalists. The hunter-forager phase could go back hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, this is where it is also important to mention that anatomically modern humans, and we’re not the only humans. We had Neanderthals from, I don’t know, 400,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago. They were certainly human because anatomically modern humans interbred with them. And we carry Neanderthal genes. There were the Denisovans maybe 300,000 to perhaps even as recently as 30,000 years ago. And again, interbreeding took place. They’re obviously a human species. So we’ve got this background of humans who didn’t look quite like us.
It would be better to describe it as a foundational sense of puzzlement and incompleteness in the story that we are taught about our past, which envisages more or less, there have been a few ups and downs, but more or less a straightforward evolutionary progress. We start out as hunter-foragers, then we become agriculturalists. The hunter-forager phase could go back hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, this is where it is also important to mention that anatomically modern humans, and we’re not the only humans. We had Neanderthals from, I don’t know, 400,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago. They were certainly human because anatomically modern humans interbred with them. And we carry Neanderthal genes. There were the Denisovans maybe 300,000 to perhaps even as recently as 30,000 years ago. And again, interbreeding took place. They’re obviously a human species. So we’ve got this background of humans who didn’t look quite like us.
And then we have anatomically modern humans. And I think the earliest anatomically modern human skeletal remains are from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco and date to about 310,000 years ago. So the question is what were our ancestors doing after that? And I think we can include the Neanderthals and the Denisovans in that general picture. And why did it take so long? This is one of the puzzles, one of the questions that bother me. Why did it take so long? When we have creatures who are physically identical to us, we cannot actually weigh and measure their brains. But from the work that’s been done on the crania, it looks like they had the same brains that we do with the same wiring. So if we’ve been around for 300,000 plus years at least, and if ultimately in our future was the process to create civilization or civilizations, why didn’t it happen sooner?
Why did it take so long? Why was it such a long time? Even the story of anatomically modern humans has kept on changing. I remember a time when it was said that there hadn’t been anatomically modern humans before 50,000 years ago, and then it became 196,000 years ago with the findings in Ethiopia and then 310,000 years ago. There’s a lot of missing pieces in the puzzle there. But the big question for me in that timeline is why didn’t we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago to start seeing what are selected as the beginnings of civilization in places like Turkey, for example. And then there’s a relatively slow process of adopting agriculture. And by 6,000 years ago, we see ancient Sumer emerging as a civilization. And we’re then in the pre-dynastic period in ancient Egypt as well 6,000 years ago, beginning to see definite signs of what will become the dynastic civilization of Egypt about 5,000 years ago.
And interestingly round about the same time, you have the Indus Valley civilization popping up out of nowhere. And by the way, the Indus Valley civilization was a lost civilization until the 1920s when railway workers accidentally stumbled across some ruins. I’ve been to Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, and these are extraordinarily beautifully centrally planned cities. Clearly they’re the work of an already sophisticated civilization. One of the things that strikes me about the Indus Valley Civilization is that we find a steatite seal of an individual seated in a recognizable yoga posture. And that seal is 5,000 years old, and the yoga posture is Mulabandhasana, which involves a real contortion of the ankles and twisting the feet back. It’s an advanced yoga posture. So there it is, 5,000 years ago. And that then raises the question, well, how long did yoga take to get to that place when it was already so advanced 5,000 years ago?
What’s the background to this? China, the Yellow River Civilization again, it’s around about the same period, five to 6,000 years ago. You get these first signs of something happening. So it’s very odd that all around the world we have this sudden upsurge of civilization about 6,000 years ago, preceded by what seems like a natural evolutionary process that would lead to a civilization. And yet certain ideas being carried down and manifested and expressed in many of these different civilizations. I just find that that whole idea very puzzling and very disturbing, especially when I look at this radical break that takes place in not just the human story, but the story of all life on Earth, which was the last great cataclysm that the Earth went through, which was the Younger Dryas event. It was an extinction level event. That’s when all the great megafauna of the Ice Age went extinct.
It’s after that. It’s after event that we start seeing this what had taken to be the beginnings of the first gradual steps towards civilization, we come out of the upper Paleolithic as it’s defined the end of the old Stone Age and into the Neolithic. And that’s when the wheels are supposedly set in motion to start civilization rolling. But what happened before that and why did that suddenly happen then? And I can’t help feeling, and I’ve felt this for a very long while, that there are major missing pieces in our story. It’s often said that I’m claiming to have proved that there was an advanced lost civilization in the Ice Age. And I am not claiming to have proved that. That is a hypothesis that I’m putting forward to answer some of the questions that I have about prehistory. And I think it’s worthwhile to inquire into those possibilities because the Younger Dryas event was a massive global cataclysm, whatever caused it.
And it’s strange that just after it we start seeing these first signs.
Göbekli Tepe
Lex Fridman
So the current understanding in mainstream archeology is that after the Younger Dryas is when the civilizations popped up in different places of the globe with a lot of similarities, but they popped up independently.
So the current understanding in mainstream archeology is that after the Younger Dryas is when the civilizations popped up in different places of the globe with a lot of similarities, but they popped up independently.
Graham Hancock
Independently. And by coincidence. And by coincidence, those big civilizations that we all remember as the first civilizations, Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilization, China, they all pop up at pretty much the same time. That is the mainstream view.
Independently. And by coincidence. And by coincidence, those big civilizations that we all remember as the first civilizations, Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilization, China, they all pop up at pretty much the same time. That is the mainstream view.
Lex Fridman
And they don’t just pop up, they kind of build up gradually. First there’s some settlements.
And they don’t just pop up, they kind of build up gradually. First there’s some settlements.
Graham Hancock
Oh, definitely, yes.
Oh, definitely, yes.
Lex Fridman
And then there’s different dynamics of how they build up and the role of agriculture. And that is also non-obvious, but it’s just there’s first a kind of settlement, a stabilization of where the people are living. Then they start using agriculture, then they start getting urban centers and that kind of stuff.
And then there’s different dynamics of how they build up and the role of agriculture. And that is also non-obvious, but it’s just there’s first a kind of settlement, a stabilization of where the people are living. Then they start using agriculture, then they start getting urban centers and that kind of stuff.
Graham Hancock
It seems like an entirely reasonable argument. Everything about that makes sense. There is no doubt that you’re seeing evolutionary progress, social evolution taking place in those thousands of years before Sumer emerges. But what’s happening now, really, I spent much of the nineties and the late 1980s investigating this issue of a lost civilization. I wrote a series of books about it. But by 2002 when I published a book called Underworld, which was the most massive and most heavy book that I’ve ever written, because I was writing very defensively at the time. By the time I finished that book, my wife Santha and I spent seven years scuba diving all around the world looking for structures underwater, often led by local fishermen or local divers to anomalies that they’d seen underwater. By the time that book was finished, I thought, actually, I’ve done this story. I’ve walked the walk.
It seems like an entirely reasonable argument. Everything about that makes sense. There is no doubt that you’re seeing evolutionary progress, social evolution taking place in those thousands of years before Sumer emerges. But what’s happening now, really, I spent much of the nineties and the late 1980s investigating this issue of a lost civilization. I wrote a series of books about it. But by 2002 when I published a book called Underworld, which was the most massive and most heavy book that I’ve ever written, because I was writing very defensively at the time. By the time I finished that book, my wife Santha and I spent seven years scuba diving all around the world looking for structures underwater, often led by local fishermen or local divers to anomalies that they’d seen underwater. By the time that book was finished, I thought, actually, I’ve done this story. I’ve walked the walk.
I really don’t have much more to say about it. And I turned in another direction and I wrote a book called Supernatural Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind recently retitled Visionary. And that was about the role of fundamentally about the role of psychedelics in the evolution of human culture. And I didn’t think that I would go back to the lost civilization issue, but Göbekli Tepe in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me the more and more discoveries there, the 11,600 year date from Enclosure D, which is the two largest megalithic pillars. And I reached a point where I realized I have to get back in the water and I have to investigate this again. And Göbekli Tepe was a game changer, but I think it’s a game changer for everything because Göbekli Tepe, the extraordinary nature of it. We are looking at a major megalithic site, which is at least five and a half thousand years older than Ä gantija in Malta, which was previously considered to be the oldest megalithic site in the world.
And this led of course to a huge amount of interest and attention, both from the Turkish government who see the potential tourism potential of having the world’s oldest megalithic site and from archeologists. And this in turn has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region. And what they’re finding throughout that whole region around Göbekli Tepe and going down into Syria and further down into the Jordan Valley as far as Jericho and even across a bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus, is what Turkish archeologists are now calling the TaÅŸ Tepeler civilization. They’re calling it a civilization, the Stone Hills Civilization with very definite identifying characteristics, semi-subterranean circular structures, the use of T-shaped megalithic pillars, sometimes not anywhere near as big as those at Göbekli Tepe. It’s clear that Göbekli Tepe now was not the beginning of this process. It was actually in a way, the end of this process.
It was the summation of everything that Stone Hills Civilization had achieved. But what is becoming clear is that this is a period between before the foundation of Göbekli Tepe, as far as we know, that date of 11,600 years ago is the oldest date for Göbekli Tepe. But of course there’s a lot of Göbekli Tepe still underground, so we can’t say for sure that that’s the oldest, but it’s the oldest so far excavated. What we’re seeing is that in that whole region around there, there was something was in motion and it began to go into motion round about the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And this is where these two dates are really important. The Younger Dryas, I’ll round the figures off, begins around 12,800 years ago, and it ends around 11,600 years ago.
So Göbekli Tepe’s construction date, if it is 11,600 years ago, if they don’t find older materials, marks the end of the Younger Dryas, but the beginning of the Younger Dryas, we are already seeing the stirrings of the kind of culture that manifests in full form at Göbekli Tepe and after the construction of Göbekli Tepe, in fact, even during the construction of Göbekli Tepe, we see agriculture beginning to be adopted. The people who created Göbekli Tepe were all hunter-foragers at the beginning. But by the time Göbekli Tepe was finished, and it was definitely deliberately finished, closed off, closed down, deliberately buried, covered with earth, covered with rubble, and then topped off with a hill, which is why Göbekli Tepe is called what it is, Göbekli Tepe means pot-bellied hill or the hill of the navel. For a long time, Göbekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill that looked a bit like a pot belly.
Lex Fridman
You say how it was discovered, I think this is one of the most fascinating things on Earth, period. So maybe can you say what it is and how it was discovered?
You say how it was discovered, I think this is one of the most fascinating things on Earth, period. So maybe can you say what it is and how it was discovered?
Graham Hancock
Well, Göbekli Tepe is first of all the oldest fully elaborated megalithic site that we know of anywhere in the world. It doesn’t mean that older ones won’t be found, but it is the oldest so far found. The part of the site that’s been excavated, which is a tiny percentage of the whole site. We do know. My first visit to Göbekli Tepe was in 2013, and Dr. Klaus Schmidt, the late Dr. Klaus Schmidt, who died a year later, was very generous to me and showed me around the site for over a period of three days. And he explained to me that they’ve already used ground penetrating radar on the site, and they know that there’s much more Göbekli Tepe still underground. So anything is possible in terms of the dating of Göbekli Tepe. But what we have at the moment is a series of almost circular, but not quite circular enclosures, which are walled with relatively small stones.
Well, Göbekli Tepe is first of all the oldest fully elaborated megalithic site that we know of anywhere in the world. It doesn’t mean that older ones won’t be found, but it is the oldest so far found. The part of the site that’s been excavated, which is a tiny percentage of the whole site. We do know. My first visit to Göbekli Tepe was in 2013, and Dr. Klaus Schmidt, the late Dr. Klaus Schmidt, who died a year later, was very generous to me and showed me around the site for over a period of three days. And he explained to me that they’ve already used ground penetrating radar on the site, and they know that there’s much more Göbekli Tepe still underground. So anything is possible in terms of the dating of Göbekli Tepe. But what we have at the moment is a series of almost circular, but not quite circular enclosures, which are walled with relatively small stones.
And then inside them you have pairs of megalithic pillars. And the archetypal part of that site is Enclosure D, which contains the two largest upright megaliths, about 18 feet tall and reckoned to weigh somewhere in the range of 20 tons, if I have my memory correct, they’re substantial hefty pieces of stone. It isn’t some kind of extraordinary feat to create a 20 foot tall or 20 ton megalith, nor is it an extraordinary feat to move it. There’s nothing magical or really weird about that. Human beings can do that and always have, besides the quarry for the megaliths is right there. It’s within 200 meters of the main enclosures. So that’s not a mystery, but the mystery is, the mystery is why suddenly this new form of architecture, this massive, massive megalithic pillars appear, and the pillars, one of the things that interests me about the pillars is their alignment.
And there is good work that’s been done, which suggests that Enclosure D aligns to the rising of the star Sirius. And the rising points of the star Sirius appear to be mapped by the other enclosures, which are all oriented in slightly different directions. It was the work entirely of hunter-foragers. But by the time Göbekli Tepe was completed, agriculture was being introduced and was taking place there. Now you asked how Göbekli Tepe was found. The answer to that is that there was a survey of that pot-bellied hill in the 1960s by some American archeologists, and they were looking absolutely looking for Stone Age material, for material from the Paleolithic. And they had found some Paleolithic flints, upper Paleolithic flints around there. So it looked like a good place to look. But then they noticed sticking out of the side of the hill, some very finely cut stone, bits of very large and very finely cut stone.
And looking at that, the workmanship was so good that those archeologists were confident that it had nothing to do with the Stone Age, and they thought they were looking at perhaps some Byzantine remains, and they abandoned the site and never looked at it further. And it wasn’t until the German Archaeological Institute got involved, and particularly Klaus Schmidt, who I think was a genius, had real insight into this and started to dig at Göbekli Tepe that they’d realized what they’d found, that they’d found potentially the oldest megalithic site in the world. And they’d found it at a place where agriculture, according to the established historical timeline, that’s where agriculture, at any rate in Europe and Western Asia begins. It begins in Anatolia, in Turkey, and then it gradually disseminates westward from there.
Lex Fridman
And yet the understanding is it was created by hunter-gatherers.
And yet the understanding is it was created by hunter-gatherers.
Graham Hancock
It was created by hunter-gatherers. Yeah, there was no agriculture 11,600 years ago in Göbekli Tepe. But by the time Göbekli Tepe was decommissioned, and I use that word deliberately, was closed down and buried. Agriculture was all around it. And this was agriculture of people who knew how to cultivate plants.
It was created by hunter-gatherers. Yeah, there was no agriculture 11,600 years ago in Göbekli Tepe. But by the time Göbekli Tepe was decommissioned, and I use that word deliberately, was closed down and buried. Agriculture was all around it. And this was agriculture of people who knew how to cultivate plants.
Lex Fridman
Do we have an understanding when it was turned into a, if I could say a time capsule so protected by forming a mound around it?
Do we have an understanding when it was turned into a, if I could say a time capsule so protected by forming a mound around it?
Graham Hancock
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
Is it around that similar time?
Is it around that similar time?
Graham Hancock
It stood from roughly 11,600 years ago to about 10,400 years ago to about 8,400 BC. So around 1200 years it was there, and it continued to be elaborated as a site. And while it was being elaborated as a site, we see agriculture, I’m going to use the word being introduced, there’d been no sign of it before, and suddenly it’s there. And to me, that’s another of the mysteries about Göbekli Tepe. And then with the new work that’s being done, we realize that it’s part of a much wider phenomenon which spreads across an enormous distance. And the puzzling thing is that after Göbekli Tepe there almost seems to be a decline. Things fall down again, and then we enter this long, slow process of the Neolithic, thousands of years, gradual developments until we come to ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia.
It stood from roughly 11,600 years ago to about 10,400 years ago to about 8,400 BC. So around 1200 years it was there, and it continued to be elaborated as a site. And while it was being elaborated as a site, we see agriculture, I’m going to use the word being introduced, there’d been no sign of it before, and suddenly it’s there. And to me, that’s another of the mysteries about Göbekli Tepe. And then with the new work that’s being done, we realize that it’s part of a much wider phenomenon which spreads across an enormous distance. And the puzzling thing is that after Göbekli Tepe there almost seems to be a decline. Things fall down again, and then we enter this long, slow process of the Neolithic, thousands of years, gradual developments until we come to ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia.
But agriculture has taken a firm root by then. Actually, one other thing, I’ll just say this in passing. When I talk about a lost civilization introducing ideas to people, I’m often accused of stealing credit from the indigenous people who had those ideas in the first place. So I do find it slightly hypocritical that archeology fully accepts that the idea of agriculture was introduced to Western Europe from Turkey, and that Western Europeans didn’t invent agriculture. It was absolutely introduced by Anatolian farmers who traveled west. So the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn’t be so annoying to archeologists as it is.
Early humans
Lex Fridman
And perhaps we should also state, if we look at the entirety of history of hominids, humans or hominids have been explorers. I didn’t even know this when I was preparing for this. Looking at Homo erectus 1. 9 million years ago.
And perhaps we should also state, if we look at the entirety of history of hominids, humans or hominids have been explorers. I didn’t even know this when I was preparing for this. Looking at Homo erectus 1. 9 million years ago.
Graham Hancock
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
Almost right away they spread out through the whole world and we, Homo sapiens evolved from them. And we should also mention, since we’re talking about controversial debates going on, as I understand there’s still debates about the dynamics of all that was going on there. Like we mentioned in Africa that I think the current understanding, we didn’t come from one particular point of Africa, that there’s multiple locations.
Almost right away they spread out through the whole world and we, Homo sapiens evolved from them. And we should also mention, since we’re talking about controversial debates going on, as I understand there’s still debates about the dynamics of all that was going on there. Like we mentioned in Africa that I think the current understanding, we didn’t come from one particular point of Africa, that there’s multiple locations.
Graham Hancock
This is the Out of Africa theory. I think it’s more than a theory. It’s really strongly evidenced. Why? Because we’re part of the Great Ape family and it’s an African family.
This is the Out of Africa theory. I think it’s more than a theory. It’s really strongly evidenced. Why? Because we’re part of the Great Ape family and it’s an African family.
There’s no doubt that human beings, our deep origins are in Africa. But then as you rightly say, there were these very early migrations out of Africa by species that are likely ancestral to anatomically modern humans, including definitely Homo erectus and the astonishingly distant travels that they undertook. Yes, I think there is an urge to explore in all of humanity. I think there is an urge to find out what’s around the next corner, what’s over the brow of the next hill. And I think that goes very deep into human character. And I think it was being manifested in those early adventures of people who left Africa and traveled all around the world and then settling in different parts of the world. I think a lot of anatomically modern human evolution took place outside Africa as well, not only in Africa.
Lex Fridman
So I guess the general puzzlement that you’re filled with is given that these creatures explore and spread and try out different environments, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop complicated society settlements?
So I guess the general puzzlement that you’re filled with is given that these creatures explore and spread and try out different environments, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop complicated society settlements?
Graham Hancock
That’s the first big question. Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind a hypothesis, a possibility. Maybe it didn’t take so long. Maybe things were happening that we haven’t yet got hold of in the archeological record, which await to be discovered. And of course, there are huge parts of the world that have not been studied at all by archeology, but the fact that huge parts of the world have not been studied at all by archeology is not on its own enough to suggest that we’re missing a chapter in the human story. The reason that I come to that isn’t only puzzlement about that 300,000 year gap. It’s also to do with the fact that there’s common iconography. There’s common myths and traditions, and there’s common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world, and they’re found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another and that are also distant from one another in time.
That’s the first big question. Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind a hypothesis, a possibility. Maybe it didn’t take so long. Maybe things were happening that we haven’t yet got hold of in the archeological record, which await to be discovered. And of course, there are huge parts of the world that have not been studied at all by archeology, but the fact that huge parts of the world have not been studied at all by archeology is not on its own enough to suggest that we’re missing a chapter in the human story. The reason that I come to that isn’t only puzzlement about that 300,000 year gap. It’s also to do with the fact that there’s common iconography. There’s common myths and traditions, and there’s common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world, and they’re found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another and that are also distant from one another in time.
They don’t necessarily occur at the same time. And this is where I think that archeology is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas as well as just a history of things. Because an idea can manifest again and again throughout the human story. So there are particular issues, for example, the notion of the afterlife, destiny of the soul, what happens to us when we die? And believe me, when you reach my age, that’s something you do think about what happens. I used to feel immortal when I was in my forties, but now that I’m 74, I definitely know that I’m not. Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same feeling, that same idea. But why would they all decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way, that it makes a journey along the Milky Way, that there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates.
The course of the life that that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey. And this idea, the path of souls, the Milky Way is called the path of souls. It’s very strongly found in the Americas right from South America through Mexico, through into North America. But it’s also found in ancient Egypt, in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia, the same idea. And I don’t feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we are looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that’s been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and that has taken on a life of its own within those cultures. So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences in the expression of these ideas. The other thing, very puzzling thing, is the sequence of numbers that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes.
Astronomical symbolism
At least I think that’s the best theory to explain them. Here, I think it’s important to pay tribute to the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. Giorgio de Santillana was professor of history of science actually at MIT, where you are based, back in the sixties. And Hertha von Dechend was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University, and they wrote an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet’s Mill, and Hamlet’s Mill differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession. And I’ll explain what precession is in a moment. Generally, it’s held that it was the Greeks who discovered the precession and the dating on that is put back not very far, maybe 2,300 years ago or so. Santillana and von Dechend are pointing out that knowledge of precession is much, much older than that, thousands of years older than that.
And they do actually trace it. I think I’m quoting them pretty much correctly to some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization. Reading that book was one of the several reasons that I got into this mystery in the first place. Okay, now, the precession of the equinoxes, to give it its full name, results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars. And our planet, of course, is rotating on its own axis at roughly a thousand miles an hour at the equator. But what’s less obvious is that it’s also wobbling on its axis. So if you imagine the extended North Pole of the earth pointing up at the sky in our time, it’s pointing at the star Polaris, and that is our pole star. But Polaris has not always been the pole star precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the Earth.
Other stars have occupied the pole position, and sometimes the extended North Pole of the earth points at empty space. There is no pole star. That’s one of the obvious results of the wobble on the Earth’s axis. The other one is that there are 12 well-known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the zodiac that lie along what is referred to as the path of the sun. The earth is orbiting the sun, and we are seeing what’s behind it, what’s in direct line with the sun in our view. And the zodiacal constellations all lie along the path of the sun. So at different times of the year, the sun will rise against the background of a particular zodiacal constellation. Today we live in the age of Pisces, and it’s definitely not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol. This is another area where I differ from archeology.
Think the constellations of the zodiac were recognized as such much earlier than we suppose. Anyway, to get to the point, the key marker of the year, certainly in the northern hemisphere, was the spring equinox. The question was, what constellation is rising behind the sun? What constellation is housing the sun at dawn on the spring equinox? Right now it’s Pisces. In another 150 years or so, it’ll be Aquarius. We do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Back in the time of the late ancient Egyptians, it was Aries going back to the time of Ramesses or before. Before that it was Taurus and so on and so forth. It’s backwards through the zodiac until 12,500 years ago. You come to the age of Leo when the constellation of Leo houses the sun on the spring equinox. Now this process unfolds very, very, very, very slowly, the whole cycle, and it is a cycle.
It repeats itself roughly every 26,000 years. Put a more exact figure on it, 25,920 years. That may be a convention. Some scholars would say it was a bit less than that, a bit more. But you’re talking fractions. It’s in that area, 25,920 years. And to observe it, you really need more than one human lifetime because it unfolds very, very slowly at a rate of one degree every 72 years. And the parallel that I often give is hold your finger up to the horizon, the distant horizon. The movement in one lifetime, in a period of 72 years is about the width of your finger. It’s not impossible to notice in a lifetime, but it’s difficult. You’ve got to pass it on. And what seems to have happened is that some ancient culture, the culture that Santillana and von Dechend call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture, worked out the entire process of precession and selected the key numbers of precession, of which the most important number, the governing number is the number 72. But we also have numbers related to the number 72. 72 plus 36 is 108, 108 divided by two.
Graham Hancock
… 36 is 108. 108 divided by two is 54. These numbers are also found in mythology all around the world. There were 72 conspirators who were involved in killing the god Osiris in Ancient Egypt and nailing him up in a wooden coffer and dumping him in the Nile. There are 432,000 in the Rigveda. 432,000 is a multiple of 72.
… 36 is 108. 108 divided by two is 54. These numbers are also found in mythology all around the world. There were 72 conspirators who were involved in killing the god Osiris in Ancient Egypt and nailing him up in a wooden coffer and dumping him in the Nile. There are 432,000 in the Rigveda. 432,000 is a multiple of 72.
And at Angkor, in Cambodia, for example, you have the bridge to Angkor Thom. And on that bridge you have figures on both sides, sculpted figures, which are holding the body of a serpent. That serpent is Vasuki, and what they’re doing is they’re churning the milky ocean. It’s the same metaphor of churning and turning that’s defined in the story of Hamlet’s Mill, of Amlodhi’s mill. There are 54 on each side. 54 plus 54 is 108. 108 is 72 plus 36. It’s a precessional number according to the work that Santillana and von Dechend did.
And the fascination with this numbers system and its discovery all around the world is one of the puzzles that intrigue me. And suggest to me that we are looking at ancestral knowledge that was passed down, and probably was passed down from a specific single common source at one time, but then was spread out very widely around the world.
Lex Fridman
One of the defining ways that you approach the study of human history that I think contrasts with mainstream archeology is that you take this astronomical symbolism and the relationship between humans and the stars very seriously.
One of the defining ways that you approach the study of human history that I think contrasts with mainstream archeology is that you take this astronomical symbolism and the relationship between humans and the stars very seriously.
Graham Hancock
I do, as I believe the ancients did.
I do, as I believe the ancients did.
Lex Fridman
I think it’s important to consider what humans would’ve thought about back then. Now we have a lot of distractions. We have social media, we can watch videos on YouTube and whatever. But back then, especially before electricity, the stars is the sexiest thing to talk about.
I think it’s important to consider what humans would’ve thought about back then. Now we have a lot of distractions. We have social media, we can watch videos on YouTube and whatever. But back then, especially before electricity, the stars is the sexiest thing to talk about.
Graham Hancock
There’s no light pollution.
There’s no light pollution.
Lex Fridman
There’s no light pollution so, I mean, you’re [inaudible 00:33:21]-
There’s no light pollution so, I mean, you’re [inaudible 00:33:21]-
Graham Hancock
That’s the majesty of the heavens.
That’s the majesty of the heavens.
Lex Fridman
Every single night you’re spending looking up at the stars. And you can imagine there’s a lot of status value to be the guy who’s very good at studying the stars, as the scientists of the day. And I’m sure there’s going to be these geniuses that emerge. They’re able to do two things. One, tell stories about the gods of whatever, based on the stars. And then also, as we’ll probably talk about, use the stars practically for navigation, for example.
Every single night you’re spending looking up at the stars. And you can imagine there’s a lot of status value to be the guy who’s very good at studying the stars, as the scientists of the day. And I’m sure there’s going to be these geniuses that emerge. They’re able to do two things. One, tell stories about the gods of whatever, based on the stars. And then also, as we’ll probably talk about, use the stars practically for navigation, for example.
Graham Hancock
Oh, yeah. Definitely.
Oh, yeah. Definitely.
Lex Fridman
So it makes sense that the stars had a primal importance for the ideas of the times, for the status, for religious explorations.
So it makes sense that the stars had a primal importance for the ideas of the times, for the status, for religious explorations.
Graham Hancock
It was an ever-present reality, and it was bright and it was brilliant, and it was full of lights. It’s inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it. It was an overwhelming presence.
It was an ever-present reality, and it was bright and it was brilliant, and it was full of lights. It’s inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it. It was an overwhelming presence.
And that’s one of the reasons why I’m really confident that the constellations that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier, because it’s hard to miss when you pay attention to the sky, that the sun over the course of the solar year is month by month rising against the background of different constellations. And then there’s a much longer process, the process of precession, which takes that journey backwards and where we have a period of 2,160 years for each sign of the zodiac.
I think it would’ve been hard for the ancients to have missed that. They might not have identified the constellations in exactly the same way we do today. That may well be a Babylonian or Greek convention, but that the constellations were there I think was very clear. And that they were special constellations, unlike other ones higher up in the sky which were not on the path of the sun, that people paid attention to.
Lex Fridman
Well, but detecting the procession of the equinox is hard because especially they don’t have any writing systems, they don’t have any mathematical systems. So everything is told through words.
Well, but detecting the procession of the equinox is hard because especially they don’t have any writing systems, they don’t have any mathematical systems. So everything is told through words.
Graham Hancock
Yeah. Let’s not underestimate oral traditions. Oral traditions, that’s something we’ve lost in our culture today. One of the things that happens with the written word is that you gradually lose your memory.
Yeah. Let’s not underestimate oral traditions. Oral traditions, that’s something we’ve lost in our culture today. One of the things that happens with the written word is that you gradually lose your memory.
Actually, there’s a nice story from Ancient Egypt about the god Thoth, the god of wisdom, who is very proud of himself because he has invented writing. “Look at this gift,” he says to a mythical pharaoh of that time, “Look at the gift that I’m giving humanity, writing. This is a wonderful thing. It’ll enable you to preserve so much that you would otherwise lose.” And the pharaoh in this story replies to him, “No, you have not given us a wonderful gift. You have destroyed the art of memory. We will forget everything. Words will roam free around the world, not accompanied by any wise advice to set them into context.” And actually that’s a very interesting point. And we do know that cultures that still do have oral traditions are able to preserve information for very long periods of time.
One thing I think is clear in any time, in any period of history, is human beings love stories. We love great stories. And one way to preserve information is to encode it, embed it in a great story. And so carefully done that actually, it doesn’t matter whether the storyteller knows that they’re passing on that information or not. The story itself is the vehicle. And as long as it’s repeated faithfully, the information contained within it will be passed on. And I do think this is part of the story of the preservation of knowledge.
Lex Fridman
That’s one of the reasons that you take myths seriously.
That’s one of the reasons that you take myths seriously.
Younger Dryas impact hypothesis
Graham Hancock
I take them very seriously. There’s many reasons, but I can’t help being deeply impressed and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm within human memory. I mean, we know scientifically that there have been many, many cataclysms in the past going back millions of years. I mean, the best-known one of course is the KPG event as it’s now called, that made the dinosaurs extinct 65 million or 66 million years ago.
I take them very seriously. There’s many reasons, but I can’t help being deeply impressed and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm within human memory. I mean, we know scientifically that there have been many, many cataclysms in the past going back millions of years. I mean, the best-known one of course is the KPG event as it’s now called, that made the dinosaurs extinct 65 million or 66 million years ago.
But has there been such a cataclysm in the lifetime of the human species? Yeah, the Mount Toba eruption about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad. But a global cataclysm, the Younger Dryas really ticks all the boxes as a worldwide disaster, which definitely involved sea level rise, both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas. It definitely involved the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water.
And I think it’s an excellent candidate for this worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm, of which one of, but not the only, distinguishing characteristics was a flood, an enormous flood, and the submergence of lands that had previously been above water, underwater. The fact that this story is found all around the world suggests to me that the archeological explanation is, look, people suffer local floods all the time. I mean, as we’re talking, there’s flooding in Florida, but I don’t think anybody in Florida is going to make the mistake of believing that that’s a global flood. They know it’s local.
But that’s the argument largely of archeology, dealing with the flood myths, or that some local population experienced a nasty local flooding event and they decided to say that it affected the whole world. I’m not persuaded by that, particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch, the Younger Dryas, when flooding did occur, and when the Earth was subjected to events cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the ice age.
Lex Fridman
There is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis that provides an explanation of what happened during this period that resulted in such rapid environmental change. So can you explain this hypothesis?
There is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis that provides an explanation of what happened during this period that resulted in such rapid environmental change. So can you explain this hypothesis?
Graham Hancock
Yes. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, YDIH for short, is not a lunatic fringe theory as its opponents often attempt to write it off. It’s the work of more than 60 major scientists working across many different disciplines, including archeology and including oceanography as well.
Yes. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, YDIH for short, is not a lunatic fringe theory as its opponents often attempt to write it off. It’s the work of more than 60 major scientists working across many different disciplines, including archeology and including oceanography as well.
And they are collectively puzzled by the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas, and by the fact that it is accompanied 12,800 years ago by a distinct layer in the Earth. You can see it most clearly at Murray Springs in Arizona, for example. You can see, it’s about the width of a human hand, and there’s a draw there that’s been cut by flash flooding at some time. And that draw has revealed the sides of the draw.
And you can see the cross-section. And in the cross-section is this distinct dark layer that runs through the Earth. And it contains evidence of wildfires, there is a lot of soot in it. There are also nanodiamonds in it. There is shocked quartz in it. There is quartz that’s been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees centigrade. There are carbon microspherules. All of these are proxies for some kind of cosmic impact.
I talked a moment ago about the extinction of the dinosaurs. Luis and Walter Alvarez, who made that incredible discovery, initially their discovery was based entirely on impact proxies, just as the Younger Dryas is. There was no crater. And for a long time they were disbelieved because they couldn’t produce a crater. But when they finally did produce that deeply buried Chicxulub crater, that’s when people started to say, “Yeah, they have to be right.” But they weren’t relying on the crater, they were relying on the impact proxies. And they’re the same impact proxies that we find in what’s called the Younger Dryas boundary layer all around the world.
So it’s the fact that at the moment when the Earth tips into a radical climate shift, it’s been warming up for at least 2,000 years before 12,800 years ago, people at the time must have been feeling a great sense of relief. “We’ve been living through this really cold time, but it’s getting better. Things are getting better.” And then suddenly, around 12,800 years ago, some might say 12, 860 years ago, there’s a massive global plunge in global temperatures, and the world suddenly gets as cold as it was at the peak of the ice age. And it’s almost literally overnight. It’s very, very, very rapid.
Normally in an epoch, when the Earth is going into a freeze, you would not expect sea levels to rise. But there is a sea level rise, a sudden one, right at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And then you have this long frozen period from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. And then equally, dramatically and equally suddenly the Younger Dryas comes to an end and the world very rapidly warms up. And you have a recognized pulse of meltwater at that time as the last of the glaciers collapse into the sea, called meltwater pulse 1B, around about 11,600 years ago.
This is a period which is very tightly defined, it’s a period when we know that human populations were grievously disturbed. That’s when the so-called Clovis culture of North America vanished entirely from the record during the Younger Dryas. And it’s the time when the mammoths and the saber-toothed tigers vanished from the record as well.
Lex Fridman
Is there a good understanding of what happened geologically, whether there was an impact or not? What explains this huge dip in temperature and then rise in temperature?
Is there a good understanding of what happened geologically, whether there was an impact or not? What explains this huge dip in temperature and then rise in temperature?
Graham Hancock
The abrupt cessation of the global meridional overturning circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is the best-known part, the main theory that’s been put forward up to now, and I don’t dispute that theory at all, is that the sudden freeze was caused by the cutting off of the Gulf Stream basically, which is part of the central heating system of our planet. So no wonder it became cold.
The abrupt cessation of the global meridional overturning circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is the best-known part, the main theory that’s been put forward up to now, and I don’t dispute that theory at all, is that the sudden freeze was caused by the cutting off of the Gulf Stream basically, which is part of the central heating system of our planet. So no wonder it became cold.
But what’s not really been addressed before is why that happened, why the Gulf Stream was cut, why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean, and it was so much of it and it was so cold that it actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks. And that’s where the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem.
Now, the hypothesis, of course, is broader than that. Amongst the scientists working on it are, for example, Bill Napier, an astrophysicist and astronomer. They have assembled a great deal of evidence, which suggests that the culprit in the Younger Dryas impact event or events was what we now call the Taurid meteor stream, which the Earth still passes through twice a year. It’s now about 30 million kilometers wide, takes the Earth a couple of days to pass through it on its orbit. It passes through it in June, and it passes through it at the end of October.
The suggestion is that the Taurid meteor stream is the end product of a very large comet that entered the solar system round about 20,000 years ago. Came in from the Oort cloud, got trapped by the gravity of the Sun, and went into orbit around the Sun, an orbit that crossed the orbit of the Earth. However, when it was one object, the likelihood of a collision with the Earth was extremely small.
But as it started to do what all comets do, which was to break up into multiple fragments because these are chunks of rock held together by ice, and as they warm up, they split and disintegrate and break into pieces, as it passed through that its debris stream became larger and larger and wider and wider. And the theory is that 12,800 years ago, the Earth passed through a particularly dense part of the Taurid meteor stream and was hit by multiple impacts all around the planet, certainly from the west of North America, as far east as Syria.
And that we are by and large not talking about impacts that would’ve caused craters, although there certainly were some, we are talking about air bursts. When an object is 100 or 150 meters in diameter and it’s coming in very fast into the Earth’s atmosphere, it is very unlikely to reach the earth, it’s going to blow up in the sky. And the best known recent example of that is the Tunguska event in Siberia, which took place on the 30th of June 1908.
The Tunguska event was, nobody disputes, it was definitely an air burst of a cometary fragment. And the date is interesting because the 30th of June is the height of the Beta Taurids. It’s one of the two times when the Earth is going through the Taurid meteor stream. Well, luckily that part of Siberia wasn’t inhabited, but 2,000 square miles of forest were destroyed. If that had happened over a major city, we would all be thinking very hard about objects out of the Taurid meteor stream and about the risk of cosmic impact.
So the suggestion is that it wasn’t one impact, it wasn’t two impacts, it wasn’t three impacts, it was hundreds of air bursts all around the planet. Coupled with a number of bigger objects, which the scientists working on this think hit the North American ice cap largely. Some of them may also have hit the Northern European ice cap, resulting in that sudden otherwise unexplained flood of meltwater that went into the world ocean and caused the cooling that then took place.
But this was a disaster for life all over the planet. And it’s interesting that one of the sites where they find the Younger Dryas boundary and where they find overwhelming evidence of an air burst and where they find all the shocked quartz, the carbon microspherules, the nanodiamonds, the trinitite, and so on and so forth, all of those impact proxies are found at Abu Hureyra. That was a settlement within 150 miles of Gobekli Tepe, and it was hit 12,800 years ago and it was obliterated. Interestingly, it was re-inhabited by human beings within probably five years, but it was completely obliterated at that time. And it is difficult to imagine that the people who lived in that area would not have been very impressed by what they saw happening by these massive explosions in the sky and the obliteration of Abu Hureyra.
Now this is a theory, the Younger Dryas impact. It’s a hypothesis actually, it’s not even a theory. A theory is, I think, considered a higher level than a hypothesis. That’s why it’s the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. And of course it has many opponents and there are many who disagree with it. And there have been a series of peer-reviewed papers that have been published supposedly debunking the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. One, I think was in 2011, it was called a Requiem for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. And there’s one just been published a few months ago or a year ago called a Complete Refutation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, something like that, some lengthy title.
So it’s a hypothesis that has its opponents, and even within those of us who are looking at the alternative side of history, there are different points of view. Robert Schoch from Boston University, the geologist who demonstrated that the erosion on the Sphinx may well have been caused by exposure to a long period of very heavy rainfall, he doesn’t go for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. He fully accepts that the Younger Dryas was a global cataclysm and that the extinctions took place, but he thinks it was caused by some kind of massive solar outburst.
What everybody’s agreed on is the Younger Dryas was bad, but there is dispute about what caused it. I personally have found the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis to be the most persuasive, which most effectively explains all the evidence.
Lex Fridman
How important is the impact hypothesis to your understanding of the ice age advanced civilizations? Is it possible to have another explanation for environmental factors that could have erased most of an advanced civilization during this period?
How important is the impact hypothesis to your understanding of the ice age advanced civilizations? Is it possible to have another explanation for environmental factors that could have erased most of an advanced civilization during this period?
Graham Hancock
In a sense, it’s not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I’m saying, it’s the Younger Dryas that’s central to what I’m saying. And the Younger Dryas required a trigger, something caused it. I think the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, the notion that we’re looking at a debris stream of a fragmenting comet, and we can still see that debris stream because it’s still up there and we still pass through it twice a year, is the best explanation. But I don’t mind other explanations. It’s good that there are other explanations. The Younger Dryas is a big mystery, and it’s not a mystery that’s been solved yet.
In a sense, it’s not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I’m saying, it’s the Younger Dryas that’s central to what I’m saying. And the Younger Dryas required a trigger, something caused it. I think the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, the notion that we’re looking at a debris stream of a fragmenting comet, and we can still see that debris stream because it’s still up there and we still pass through it twice a year, is the best explanation. But I don’t mind other explanations. It’s good that there are other explanations. The Younger Dryas is a big mystery, and it’s not a mystery that’s been solved yet.
And that word, advanced civilization, this is another word that is easily misunderstood. And I’ve tried to make clear many, many times that when we consider the possibility of something like a civilization in the past, we shouldn’t imagine that it’s us, that it’s something like us. We should expect it to be completely different from us, but that it would’ve achieved certain things.
Amongst the clues that intrigue me are those precessional numbers that are found all around the world, and are a category of ancient maps called Portolanos, which suddenly started to appear just after the crusade that entered Constantinople and sacked Constantinople, the Portolanos suddenly start to appear. And they’re extremely accurate maps. The most of the ones that have survived are extremely accurate maps of the Mediterranean alone, but some of them show much wider areas.
For example, on these Portolano-style maps, you do find a depiction of Antarctica again and again. And another thing that these maps have in common is that many of the mapmakers state that they base their maps on multiple older source maps, which have not survived. These maps are intriguing because they have very accurate relative longitudes.
Our civilization did not crack the longitude problem until the mid-18th century with Harrison’s chronometer, which was able to keep accurate time at sea so you could have the time in London and you could have the local time at sea at the same time. And then you could work out your longitude. There might be other ways of working out longitude as well, but there it is. The fact is these Portolanos have extremely accurate relative longitudes.
Secondly, some of them show the world, to my eye, as it looked during the ice age. They show a much extended Indonesia and Malaysian peninsula and the series of islands that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together into one landmass. And that was the case during the ice age. That was the Sunda Shelf. And the presence of Antarctica on some of these maps also puzzles and intrigues me and is not satisfactorily explained in my view by archeology, which says, “Oh, those mapmakers, they felt that the world needed something underneath it to balance it so they put a fictional landmass there.”
I don’t think that makes sense. I think somebody was mapping the world during the last ice age, but that doesn’t mean that they had our kind of tech. It means that they were following that exploration instinct. That they knew how to navigate. They’d been watching the stars for thousands of years before, they knew how to navigate and they knew how to build seagoing ships. And they explored the world and they mapped the world.
Those maps were made a very, very long time ago. Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved in the Library of Alexandria. I think even then they were being copied and recopied. We don’t know exactly what happened to the Library of Alexandria, except that it was destroyed. I suggest it’s likely this was during the period of the Roman Empire. I suggest it’s likely that some of those maps were taken out of the library and taken to Constantinople, and that’s where they were liberated during the crusade and entered world culture again and started to be copied and recopied.
Lex Fridman
From this perspective, when we talk about advanced ice age civilization, it could have been a relatively small group of people with the technology of their scholars of the stars and their expert seafaring navigators.
From this perspective, when we talk about advanced ice age civilization, it could have been a relatively small group of people with the technology of their scholars of the stars and their expert seafaring navigators.
Graham Hancock
Yes, that’s about as far as I would take it. And when I say that, as I have said on a number of occasions, that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century, I’m referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude. I’m not saying that they were building steam engines. I don’t see any evidence for that.
Yes, that’s about as far as I would take it. And when I say that, as I have said on a number of occasions, that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century, I’m referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude. I’m not saying that they were building steam engines. I don’t see any evidence for that.
Lex Fridman
And perhaps some building tricks and skills of how to [inaudible 00:55:03].
And perhaps some building tricks and skills of how to [inaudible 00:55:03].
Graham Hancock
Well, definitely. And this, again, is where you come to a series of mysteries, which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza Plateau in Egypt with the three Great Pyramids. And the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don’t pay much attention to on the Giza Plateau and the Great Sphinx itself. This is an area of particular importance in understanding this issue.
Well, definitely. And this, again, is where you come to a series of mysteries, which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza Plateau in Egypt with the three Great Pyramids. And the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don’t pay much attention to on the Giza Plateau and the Great Sphinx itself. This is an area of particular importance in understanding this issue.
The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx of Giza
Lex Fridman
Well, can you actually describe the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids and what you find most mysterious and interesting about them?
Well, can you actually describe the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids and what you find most mysterious and interesting about them?
Graham Hancock
Well, first of all, the astronomy. And here I must pay tribute to two individuals, actually three individuals in particular. One of them is John Anthony West, passed away in 2018. He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder if the Sphinx was much older than it had been.
Well, first of all, the astronomy. And here I must pay tribute to two individuals, actually three individuals in particular. One of them is John Anthony West, passed away in 2018. He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder if the Sphinx was much older than it had been.
Actually, he got that idea from a philosopher called Schwaller de Lubicz, who’d noticed what he thought was water erosion on the body of the Sphinx. John West picked that up, and he was a great amateur Egyptologist himself. He spent most of his life in Egypt and he was hugely versed in Ancient Egypt. And when he looked at the Sphinx and at the strange scalloped erosion patterns and the vertical fissures, particularly in the trench around the Sphinx, he began to think maybe Schwaller was right, maybe there was some of some sort of flooding here.
And that’s when he brought Robert Shoch, second person I’d like to recognize, geologist at Boston University. He brought Shoch to Giza, and Shock was the first geologist to stick his neck out, risk the ire of Egyptologists, and say, “Well, it looks to me like the Sphinx was exposed to at least a thousand years of heavy rainfall.” And as Shoch’s calculations have continued, as he’s continued to be immersed in this mystery, he’s continuously pushed that back. And he’s now, again, looking at the date of around 12,000, 12,500 years ago during the Younger Dryas for the creation of the Great Sphinx.
And then, of course, this is the period of the wet Sahara, the humid Sahara. The Sahara was a completely different place during the ice age. There were rivers in it, there were lakes in it, it was fertile, it was possibly densely populated, and there was a lot of rain. There’s not no rain in Giza today, but there’s relatively little rain. Not enough rain to cause that erosion damage on the Sphinx.
The next person who needs to be mentioned in this context is Robert Bauval. Robert and I have co-authored a number of books together. Unfortunately, Robert has been very ill for the last seven years. He’s got a very bad chest infection. And I think also that Robert became very demoralized by the attacks of Egyptologists on his work. But Robert is the genius, and it does take a genius sometime to make these connections because nobody noticed it before, that the three pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion’s belt.
And skeptics will say, “Well, you can find any buildings and line them up with any stars you want,” but Orion actually isn’t any old constellation. Orion was the god Osiris in the sky. The ancient Egyptians called the Orion constellation Sahu, and they recognized it as the celestial image of the god Osiris. So what’s being copied on the ground is the belt of a deity, of a celestial deity. It’s not just a random constellation.
And then when we take precession into account, you find something else very intriguing happening. First of all, you find that the exact orientation of the pyramids as it is today, and pretty much as it was when they’re supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago, it’s not precisely related to how Orion’s Belt looked at that time. There’s a bit of a twist, they’re not quite right. But as you precess the stars backwards, as you go back and back and back and you come to around 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago in the Younger Dryas, you find that suddenly they lock perfectly. They match perfectly with the three pyramids on the ground.
And that’s the same moment that the Great Sphinx, an equinoctial monument, aligned perfectly to the rising sun on the spring equinox. Anybody can test this through themselves. Just go to Giza on the 21st of March, be there before dawn, stand behind the Sphinx, and you will see the sun rising directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. But the question is what constellation was behind the Sphinx? And 12,500 years ago it was the constellation of Leo. And actually the constellation of Leo has a very Sphinx-like look. And I and my colleagues are pretty sure that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely. And that over the thousands of years, it became damaged, it became eroded, particularly the part of it that sticks out the head. There were periods when the Sphinx was completely covered in sand, but still the head stuck out.
By the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty, when the Great Pyramids are supposedly built, by the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty, the lion, original lion head, would’ve been a complete mess. And we suggest that it was then re-carved into a pharaonic head. Egyptologists think it was the pharaoh Khafre, but there’s no real strong resemblance, but it’s definitely wearing the nemes headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. And we think that that’s a result of a recarving of what was originally not only a lion-bodied, but also a lion-headed monument.
It wouldn’t make sense if you create an equinoctial marker in the time of Khafre 4,500 years ago, and the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker. I mean, it’s 270 feet long and 70 feet high and it’s looking directly at the rising sun on the equinox. If you create it then, you’d be more likely to create it in the shape of a bull, because that was the age of Taurus, when the constellation of Taurus housed the sun on the spring equinox. So why is it a lion? And again, we think that’s because of that observation of the skies and putting on the ground as above, so below, putting on the ground an image of the sky at a particular time.
Now, the fact that the Giza Plateau, it’s a fact, of course, that Egyptologists completely dispute, but the fact that the principle monuments of the Giza Plateau, the three Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx, all lock astronomically on the date of around 10,500 BC, to me, is most unlikely to be an accident. And actually, if you look at computer software at the sky at that time, you’ll see that the Milky Way is very prominent and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the river Nile-
Graham Hancock
…prominent and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the river Nile. I suggest that may be one of the reasons amongst many why Giza was chosen as the site for this very special place. The point I want to make is that an astronomical design on the ground, which memorializes a very ancient date, does not have to have been done 12,500 years ago. If, from the ancient Egyptian point of view, you’re there 4, 500 years ago, and there’s a time 8,000 years before that, which is very, very, very important to you, you could use astronomical language and megalithic architecture to memorialize that date on the Giza Plateau, which is what we think we’re looking at, except for one thing, and that’s the erosion patterns on the Sphinx.
…prominent and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the river Nile. I suggest that may be one of the reasons amongst many why Giza was chosen as the site for this very special place. The point I want to make is that an astronomical design on the ground, which memorializes a very ancient date, does not have to have been done 12,500 years ago. If, from the ancient Egyptian point of view, you’re there 4, 500 years ago, and there’s a time 8,000 years before that, which is very, very, very important to you, you could use astronomical language and megalithic architecture to memorialize that date on the Giza Plateau, which is what we think we’re looking at, except for one thing, and that’s the erosion patterns on the Sphinx.
We are pretty sure that the Sphinx, at least, does date back to 12 and a half thousand years ago and with it, the megalithic temples, the so-called Valley Temple, which stands just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx and the Sphinx temple, which stands directly in front of the Sphinx. The Sphinx temple has largely been destroyed. But the Valley Temple, attributed to Khafre on no good grounds whatsoever, is a huge megalithic construction with blocks of limestone that weigh up to 100 tons each. Yet, it has been remodeled/refaced with granite. There are granite blocks that are placed on top of the core limestone blocks. Those core limestone blocks were already eroded when the granite blocks were put there. Why? Because the granite blocks have actually been purposefully and deliberately cut to fit into the erosion marks on the, we believe, much older megalithic blocks there.
I think Giza is a very complicated site. I would never seek to divorce the dynastic ancient Egyptians from the Great Pyramids. They were closely involved in the construction of the Great Pyramids as we see them today. But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older and that when we look at the three Great Pyramids, we are looking at a renovation and a restoration and a enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that. Actually, the Great Pyramid is built around a natural hill. That natural hill might’ve been seen as the original primeval mound to the ancient Egyptians.
Lex Fridman
So the idea is that the Sphinx was there long before the pyramids, and the pyramids were built by the Egyptians to celebrate further an already holy place.
So the idea is that the Sphinx was there long before the pyramids, and the pyramids were built by the Egyptians to celebrate further an already holy place.
Graham Hancock
Yeah. There were platforms in place where the pyramids stand, not the pyramids as we see them today, but the base of those pyramids was already in place at that time.
Yeah. There were platforms in place where the pyramids stand, not the pyramids as we see them today, but the base of those pyramids was already in place at that time.
Lex Fridman
What’s the evidence that the Egyptologists use to make the attributions that they do for the dating of the pyramids and the Sphinx?
What’s the evidence that the Egyptologists use to make the attributions that they do for the dating of the pyramids and the Sphinx?
Graham Hancock
Well, the three great pyramids of Giza are different from later pyramids. This is another problem that I have with the whole thing is the story of pyramid building. When did it really begin? The timeline that we get from Egyptology is the first pyramid is the pyramid of the Pharaoh, Djoser, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, about 100 years or so before the Giza pyramids were built. Then, we have this explosion in the fourth dynasty of true pyramids. We have three of them attributed to a single Pharaoh, Sneferu, who built, supposedly, the pyramid at Meidum and the two pyramids at Dahshur, the Bent and the Red Pyramid.
Well, the three great pyramids of Giza are different from later pyramids. This is another problem that I have with the whole thing is the story of pyramid building. When did it really begin? The timeline that we get from Egyptology is the first pyramid is the pyramid of the Pharaoh, Djoser, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, about 100 years or so before the Giza pyramids were built. Then, we have this explosion in the fourth dynasty of true pyramids. We have three of them attributed to a single Pharaoh, Sneferu, who built, supposedly, the pyramid at Meidum and the two pyramids at Dahshur, the Bent and the Red Pyramid.
Then, within that same 100-year span, we have the Giza pyramids being built. This is according to the Orthodox chronology. Then, suddenly, once the Giza project is finished, pyramid building goes into a massive slump in Ancient Egypt. The pyramids of the Fifth Dynasty are, frankly speaking, a mess outside. They’re very inferior constructions. You can hardly recognize them as pyramids at all. But what happens when you go inside them is you find that they’re extensively covered in hieroglyphs and imagery, repeating the name of the king who was supposedly buried in that place. Whereas, the Giza pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever. What we do have is one piece of graffiti about which there is some controversy.
Basic statistics: it’s a 6 million-ton structure. Each side is about 750 feet long. It’s aligned almost perfectly to true north, south, east, and west within 3/60ths of a single degree, the 06ths, because degrees are divided into 60s. It’s the precision of the orientation and the absolute massive size of the thing plus its very complicated internal passageways that are involved in it. In the ninth century, the Great Pyramid still had its facing stones in place, but there was an Arab Caliph, Khalifa al-Mamun, who had already realized that other pyramids did have their entrances in the north face. Nobody knew where the entrance to the Great Pyramid was. But he figured if there’s an entrance to this thing, it’s going to be in the north face somewhere. He put together a team of workers. They went in with sledgehammers. They started smashing where he thought would be the entrance. They cut their way into the Great Pyramid for a distance of maybe 100 feet. Then, the hammering that they did dislodged something. They heard a little bit further away, something big falling, and they realized there was a cavity there. They started heading in that direction. Then, they joined the internal passageway of the Great Pyramid, the descending and the ascending corridors that go up.
When you go up the ascending corridor, every one of the internal passageways in the Great Pyramid that people can walk in slopes at an angle of 26 degrees. That’s interesting because the angle of slope of the exterior of the Great Pyramid is 52 degrees. We know mathematicians were at work as well as geometers in the creation of the Great Pyramid.
If you go up the Grand Gallery, which is at the end of the so-called ascending corridor, and it’s above the so-called Queen’s Chamber… You go up the Grand Gallery. You’re eventually going to come to what is known as the King’s Chamber in which there is a sarcophagus. That sarcophagus is a little bit too big to have been got in through the narrow entrance passageway. It’s almost as though the so-called King’s Chamber was built around the sarcophagus, already in place.
Above the King’s Chamber are five other chambers. These are known as relieving chambers. The theory was that they were built to relieve the pressure on the King’s Chamber of the weight of the monument. But I think what makes that theory dubious is the fact that even lower down, where more weight was involved, you have the Queen’s Chamber, and there are no such relieving chambers above that.
In the top of these five chambers, a British adventurer and vandal called Howard Vyse, who dynamited his way into those chambers in the first place, allegedly found… Well, he claims he found a piece of graffiti left by a work-gang naming the Pharaoh Khufu. It’s true. I’ve been in that chamber, and there is the cartouche of Khufu there. Quite recognizable. But the dispute around it is whether that is a genuine piece of graffiti dating from the Old Kingdom or whether Howard Vyse actually put it there himself because he was in desperate need of money at the time. I’m not sure what the answer to that question is. But it’s one of the reasons that Egyptologists feel confident in saying that the pyramid is the work of Khufu. Another is what is called the Wadi al-Jarf Papyri, where, on the Red Sea, the diary of an individual Merer was found. He talks about bringing highly polished limestone to the Great Pyramid. It’s clear that what he’s talking about is the facing stones of the Great Pyramid. He’s not talking about the body of the Great Pyramid. He’s talking about the facing stones of the Great Pyramid during the reign of Khufu. That’s another reason why the Great Pyramid is attributed to Khufu. But I think that Khufu was undoubtedly involved in the Great Pyramid and in a big way. But I think he was building upon and elaborating a much older structure.
I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there. You’ve got to go down a 26-degree sloping corridor until a distance of about 300 feet. It’s 100 feet vertically, but the slope means you’re going to walk a distance of… Not walk. You’ve got to ape walk. You’re almost going to have to crawl. I’ve learned from long experience that the best way to go down these corridors is actually backwards. If you go forward, you keep bumping your head on them because they’re only three feet five inches high. You get down to the bottom. You have a short horizontal passage, and then you get into the subterranean chamber.
The theory of Egyptology is that this was supposed to be the burial place of Khufu, but after cutting out that 300-foot long, 26-degree sloping passage, a lot of which passes through bedrock, and having cut the subterranean chamber out of bedrock, gone to all that trouble, they decided they wouldn’t bury him there. They built what’s now known as the Queen’s Chamber as his burial chamber. But then they decided that wouldn’t do either. They then built the King’s chamber, and that’s where the Pharaoh is supposed to have been buried. Those Arab raiders under Khalifa al-Mamun didn’t find anything in the Great Pyramid at all.
Lex Fridman
Your idea is that the Sphinx and maybe some aspects of the pyramid were much earlier. Why that’s important is, in that case, it would be evidence of some transfer of technology-
Your idea is that the Sphinx and maybe some aspects of the pyramid were much earlier. Why that’s important is, in that case, it would be evidence of some transfer of technology-
Graham Hancock
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
…from a much older civilization. The idea is that during the Younger Dryas, most of that civilization was either destroyed or damaged, and they desperately scattered across the globe.
…from a much older civilization. The idea is that during the Younger Dryas, most of that civilization was either destroyed or damaged, and they desperately scattered across the globe.
Graham Hancock
Seeking refuge.
Seeking refuge.
Lex Fridman
Seeking refuge and telling stories of maybe, one, the importance of the stars, their knowledge about the stars, and their knowledge about building and knowledge about navigation.
Seeking refuge and telling stories of maybe, one, the importance of the stars, their knowledge about the stars, and their knowledge about building and knowledge about navigation.
Graham Hancock
That’s roughly the idea. It’s interesting that the ancient Egyptians have a notion of an epoch that they call Zep Tepi, which is the first time. It means the first time. This is when the gods walk the earth. This is when seven sages brought wisdom to Ancient Egypt. That is seen as the origin of ancient Egyptian civilization. There are king lists… by the ancient Egyptians themselves. There are king lists that go back way beyond the First Dynasty/go back 30,000 years into the past in Ancient Egypt, considered to be entirely mythical by Egyptologists. But nevertheless, it’s interesting that there’s that reference to remote time.
That’s roughly the idea. It’s interesting that the ancient Egyptians have a notion of an epoch that they call Zep Tepi, which is the first time. It means the first time. This is when the gods walk the earth. This is when seven sages brought wisdom to Ancient Egypt. That is seen as the origin of ancient Egyptian civilization. There are king lists… by the ancient Egyptians themselves. There are king lists that go back way beyond the First Dynasty/go back 30,000 years into the past in Ancient Egypt, considered to be entirely mythical by Egyptologists. But nevertheless, it’s interesting that there’s that reference to remote time.
Now, what you also have in Egypt are what might almost be described as secret societies. The followers of Horus are one of those specifically tasked with bringing forward the knowledge from the first time into later periods. The souls of Pe and Nekhen are another one of these mysterious secret society groups who are possessors of knowledge that they transmit to the future. What I’m broadly suggesting is that those survivors of the Younger Dryas cataclysm, who settled in Giza may have been relatively small in number. It’s interesting that they’re referred to in the Edfu Building Texts as seven sages because that repeats again and again. It’s also in Mesopotamia.
It’s seven sages, seven Apkallu, who come out of the waters of the Persian Gulf and teach people all the skills of agriculture and of architecture and of astronomy. It’s found all around the world that there was a relatively small number of people who took refuge in Giza, who benefited from the survival skills of the hunter-foragers who lived at Giza at that time, and who also passed on their knowledge to those hunter-foragers. But it was not knowledge that was ready to be put into shape at that time. That knowledge was then preserved and kept and handled within very secretive groups that passed it down over thousands of years. Finally, it burst into full form in the fourth dynasty in Ancient Egypt.
The notion that knowledge might be transferred over thousands of years shouldn’t be absurd. We know, for example, in the case of ancient Israel… It goes back to the time of Abraham, which is pretty much, I think, around 2000 BC. Knowledge has been preserved from that time right up to the present day. If you can preserve knowledge for 4,000 years, you can probably preserve it for eight.
Sahara Desert and the Amazon rainforest
Lex Fridman
Now, of course, the air bars on this are quite large, but if an advanced ice-age civilization existed, where do you think it was? Where do you think we might find it one day if it existed, and how big do you think it might have been?
Now, of course, the air bars on this are quite large, but if an advanced ice-age civilization existed, where do you think it was? Where do you think we might find it one day if it existed, and how big do you think it might have been?
Graham Hancock
Well, this is where I’m often accused of presenting a God-of-the-gaps argument, that I think there was a lost civilization because there’s lots of the earth that archeologists have never looked at. Of course, I’m not thinking that. These are very special gaps that I’m interested in. I’m interested in them because of all the curiosities and the puzzlement that I’ve expressed to you before. It’s not just because they’re gaps in the archeological record. It’s because those gaps involve places that were very interesting places to live during the ice age. They specifically include the Sahara Desert, which was not a desert during the ice age and went through this warm wet period when it was very, very fertile. Certainly, some archeology has been done in the Sahara, but it’s fractional. It’s tiny. I think if we want to get into the true origins of Ancient Egyptian civilization, of the peoples of Ancient Egypt, we need to be looking in the Sahara for that.
Well, this is where I’m often accused of presenting a God-of-the-gaps argument, that I think there was a lost civilization because there’s lots of the earth that archeologists have never looked at. Of course, I’m not thinking that. These are very special gaps that I’m interested in. I’m interested in them because of all the curiosities and the puzzlement that I’ve expressed to you before. It’s not just because they’re gaps in the archeological record. It’s because those gaps involve places that were very interesting places to live during the ice age. They specifically include the Sahara Desert, which was not a desert during the ice age and went through this warm wet period when it was very, very fertile. Certainly, some archeology has been done in the Sahara, but it’s fractional. It’s tiny. I think if we want to get into the true origins of Ancient Egyptian civilization, of the peoples of Ancient Egypt, we need to be looking in the Sahara for that.
The Amazon rainforest is another example of this. I think the Sahara is about 9 million square kilometers. The Amazon that’s left under dense canopy rainforest is about 5 million square kilometers, maybe closer to six. Then, you have the continental shelves that were submerged by sea level rise at the end of the ice age. Now, it’s well established that sea level rose by 400 feet, but it didn’t rise by 400 feet overnight. It came in dribs and drabs. There were periods of very rapid, quite significant sea level rise, and there were periods when the sea level was rising much more slowly. That 400-foot sea level rise is spread out over a period of about 10,000 years. But there are episodes within it like meltwater pulse 1B like meltwater pulse 1A when the flooding was really immense.
Lex Fridman
How big do you think it might’ve been? Do you think it was spread across the globe? If there were expert navigators, do you think they spread across the globe?
How big do you think it might’ve been? Do you think it was spread across the globe? If there were expert navigators, do you think they spread across the globe?
Graham Hancock
Well, the reason that I’m talking about the gaps is I don’t know where this civilization started or where it was based. All I’m seeing are clues and mysteries and puzzles that intrigue me and which suggest to me that something is missing from our past. I’m not inclined to look for that missing something in, for example, Northern Europe, because Northern Europe was not a very nice place to live during the ice age. I mean, nobody smart would build a civilization in Northern Europe 12,000 years ago. It was a hideous, frozen wasteland. The places to look are places that were hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the ice age. That, of course, includes the coastlines that are now underwater. Of course, it includes the Sahara Desert. Of course, it includes the Amazon rainforest as well. All of these places, I think, are candidates for “my lost civilization.” Because I think, largely from those ancient maps, that it was a navigating seafaring civilization, I suspect that it wasn’t only in one place. It was probably in a number of places.
Well, the reason that I’m talking about the gaps is I don’t know where this civilization started or where it was based. All I’m seeing are clues and mysteries and puzzles that intrigue me and which suggest to me that something is missing from our past. I’m not inclined to look for that missing something in, for example, Northern Europe, because Northern Europe was not a very nice place to live during the ice age. I mean, nobody smart would build a civilization in Northern Europe 12,000 years ago. It was a hideous, frozen wasteland. The places to look are places that were hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the ice age. That, of course, includes the coastlines that are now underwater. Of course, it includes the Sahara Desert. Of course, it includes the Amazon rainforest as well. All of these places, I think, are candidates for “my lost civilization.” Because I think, largely from those ancient maps, that it was a navigating seafaring civilization, I suspect that it wasn’t only in one place. It was probably in a number of places.
Then, I can only speculate. Maybe there was a cultural value where it was felt that it was not appropriate to interfere with the lives of hunter-foragers at that time. Maybe it was felt that they should keep their distance from them, just as, even today, there is a feeling that we shouldn’t be interfering too much with the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest. Although interestingly, some of those tribes are now using cell phones. That possibility may have been there in the past. Only when we come to a global cataclysm does it become essential to have outreach and, actually, to take refuge amongst those hunter-forager populations. That is the hypothesis that I’m putting forward. I’m not claiming that it’s a fact. But, for me, it helps to explain the evidence.
Lex Fridman
That speaks to one of the challenges that archeologists provide to this idea, is that there is a lot of evidence of humans in the ice age and they appear to be all hunter-gatherers. But, like you said, only a small percent of areas where humans have lived have been studied by archeologists.
That speaks to one of the challenges that archeologists provide to this idea, is that there is a lot of evidence of humans in the ice age and they appear to be all hunter-gatherers. But, like you said, only a small percent of areas where humans have lived have been studied by archeologists.
Graham Hancock
That’s right. Very tiny percent. Even a tiny percent of every archeological site has been studied by archeologists, too. Typically, one to 5% of any archeological site is excavated.
That’s right. Very tiny percent. Even a tiny percent of every archeological site has been studied by archeologists, too. Typically, one to 5% of any archeological site is excavated.
Lex Fridman
I mean, that’s why Göbekli Tepe fills my mind with imagination, especially seeing it as a time capsule. It’s almost certain that there is places on earth we haven’t discovered that, once we do, even if it’s after the ice age, will change our view of human history. What would be your dream thing to discover, like Göbekli Tepe, that says a definitive perturbation to our understanding of ice age history?
I mean, that’s why Göbekli Tepe fills my mind with imagination, especially seeing it as a time capsule. It’s almost certain that there is places on earth we haven’t discovered that, once we do, even if it’s after the ice age, will change our view of human history. What would be your dream thing to discover, like Göbekli Tepe, that says a definitive perturbation to our understanding of ice age history?
Graham Hancock
Some archive. Some hall of records. There’s both mystical associations with the Hall of Records at Giza from people like the Edgar Cayce organization. There’s also ancient Egyptian traditions which suggest that something was concealed beneath the Sphinx. This is not an idea that is alien to Ancient Egypt. It’s quite present in Ancient Egypt. So far, as far as I know, nobody has some dug down beneath the Sphinx. Of course, there’s very good reasons for that. You don’t want to damage the place too much. But let’s call it the Hall of Records. I’d love to find that.
Some archive. Some hall of records. There’s both mystical associations with the Hall of Records at Giza from people like the Edgar Cayce organization. There’s also ancient Egyptian traditions which suggest that something was concealed beneath the Sphinx. This is not an idea that is alien to Ancient Egypt. It’s quite present in Ancient Egypt. So far, as far as I know, nobody has some dug down beneath the Sphinx. Of course, there’s very good reasons for that. You don’t want to damage the place too much. But let’s call it the Hall of Records. I’d love to find that.
But I think in a way that’s what Göbekli Tepe is. Göbekli Tepe is a hall of records. It’s interesting that just as I’ve tried to outline, I hope reasonably clearly, that the three great pyramids of Giza match Orion’s belt in 10,500 BC just as the Sphinx matches Leo in 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago or so. Pillar 43 in Enclosure D at Göbekli Tepe contains what a number of researchers, myself included, regard as an astronomical diagram. Martin Sweatman of Edinburgh University has brought forward the best work in this field. But it was initially started by a gentleman called Paul Burley who noticed that one of the figures on Pillar 43 is a scorpion, very much like we represent the constellation of Scorpio today and that above it is a vulture with outstretched wings, which is in a posture very similar to the constellation that we call Sagittarius. On that outstretched wing is a circular object, and the suggestion is that it’s marking the time when the sun was at the center of the dark rift in the Milky Way at the summer solstice 12 and a half thousand years ago. That’s what it’s marking.
It’s interesting that the same date can be deduced from Pillar… Of course, it’s controversial. Martin Sweatman’s ideas are by no means accepted by archeology. But he’s done very, very thorough, detailed, statistical work on this. I’m personally convinced. We have a time capsule at Göbekli Tepe, which is memorializing a date that is at least 1,200 years before Göbekli Tepe was built if that dating of 11,600 years ago proves to be absolutely the oldest date as it is at present. The date memorialized on Pillar 43 is 12,800 years ago, the beginning of the Younger Dryas, the beginning of the impact event.
Then, Giza does the same thing but in much larger scale. It uses massive megalithic architecture, which is very difficult to destroy, and a profound knowledge of astronomy to encode a date in a language that any culture which is sufficiently literate in astronomy will be able to decode. We don’t have to have a script that we can’t read like we do with the Indus Valley civilization or with the Easter Island script. We don’t have to have a script that can’t be interpreted. If you use astronomical language, then any astronomical literate civilization will be able to give you a date.
Hoover Dam has a star map built into it. That star map is part of an exhibition that was put there at the founding of the Hoover Dam. What it does is it freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam at the moment of its completion. Oscar Hansen, the artist who created that piece said so specifically that this would be so that any future culture would be able to know the time of the dam’s construction. You can use astronomy and architecture to memorialize a particular date.
Lex Fridman
Quick pause. Bathroom break.
Quick pause. Bathroom break.
Graham Hancock
Sounds good.
Sounds good.
Response to critics
Lex Fridman
To me, the story that we’ve been talking about… It is both exciting if the mainstream archeology narrative is correct and the one you’re constructing is correct. Both are super interesting because the mainstream archeology perspective means that there’s something about the human mind from which the pyramids/these ideas spring naturally. You place humans anywhere. You place them on Mars. It’s going to come out that way. That’s an interesting story of human psychology that then becomes even more interesting when you evolve out of Africa with homo sapiens, how they think about the world. That’s super interesting. Then, if there’s an ancient civilization/advanced civilization that explains why there’s so many similar types of ideas that spread, that means that there’s so much undiscovered still about the spring of these ideas of civilization that come. To me, they’re both fascinating. I don’t know why there’s so much infighting.
To me, the story that we’ve been talking about… It is both exciting if the mainstream archeology narrative is correct and the one you’re constructing is correct. Both are super interesting because the mainstream archeology perspective means that there’s something about the human mind from which the pyramids/these ideas spring naturally. You place humans anywhere. You place them on Mars. It’s going to come out that way. That’s an interesting story of human psychology that then becomes even more interesting when you evolve out of Africa with homo sapiens, how they think about the world. That’s super interesting. Then, if there’s an ancient civilization/advanced civilization that explains why there’s so many similar types of ideas that spread, that means that there’s so much undiscovered still about the spring of these ideas of civilization that come. To me, they’re both fascinating. I don’t know why there’s so much infighting.
Graham Hancock
I think it’s partly territorial. I cannot speak of all archeologists, but some archeologists feel very territorial about their profession. They do not feel happy about outsiders entering their realm, especially if those outsiders have a large platform. I’ve found that the attacks on me by archeologists have increased step-by-step with the increase of my exposure. I wasn’t very interesting to them when I just had one minor bestseller in 1992 with a book called The Sign and the Seal. But when Fingerprints of the Gods was published in 1995 and became a global bestseller, then I started to attract their attention and appear to have been regarded as a threat to them.
I think it’s partly territorial. I cannot speak of all archeologists, but some archeologists feel very territorial about their profession. They do not feel happy about outsiders entering their realm, especially if those outsiders have a large platform. I’ve found that the attacks on me by archeologists have increased step-by-step with the increase of my exposure. I wasn’t very interesting to them when I just had one minor bestseller in 1992 with a book called The Sign and the Seal. But when Fingerprints of the Gods was published in 1995 and became a global bestseller, then I started to attract their attention and appear to have been regarded as a threat to them.
That is the case today. That is why Ancient Apocalypse Season 1 was defined as the most dangerous show on Netflix. It’s why the Society for American Archeology wrote an open letter to Netflix asking Netflix to reclassify the series of science fiction. It’s why they accused the series of antisemitism, misogyny, white supremacism, and… I don’t know, a whole bunch of other things like that, that have nothing to do with anything that’s in the series. It was like, “We must shut this down. This is so dangerous to us.” There are many more dangerous things in the world than a television series going on right now. But maybe it was seen as a danger to archeology, that this non-archeologist was in archeological terrain and being viewed and seen and read by large numbers of people. Maybe that was part of the problem.
Human nature being what it is, I noticed that two of my principal critics, John Hoopes from the University of Kansas and Flint Dibble, who’s now teaching at the University of Cardiff in Wales in the UK, are both people who like to have media exposure. John Hoopes has just recently started a YouTube channel. Flint Dibble has had one for quite a while. A pretty small number of followers. I think that they feel that they should be the ones who are getting the global attention and that it’s not right that I am and that the best way to stop that is to stop me, to shut me down, to get me canceled and basically requiring Netflix to relabel my series from a documentary to a science fiction, which is what they actually had the temerity to suggest to Netflix.
If that had gone through, if Netflix had listened to them, that would’ve effectively been the cancellation of my documentary series. It would no longer have been ranked under documentaries. It was a deliberate attempt to shut me down. I see that going on again and again, and it’s so unfortunate and so unnecessary. I’ve become very defensive towards archeology. I hit back. After 30 years of these attacks on my work, I’m tired of it. I do defend myself. Sometimes, I’m perhaps over-vigorous in that defense. Maybe I was a little bit too strong in my critique of archeology in the first season of Ancient Apocalypse. Maybe I should have been a bit gentler and a bit kinder. I’ve tried to reflect that in the second season and to bring also many more Indigenous voices into the second season, as well as the voices of many more archeologists.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. In general, I got a chance to get a glimpse of the archeology community. In archeology/in science, in general, I don’t have much patience for this arrogance or snark or dismissal of general human curiosity that I think your work inspires in people. That’s why people like Ed Barnhart, who I recently had a conversation with… He radiates kindness and curiosity as well. It’s like that kind of approach to ideas, especially about human history, it inspires people.
Yeah. In general, I got a chance to get a glimpse of the archeology community. In archeology/in science, in general, I don’t have much patience for this arrogance or snark or dismissal of general human curiosity that I think your work inspires in people. That’s why people like Ed Barnhart, who I recently had a conversation with… He radiates kindness and curiosity as well. It’s like that kind of approach to ideas, especially about human history, it inspires people.
Graham Hancock
Exactly.
Exactly.
Lex Fridman
Inspires millions of people to ask questions.
Inspires millions of people to ask questions.
Graham Hancock
Exactly. Exactly.
Exactly. Exactly.
Lex Fridman
I mean, that’s why you had Keanu Reeves on the new season. He’s basically coming to the show from that same perspective of curiosity.
I mean, that’s why you had Keanu Reeves on the new season. He’s basically coming to the show from that same perspective of curiosity.
Graham Hancock
Keanu is genuinely curious about the past and very, very interested in it. He’s bringing to it questions that everybody brings to the past. He’s speaking for every man in the series.
Keanu is genuinely curious about the past and very, very interested in it. He’s bringing to it questions that everybody brings to the past. He’s speaking for every man in the series.
Lex Fridman
Given that, can you maybe steelman the case that archeologists make about this period that we’ve been talking about? Can make the case that that is indeed what happened; is it was hunter-gatherers for a long time, and then there was a cataclysm, a very difficult period in human history with the Younger Dryas, and that changed the environment and then led to the springing up of civilizations at different places on earth? Can you make the case for that?
Given that, can you maybe steelman the case that archeologists make about this period that we’ve been talking about? Can make the case that that is indeed what happened; is it was hunter-gatherers for a long time, and then there was a cataclysm, a very difficult period in human history with the Younger Dryas, and that changed the environment and then led to the springing up of civilizations at different places on earth? Can you make the case for that?
Graham Hancock
No, I completely understand why that is the position of archeology because that’s what they’ve found. Archeology is very much wishing to define itself as a science. The techniques of weighing, and measuring, and counting are very key to what archeology does. In what they’ve found and what they’ve studied around the world, they don’t see any traces of a lost civilization. We live in a very politically correct world today. The idea that some lost civilization brought knowledge to other cultures around the world is seen as almost racist or colonialist in some way. It triggers that aspect as well.
No, I completely understand why that is the position of archeology because that’s what they’ve found. Archeology is very much wishing to define itself as a science. The techniques of weighing, and measuring, and counting are very key to what archeology does. In what they’ve found and what they’ve studied around the world, they don’t see any traces of a lost civilization. We live in a very politically correct world today. The idea that some lost civilization brought knowledge to other cultures around the world is seen as almost racist or colonialist in some way. It triggers that aspect as well.
But basically, I think majority of archeologists are in complete good faith on this. I don’t think that anybody’s really seeking to frame me. I think that what we are hearing from most archeologists… some much more vicious than others. But what we’re hearing from most archeologists is this is what we found, and we don’t see evidence for a lost civilization in it. To that, I…
Graham Hancock
… civilization in it. And to that, I must reply, “Please look at the myths. Please consider the implications of the Younger Dryas. Please look at the ancient astronomy. Please look at those ancient maps and don’t just dismiss them and sneer at them. And for God’s sake, please look more deeply at the parts of the world that were immensely habitable and attractive during the ice age and that have hardly been studied by archaeology at all, before you tell us that your theory is the only one that can possibly be correct.” In fact, it’s a very arrogant and silly position of archeology, because archaeological theories are always being overthrown. It can take years, it can take decades. It took decades in the case of the Clovis-First hypothesis for the settlement of the Americas. But sooner or later a bad idea will be kicked out by a preponderance of evidence that that idea does not explain.
… civilization in it. And to that, I must reply, “Please look at the myths. Please consider the implications of the Younger Dryas. Please look at the ancient astronomy. Please look at those ancient maps and don’t just dismiss them and sneer at them. And for God’s sake, please look more deeply at the parts of the world that were immensely habitable and attractive during the ice age and that have hardly been studied by archaeology at all, before you tell us that your theory is the only one that can possibly be correct.” In fact, it’s a very arrogant and silly position of archeology, because archaeological theories are always being overthrown. It can take years, it can take decades. It took decades in the case of the Clovis-First hypothesis for the settlement of the Americas. But sooner or later a bad idea will be kicked out by a preponderance of evidence that that idea does not explain.
Lex Fridman
If we can just look back at your debate with Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan Experience, what are some takeaways from that? What have you learned? Maybe what are some things you like about Flint? You said that he’s one of your big critics, but what do you like about his ideas? And what were you maybe bothered by?
If we can just look back at your debate with Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan Experience, what are some takeaways from that? What have you learned? Maybe what are some things you like about Flint? You said that he’s one of your big critics, but what do you like about his ideas? And what were you maybe bothered by?
Graham Hancock
First of all, just very recently, and it can be found on my YouTube channel and it’s signaled on my website, I have made a video. Runs about an hour, which looks at a series of statements that Flint made during the debate, which I was not prepared to answer. And it turns out that some of those statements are not correct. The notion, for example, that there were three million shipwrecks that have been mapped, Flint actually uses the word “mapped.” Three million shipwrecks that have been mapped at one point in the debate. And I’ve put that clip into the video that I brought out. That is not a fact, that is an estimate, a UNESCO estimate. And actually in the small print on one of the slides that he has on the screen, you can see the word “estimate,” but he never expresses that word out loud. So those who are listening to the podcast rather than watching it wouldn’t even have a chance to see that. And I, sitting there in the studio didn’t see that word estimate either.
First of all, just very recently, and it can be found on my YouTube channel and it’s signaled on my website, I have made a video. Runs about an hour, which looks at a series of statements that Flint made during the debate, which I was not prepared to answer. And it turns out that some of those statements are not correct. The notion, for example, that there were three million shipwrecks that have been mapped, Flint actually uses the word “mapped.” Three million shipwrecks that have been mapped at one point in the debate. And I’ve put that clip into the video that I brought out. That is not a fact, that is an estimate, a UNESCO estimate. And actually in the small print on one of the slides that he has on the screen, you can see the word “estimate,” but he never expresses that word out loud. So those who are listening to the podcast rather than watching it wouldn’t even have a chance to see that. And I, sitting there in the studio didn’t see that word estimate either.
And I didn’t know that. I thought, “My God. If Flint has a point here. If there’d been three million shipwrecks found and mapped, if that’s the case, the absence of any shipwreck from a lost civilization of the ice age is a problem.” But then I discovered that it isn’t three million shipwrecks that have been mapped. It’s much, much less than that. And maybe it’s 250,000. Still a large number, but most of them from the last 1,000 years. And unfortunately, what Flint didn’t go into, and perhaps he should have shared with the audience … And again I go into this in the video, is that there is indisputable evidence that human beings were seafarers as much as 50 or 60,000 years ago. The peopling of Australia involved a relatively short 90 kilometers, 100-kilometer ocean voyage. But nevertheless, it was an ocean voyage.
And it must have involved a large enough people, a large enough number of people to create a permanent population that wouldn’t go extinct. The settlement of Cyprus is the same thing. It was always an island even during the ice age. And no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Australia, and no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Cyprus either. But that doesn’t mean that that thing didn’t happen.
Lex Fridman
I [inaudible 01:36:33] linger on this, because for me it was, the shipwrecks thing was convincing. And then looking back, first of all, watching your video, but also just realizing the peopling of Australia part, that’s mind boggling. 50,000 years ago. Just imagine being the person standing on the shore, looking out into the ocean. Standing on the shore of a harsh environment, looking out the ocean, a harsh environment and deciding that, “You know what? I’m going to go towards near certain death and explore-
I [inaudible 01:36:33] linger on this, because for me it was, the shipwrecks thing was convincing. And then looking back, first of all, watching your video, but also just realizing the peopling of Australia part, that’s mind boggling. 50,000 years ago. Just imagine being the person standing on the shore, looking out into the ocean. Standing on the shore of a harsh environment, looking out the ocean, a harsh environment and deciding that, “You know what? I’m going to go towards near certain death and explore-
Graham Hancock
You don’t know what’s on the other side of that water. You can’t see 90 kilometers-
You don’t know what’s on the other side of that water. You can’t see 90 kilometers-
Lex Fridman
And humans did it.
And humans did it.
Graham Hancock
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
I love humans so much.
I love humans so much.
Graham Hancock
Again, it’s that urge to explore. And I suggest that it probably began with a few pioneers who made the journey there and back. They ventured into the water. They definitely had boats. And lo and behold, after a two- or three-day voyage, they ended up on a coastline. You’re an individual. You’ve got by relatively straightforward island- hopping, where each island is within sight of each other as far as Timor. And when you get to Timor, suddenly you can’t island hop anymore. There’s an expansive ocean that you can’t see across. But that urge to explore, that curiosity, that is central to the human condition would undoubtedly have led some adventurous individuals to want to find out more and even be willing to risk their lives. And that first reconnoitering of what lay beyond that strait would’ve undoubtedly been undertaken by very few individuals. Not enough to create a permanent population in Australia, but when they came back with the good news that there’s a whole land there, that’s the land that geographers call Sahul, which just as Sunda was the Ice age Indonesian and Malaysian Peninsula all joined together into one landmass.
Again, it’s that urge to explore. And I suggest that it probably began with a few pioneers who made the journey there and back. They ventured into the water. They definitely had boats. And lo and behold, after a two- or three-day voyage, they ended up on a coastline. You’re an individual. You’ve got by relatively straightforward island- hopping, where each island is within sight of each other as far as Timor. And when you get to Timor, suddenly you can’t island hop anymore. There’s an expansive ocean that you can’t see across. But that urge to explore, that curiosity, that is central to the human condition would undoubtedly have led some adventurous individuals to want to find out more and even be willing to risk their lives. And that first reconnoitering of what lay beyond that strait would’ve undoubtedly been undertaken by very few individuals. Not enough to create a permanent population in Australia, but when they came back with the good news that there’s a whole land there, that’s the land that geographers call Sahul, which just as Sunda was the Ice age Indonesian and Malaysian Peninsula all joined together into one landmass.
So Sahul was New Guinea joined to Australia. So they would’ve made landfall in New Guinea. And then they think, “Well, here is this vast open, incredible land. We need to bring more people here.” And that would’ve involved larger craft. You need to bring people with resources and you need to bring enough of them, both men and women in order to produce a population that will not rapidly become extinct. And it’s the same in Cyprus. There the work that’s been done suggests very strongly that we’re looking at planned migrations of groups of people in excess of 1,000 at a time, bringing animals with them. And this certainly would’ve involved multiple boats and boats of a significant size.
Lex Fridman
And there’s no archaeological evidence of those boats?
And there’s no archaeological evidence of those boats?
Graham Hancock
None whatsoever. The oldest boat that’s ever been found in the world is the Dokos shipwreck off Greece, which is around 5,000 years old if, I recall correctly.
None whatsoever. The oldest boat that’s ever been found in the world is the Dokos shipwreck off Greece, which is around 5,000 years old if, I recall correctly.
Lex Fridman
So everything that makes a boat is lost at the time?
So everything that makes a boat is lost at the time?
Graham Hancock
Yes. Boats can be preserved under certain circumstances. There’s a wreck at the bottom of the Black Sea, almost two miles deep. I didn’t know the Black Sea was that deep. But there’s a wreck and there’s no oxygen down there that is more than 2000 years old and is still in pretty much perfect condition. But in other conditions, the structure of the ship evaporates. Sometimes what you’re left with is the cargo of the ship. And you could say there was a ship that sank here, but the ship itself has gone. The fact is we know that our ancestors were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago. And no ship has survived to testify to that, yet we accept that they were.
Yes. Boats can be preserved under certain circumstances. There’s a wreck at the bottom of the Black Sea, almost two miles deep. I didn’t know the Black Sea was that deep. But there’s a wreck and there’s no oxygen down there that is more than 2000 years old and is still in pretty much perfect condition. But in other conditions, the structure of the ship evaporates. Sometimes what you’re left with is the cargo of the ship. And you could say there was a ship that sank here, but the ship itself has gone. The fact is we know that our ancestors were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago. And no ship has survived to testify to that, yet we accept that they were.
Lex Fridman
Do you think you one day we’ll find a ship that’s 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years old?
Do you think you one day we’ll find a ship that’s 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years old?
Graham Hancock
It’s not impossible. I think it’s quite unlikely, given the very thin survival of ships the further back you go in time, with the oldest, as I say, being about 6,000 years old now. And then the other thing to take into account is the Younger Dryas event itself and the cataclysmic circumstances of that event. And the roiling of the seas that would’ve taken place then, how much would’ve survived in a boat accident at that time, would’ve survived for thousands of years afterwards, I’m not sure. But I don’t give up hope, it’s possible.
It’s not impossible. I think it’s quite unlikely, given the very thin survival of ships the further back you go in time, with the oldest, as I say, being about 6,000 years old now. And then the other thing to take into account is the Younger Dryas event itself and the cataclysmic circumstances of that event. And the roiling of the seas that would’ve taken place then, how much would’ve survived in a boat accident at that time, would’ve survived for thousands of years afterwards, I’m not sure. But I don’t give up hope, it’s possible.
Lex Fridman
Okay. So that’s back to the three million shipwrecks.
Okay. So that’s back to the three million shipwrecks.
Graham Hancock
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So what’s your takeaway from that debate?
So what’s your takeaway from that debate?
Graham Hancock
Well, my takeaway from that debate is that I should have been better prepared and I should have been less angry. I have to say that Flint had really disturbed me with these constant snide, not quite exact, references to racism and white supremacism in my work. I detest such things, and to have those labels stuck on me … He’s always avoided taking direct responsibility, pretty much always avoided. There’s one example that I include in the video I’ve made, where he really hasn’t successfully avoided it. But in most cases he’s trying to say that I rely on sources that were racist, but that he’s not saying that I myself am a racist.
Well, my takeaway from that debate is that I should have been better prepared and I should have been less angry. I have to say that Flint had really disturbed me with these constant snide, not quite exact, references to racism and white supremacism in my work. I detest such things, and to have those labels stuck on me … He’s always avoided taking direct responsibility, pretty much always avoided. There’s one example that I include in the video I’ve made, where he really hasn’t successfully avoided it. But in most cases he’s trying to say that I rely on sources that were racist, but that he’s not saying that I myself am a racist.
But the end result of those statements is that people all around the world came to the conclusion that Graham Hancock is a racist and a white supremacist. And that really got under my skin and it really upset me. And I felt angry about it and I felt that I was there to defend Ancient Apocalypse, season one, whereas in fact, what I was there to do was to listen to a series of lectures where an archaeologist tells me what archaeologists have found. And that somehow I’m to deduce that from what they have found, they’re not going to find anything else. At least not anything to do with the lost civilization.
Lex Fridman
Listen, I feel you. I’ve seen the intensity of the attacks and the whole racism label is the one that can get under your skin. And it’s a toolbox that’s been prevalent over the past, let’s say decade, maybe a little bit more, as a method of cancellation. When a person is the opposite of racist, very often it’s hilarious to watch. But it can get under your skin, especially when you have certain dynamics that happen on the internet, where it seeps into a Wikipedia page and then other people read that Wikipedia page and you get to hear it from friends, “Oh, I didn’t know you’re … ” whatever. And you realize that Wikipedia description of who you are is actually has a lot of power, not by people that know you well, but people that just are learning about you for the first time-
Listen, I feel you. I’ve seen the intensity of the attacks and the whole racism label is the one that can get under your skin. And it’s a toolbox that’s been prevalent over the past, let’s say decade, maybe a little bit more, as a method of cancellation. When a person is the opposite of racist, very often it’s hilarious to watch. But it can get under your skin, especially when you have certain dynamics that happen on the internet, where it seeps into a Wikipedia page and then other people read that Wikipedia page and you get to hear it from friends, “Oh, I didn’t know you’re … ” whatever. And you realize that Wikipedia description of who you are is actually has a lot of power, not by people that know you well, but people that just are learning about you for the first time-
Graham Hancock
Definitely.
Definitely.
Lex Fridman
And they can really start to annoy you and get onto your skin, when people are indirectly injecting … They’re writing articles about you. They can then be cited by Wikipedia. It can really bother a person who’s actually trying to do good science, or just trying to inspire people with different ideas.
And they can really start to annoy you and get onto your skin, when people are indirectly injecting … They’re writing articles about you. They can then be cited by Wikipedia. It can really bother a person who’s actually trying to do good science, or just trying to inspire people with different ideas.
Graham Hancock
I felt that my work was being deliberately misrepresented and I felt that I, as a human being, was being insulted and wronged in ways that are deeply hurtful. My wife and I have six children between us and we have nine grandchildren. And of those nine grandchildren, seven are of mixed race. And this is my family, and these are kids who are going to grow up and read Wikipedia and learn from reading Wikipedia that Grandpa was some kind of racist. This is a personal issue for me, and I’m afraid I carried that personal anger into the debate and it made me less effective than I should have been. But ultimately I do want to pay tribute to Flint. He is an excellent debater. He’s got a very sharp mind. He’s a very clever man and he’s very fast on his feet. And I recognize that.
I felt that my work was being deliberately misrepresented and I felt that I, as a human being, was being insulted and wronged in ways that are deeply hurtful. My wife and I have six children between us and we have nine grandchildren. And of those nine grandchildren, seven are of mixed race. And this is my family, and these are kids who are going to grow up and read Wikipedia and learn from reading Wikipedia that Grandpa was some kind of racist. This is a personal issue for me, and I’m afraid I carried that personal anger into the debate and it made me less effective than I should have been. But ultimately I do want to pay tribute to Flint. He is an excellent debater. He’s got a very sharp mind. He’s a very clever man and he’s very fast on his feet. And I recognize that.
I was definitely up against a superior debater in that debate. I’m not sure that I have those debating skills and I certainly didn’t have them on that particular day. I also admire about Flint something else, which is that he was willing to be there. Most archaeologists don’t want to talk to me at all. They want to insult me from the sidelines. They want to make sure that Wikipedia keeps on calling me a pseudo-archaeologist, or a purveyor of pseudo-archaeological theories. They want to make sure that the hints of racism are there, but they actually don’t want to sit down and confront me.
At least Flint was willing to do that and I’m grateful to him for that. And I think in that sense it is an important encounter between people with, let’s say, an alternative view of history and those with the very much mainstream view of history that archaeology gives us. And he’s also a very determined character. He doesn’t give up. So all of those things about him I admire and respect. But, I think he fought dirty during the debate, and I’ve said exactly why in this video that I now have up on YouTube.
Lex Fridman
To say a positive thing that I enjoyed, I think towards the end and him speaking about agriculture was pretty interesting. So the techniques of archaeology are pretty interesting, where you can get some insights through the fog of time about what people were doing, how they were living. That’s pretty interesting.
To say a positive thing that I enjoyed, I think towards the end and him speaking about agriculture was pretty interesting. So the techniques of archaeology are pretty interesting, where you can get some insights through the fog of time about what people were doing, how they were living. That’s pretty interesting.
Graham Hancock
It’s very interesting. It’s a very important discipline. And I’ve said many times before, publicly, I couldn’t do any of my work without the work that archaeologists do. I emphasize very strongly in this video that I don’t study what archaeologists study. But nevertheless, the data that archaeologists have generated over the last century or so has been incredibly valuable to me in the work that I do. But, when I look at the Great Sphinx and the studies of archaeology saying that this is the work of the pharaoh Khafre, despite the absence of any single contemporary inscription that describes it to Khafre, and in fact the presence of other inscriptions that say that it was already there in the time of Khufu, I am not looking at what egyptologists study. They just dismiss all of that and lock into the Khafre connection.
It’s very interesting. It’s a very important discipline. And I’ve said many times before, publicly, I couldn’t do any of my work without the work that archaeologists do. I emphasize very strongly in this video that I don’t study what archaeologists study. But nevertheless, the data that archaeologists have generated over the last century or so has been incredibly valuable to me in the work that I do. But, when I look at the Great Sphinx and the studies of archaeology saying that this is the work of the pharaoh Khafre, despite the absence of any single contemporary inscription that describes it to Khafre, and in fact the presence of other inscriptions that say that it was already there in the time of Khufu, I am not looking at what egyptologists study. They just dismiss all of that and lock into the Khafre connection.
At Gobekli Tepe, I’m not really looking at what archaeologists look at, I’m looking at the alignments of the megaliths and how they seem to track precession of the star Sirius over a period of time. Archaeologists aren’t interested in any of that. So I value and respect archeology. I think it’s an incredible tool for investigating our past, but I wish archaeologists would bring a slightly gentler frame of mind to it and a slightly opener perspective. And also that archaeologists would be willing to trust the general public to make up their own minds. It’s as though certain archaeologists are afraid of the public being presented with an alternative point of view, which they regard as quote, unquote, “dangerous,” because they somehow underestimate the intelligence of the general public and think the general public are just going to accept that.
Actually by condemning those alternative point of view, archaeologists make it much more likely that the general public will accept those alternative point of view, because there is a great distrust of experts in our society today. And behaving in a snobbish arrogant way, we archaeologists are the only people who are really qualified to speak about the past and anybody else who speaks about the past is dangerous. That actually is not helpful to archaeology in the long term. There could be a much more positive and a much more cooperative relationship. And I can see that relationship with a gentleman like Ed Barnhart. Was very much the case with archaeologist Martti Parssinen from the University of Helsinki and with geographer Alcio Arranzi, Brazilian geographer. Very, very senior figure who I worked with in the Amazon for season two of Ancient Apocalypse, looking at these astonishing earthworks that have emerged from the Amazon jungle and which more and more are now being found with LiDAR. Indeed, we found some of them ourselves with LiDAR while we were there.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. That was an incredible part of the show that I got a chance to preview. It’s like there’s all this earthworks. Yeah. The traces of things built on the ground that probably you can only really appreciate when you look from up above.
Yeah. That was an incredible part of the show that I got a chance to preview. It’s like there’s all this earthworks. Yeah. The traces of things built on the ground that probably you can only really appreciate when you look from up above.
Graham Hancock
That’s right.
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
So the idea that they built stuff that you can only appreciate when viewed from up above means they had a very deep relationship with the sky.
So the idea that they built stuff that you can only appreciate when viewed from up above means they had a very deep relationship with the sky.
Graham Hancock
With the sky. And a very good knowledge of geometry as well, because these are geometrical structures and some of them even seem to incorporate geometrical games, almost like squaring the circle. It’s not quite that, but you have a lovely square earthwork with a lovely circle earthwork right in the middle of it. Whatever else they were, they were geometers. They were not just builders of fantastically huge earthworks that nobody expected in the Amazon. Not just builders of cities that we now know existed in the Amazon. But, that they were astronomers and mathematicians as well.
With the sky. And a very good knowledge of geometry as well, because these are geometrical structures and some of them even seem to incorporate geometrical games, almost like squaring the circle. It’s not quite that, but you have a lovely square earthwork with a lovely circle earthwork right in the middle of it. Whatever else they were, they were geometers. They were not just builders of fantastically huge earthworks that nobody expected in the Amazon. Not just builders of cities that we now know existed in the Amazon. But, that they were astronomers and mathematicians as well.
Panspermia
Lex Fridman
Everything we’re talking about is so full of mystery. It’s just fascinating, especially the farther back we go.
Everything we’re talking about is so full of mystery. It’s just fascinating, especially the farther back we go.
Graham Hancock
That’s what I love about the past, is the mystery that’s there. And that’s another thing that I regret about some archeologists is that their mission seems to drain all mystery out of the past, to suck it dry like some vampire sucking the blood out of the past and to reduce it to a series of numbers that appear to be scientific. I think that’s most unfortunate. The past is deeply mysterious. The whole story of life on earth is deeply mysterious. We were talking about the timeline of human beings, but if you go back to the formation of the earth itself, if I’ve got the figures right, it’s about four-and-a-half billion years ago that the Earth supposedly formed. It was then incredibly hot and inhospitable to life for the next several hundred million years.
That’s what I love about the past, is the mystery that’s there. And that’s another thing that I regret about some archeologists is that their mission seems to drain all mystery out of the past, to suck it dry like some vampire sucking the blood out of the past and to reduce it to a series of numbers that appear to be scientific. I think that’s most unfortunate. The past is deeply mysterious. The whole story of life on earth is deeply mysterious. We were talking about the timeline of human beings, but if you go back to the formation of the earth itself, if I’ve got the figures right, it’s about four-and-a-half billion years ago that the Earth supposedly formed. It was then incredibly hot and inhospitable to life for the next several hundred million years.
But it was actually Francis Crick who pointed out something odd, that within 100 million years of the earth being cool enough to support life, there’s bacterial life all over the planet. And Crick wrote a book called Life Itself that was published in 1981, and he suggested that life had been brought here by a process of panspermia. Now that’s an idea that’s around in circulation that comets may carry bacteria, which can seed life on planets. But, Crick actually in Life Itself was talking about directed panspermia. He envisaged … This is Crick, not me. He envisaged an alien civilization far away across the galaxy, which faced extinction. Perhaps a supernova was going to go off in the neighborhood.
They were highly advanced. Their first thought it might’ve been, “Let’s get ourselves off the planet and go and populate some other planet,” but the distances of interstellar space were so great. So their second thought was, “Let’s preserve our DNA. Let’s put genetically engineered bacteria into cryogenic chambers and fire them off into the universe in all directions.” And bottom line of Crick’s theory in Life Itself is one of those cryogenic containers containing bacterial life from another solar system crashed into the early Earth. And that’s why life began so suddenly here on Earth.
Lex Fridman
If we as a human civilization continue, I think that is a one way to create backups of us elsewhere in the universe, given the space is to do a life gun and shoot it everywhere and it just plants. And you hope that whatever is the magic that makes up human consciousness … And if that magic was already there in the initial DNA of the bacteria-
If we as a human civilization continue, I think that is a one way to create backups of us elsewhere in the universe, given the space is to do a life gun and shoot it everywhere and it just plants. And you hope that whatever is the magic that makes up human consciousness … And if that magic was already there in the initial DNA of the bacteria-
Graham Hancock
The potential for that magic is there.
The potential for that magic is there.
Lex Fridman
The potential is there.
The potential is there.
Graham Hancock
And evolutionary forces will work upon it in different ways in different environments. But the potential is there. Yes. It’s something that we would do. If we were facing a complete extinction of life on planet Earth, a major global effort would be made to preserve it somehow. And that might well include firing off cryogenic chambers into the universe and hoping that some of them would land somewhere hospitable.
And evolutionary forces will work upon it in different ways in different environments. But the potential is there. Yes. It’s something that we would do. If we were facing a complete extinction of life on planet Earth, a major global effort would be made to preserve it somehow. And that might well include firing off cryogenic chambers into the universe and hoping that some of them would land somewhere hospitable.
Lex Fridman
And as you were mentioning, there’s just so many interesting mysteries along the way here. For example, I think like three billion years it was single-cell organisms. So it seems like life was pretty good for single-cell organisms, that there was no need for multicellularity that for animals, for any of this kind of stuff. So why is that? It seems like you could adapt much better if you are a more complicated organism. It took a really long time to take that leap. Is it because it’s really hard to do? And what was the forcing function to do that kind of leap?
And as you were mentioning, there’s just so many interesting mysteries along the way here. For example, I think like three billion years it was single-cell organisms. So it seems like life was pretty good for single-cell organisms, that there was no need for multicellularity that for animals, for any of this kind of stuff. So why is that? It seems like you could adapt much better if you are a more complicated organism. It took a really long time to take that leap. Is it because it’s really hard to do? And what was the forcing function to do that kind of leap?
And the same. For us to be selfish and self-obsessed for us humans, what was the magic leap to Homo sapiens from the other hominids? And why did Homo sapiens win out against the Neanderthals and the other competitors? Why are they not around anymore? So those are all fascinating mysteries and it feels like the more we propose radical ideas about our past and take it seriously and explore the more we’ll be able to figure out that puzzle that leads all the way back to Homo sapiens and maybe all the way back to the origin of life on Earth.
Graham Hancock
Yeah. Yeah. I think that Homo sapiens is the tail end of a very long, deep series of mysteries that goes back right to the beginning of life on this planet. And probably long before actually, because this planet is part of the universe. And God knows what else is out there in the universe.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that Homo sapiens is the tail end of a very long, deep series of mysteries that goes back right to the beginning of life on this planet. And probably long before actually, because this planet is part of the universe. And God knows what else is out there in the universe.
Lex Fridman
Why do you think Homo sapiens evolved? What was the magic thing? There’s a bunch of theories about fire leading to meat, to cooking, which can fuel the brain. That’s one. The other is social interaction. We’re able to use our imagination to construct ideas and share those ideas and tell great stories and that is somehow an evolutionary advantage. Do you have any favorite conceptions of-
Why do you think Homo sapiens evolved? What was the magic thing? There’s a bunch of theories about fire leading to meat, to cooking, which can fuel the brain. That’s one. The other is social interaction. We’re able to use our imagination to construct ideas and share those ideas and tell great stories and that is somehow an evolutionary advantage. Do you have any favorite conceptions of-
Graham Hancock
Well, it’s interesting. There’s no doubt that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for at least 10,000 years, probably more than that. And yet one of the popular views is that anatomically modern humans wiped out the Neanderthals, that we killed them off. But, at the same time we were into breeding with the Neanderthals. In a sense, the Neanderthals are not gone. They’re still within us today. We are part Neanderthal. There’s another theory that I’ve read about. There is some evidence that Neanderthals were cannibals, that there was ritual cannibalism took place amongst Neanderthals and particularly the eating of human brains. And this can cause Kuru, which can kill off whole populations. That’s another suggestion of why the Neanderthals died out.
Well, it’s interesting. There’s no doubt that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for at least 10,000 years, probably more than that. And yet one of the popular views is that anatomically modern humans wiped out the Neanderthals, that we killed them off. But, at the same time we were into breeding with the Neanderthals. In a sense, the Neanderthals are not gone. They’re still within us today. We are part Neanderthal. There’s another theory that I’ve read about. There is some evidence that Neanderthals were cannibals, that there was ritual cannibalism took place amongst Neanderthals and particularly the eating of human brains. And this can cause Kuru, which can kill off whole populations. That’s another suggestion of why the Neanderthals died out.
There’s lots of possibilities that have been put forward. Maybe we just out-competed them. Maybe anatomically modern humans had some brain connections that they didn’t have. Even though the Neanderthal brain was bigger than the brain of anatomically modern human beings, as the old saying goes, size isn’t everything. Maybe we just had a more compact, more efficient brain. The fact of the matter is that Neanderthals and Denisovans did not survive the rise of Homo sapiens.
Lex Fridman
For our discussion, though, what is interesting is all the hominids seem to be explorers.
For our discussion, though, what is interesting is all the hominids seem to be explorers.
Graham Hancock
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
They spread. I didn’t know this.
They spread. I didn’t know this.
Graham Hancock
The fact that Homo erectus was all over the planet more than a million years ago is testament to that. And I do think that exploration urge is fundamental to humanity. And I would like to say that’s what I think I’m doing. I’m exercising my urge to explore the past in my own way, making my own path and defining my own route.
The fact that Homo erectus was all over the planet more than a million years ago is testament to that. And I do think that exploration urge is fundamental to humanity. And I would like to say that’s what I think I’m doing. I’m exercising my urge to explore the past in my own way, making my own path and defining my own route.
Shamanism
Lex Fridman
That’s the leap from non-human to human. One of the things you’ve discussed is your idea of what was the leap to human civilization? What is the driver? What is the inspiration for humans to form civilizations? And for you, that’s shamanism.
That’s the leap from non-human to human. One of the things you’ve discussed is your idea of what was the leap to human civilization? What is the driver? What is the inspiration for humans to form civilizations? And for you, that’s shamanism.
Graham Hancock
Definitely.
Definitely.
Lex Fridman
Can you explain what that means?
Can you explain what that means?
Graham Hancock
I think that shamanism is the origin of everything of value in humanity. I think it was the earliest form of science. When I spend time with shamans in the Amazon, I observe people who are constantly experimenting with plants in a very scientific way. They’re always trying a pinch of this and a pinch of that in different forms, for example, of the ayahuasca brew, to see if it enhances it or makes it different in any way. The invention of curare is a remarkable scientific feat, which is entirely down to shamans in the Amazon. They are the scientists of the hunter-forager state of society and they were the ancient leaders of human civilization.
I think that shamanism is the origin of everything of value in humanity. I think it was the earliest form of science. When I spend time with shamans in the Amazon, I observe people who are constantly experimenting with plants in a very scientific way. They’re always trying a pinch of this and a pinch of that in different forms, for example, of the ayahuasca brew, to see if it enhances it or makes it different in any way. The invention of curare is a remarkable scientific feat, which is entirely down to shamans in the Amazon. They are the scientists of the hunter-forager state of society and they were the ancient leaders of human civilization.
So I think all civilization arises out of shamanism. And shamanism is a naturally scientific endeavor, where experimentation is undertaken an exploration and investigation of the environment around us. And what I’m suggesting is that one group, perhaps more than one group, went a bit further than other groups did, and used that study of the skies and developed navigational techniques and we’re able to sail and explore the Earth. But that ultimately what lies behind it is the same curiosity and investigative skill that shamans are still using in the Amazon to this day. And I do see them as scientists in a very proper use of the word.
Lex Fridman
But do you think something like ayahuasca was a part of that process?
But do you think something like ayahuasca was a part of that process?
Graham Hancock
Yes. Ayahuasca is the result of shamanistic investigation of what’s available in the Amazon. Of course, ayahuasca is all the fad in Western industrialized societies today. And some people see it as a miracle cure for all kinds of ailments and problems. And perhaps it is, perhaps it can be in certain ways. The ayahuasca itself is not an Amazonian word. It comes from the Quechuan language and it means the vine of souls or the vine of the dead. But the ayahuasca vine is only one of two principle ingredients in the ayahuasca brew. And the other ingredient are leaves that contain dimethyltryptamine. And there are two sources of that. One is a bush called Psychotria viridis, that’s its botanical name. They call it Chacruna in the Amazon. And its leaves are rich in dimethyltryptamine DMT, which is arguably the most powerful psychedelic known to science. And the other source comes from another vine, Diplopterys cabrerana, which the leaves of that vine also contain DMT. So the ayahuasca vine on its own is not going to give you a visionary journey. And the leaves that contain DMT on their own, whether they come from Diplopterys or whether they come from Chacruna, are not going to give you a visionary journey. And the reason they’re not going to give you the visionary journey, is because of the enzyme monoamine oxidase in the gut that shuts down DMT when absorbed orally. Basically, DMT is not accessible orally, unless you combine it with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. And that’s what I mean when I’m talking about science in the Amazon, because there’s so many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands different species of plants and trees in the Amazon. And they’ve gone around and they’ve found just two or three of them that put together can produce these extraordinary visionary experiences.
Yes. Ayahuasca is the result of shamanistic investigation of what’s available in the Amazon. Of course, ayahuasca is all the fad in Western industrialized societies today. And some people see it as a miracle cure for all kinds of ailments and problems. And perhaps it is, perhaps it can be in certain ways. The ayahuasca itself is not an Amazonian word. It comes from the Quechuan language and it means the vine of souls or the vine of the dead. But the ayahuasca vine is only one of two principle ingredients in the ayahuasca brew. And the other ingredient are leaves that contain dimethyltryptamine. And there are two sources of that. One is a bush called Psychotria viridis, that’s its botanical name. They call it Chacruna in the Amazon. And its leaves are rich in dimethyltryptamine DMT, which is arguably the most powerful psychedelic known to science. And the other source comes from another vine, Diplopterys cabrerana, which the leaves of that vine also contain DMT. So the ayahuasca vine on its own is not going to give you a visionary journey. And the leaves that contain DMT on their own, whether they come from Diplopterys or whether they come from Chacruna, are not going to give you a visionary journey. And the reason they’re not going to give you the visionary journey, is because of the enzyme monoamine oxidase in the gut that shuts down DMT when absorbed orally. Basically, DMT is not accessible orally, unless you combine it with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. And that’s what I mean when I’m talking about science in the Amazon, because there’s so many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands different species of plants and trees in the Amazon. And they’ve gone around and they’ve found just two or three of them that put together can produce these extraordinary visionary experiences.
Lex Fridman
Just imagine the number of plants they had to have eaten, consumed and smoked or all kinds of combinations to arrive at that.
Just imagine the number of plants they had to have eaten, consumed and smoked or all kinds of combinations to arrive at that.
Graham Hancock
Exactly. Exactly. To realize that this is something very special. And then to use the principles there to find another form of it. So ayahuasca is the form that is made with the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of the Chacruna plant. But Yage is made from the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of another vine the ploparis caapiano, which contain not only, which is the DMT that everybody’s pretty much familiar with these days, but also 5-MeO-DMT. And the Yage experience, which I have also had, in my view is more intense and more powerful almost to the point of being overwhelming than the ayahuasca experience. But what the result of this sophisticated chemistry that we find taking place here is a brew which is hideous to drink. The taste, I find it quite repulsive. I almost retched just smelling it in the cup.
Exactly. Exactly. To realize that this is something very special. And then to use the principles there to find another form of it. So ayahuasca is the form that is made with the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of the Chacruna plant. But Yage is made from the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of another vine the ploparis caapiano, which contain not only, which is the DMT that everybody’s pretty much familiar with these days, but also 5-MeO-DMT. And the Yage experience, which I have also had, in my view is more intense and more powerful almost to the point of being overwhelming than the ayahuasca experience. But what the result of this sophisticated chemistry that we find taking place here is a brew which is hideous to drink. The taste, I find it quite repulsive. I almost retched just smelling it in the cup.
But then unleashes these extraordinary experiences. And it isn’t just pretty visuals. It’s the sense of encounters with sentient others, that there are sentient beings, that somehow we are surrounded by a realm of sentience that is not normally accessible to us. And that what the ayahuasca brew and certain other psychedelics, like some psilocybin mushrooms in a high enough dose can do it as well. LSD can do it. But Ayahuasca is the master in this of lowering the veil to what appears to be a seamlessly convincing other realm, other world. And of course the hard line, rational scientists will say that’s just all fantasies of your brain. But I don’t think we fully understand,
Or even close to understanding exactly what consciousness is. And I remain open to two possibilities that consciousness is generated by the brain, is made by the brain in the way that a factory makes cars. But I also am open to the possibility that the brain is a receiver of consciousness, just as a television set is the receiver of television signals. And that if that is the case, then we locked into the physical realm. We need our everyday alert, problem-solving state of consciousness, and that’s the state of consciousness that western civilization values and highly encourages. But these other states of consciousness that allow us to access alternative realities are possibly more important. It may be apocryphal, but it was reported after Francis Crick’s role-
Graham Hancock
But it was reported after Francis Crick’s role and his Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix that he finally got it under the influence of LSD. There’s the classic example of Kary Mullis and the polymerase chain reaction. He said he got that under the influence of LSD. So the notion that the alert problem-solving state of consciousness is the only valuable state of consciousness is disproved by valuable experiences that people have had in a visionary state. But the question that remains unresolved is those entities that we encounter, and not everybody encounters them, and you’re certainly not going to encounter them on every ayahuasca trip. There are ayahuasca journeys where nothing seems to happen. I suspect something does happen, but it happens at a subconscious level. I know that shamans in the Amazon regard those trips where actually you don’t see visions as amongst the most valuable, and they say you are learning stuff that you’re not remembering, but you’re learning it anyway.
But it was reported after Francis Crick’s role and his Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix that he finally got it under the influence of LSD. There’s the classic example of Kary Mullis and the polymerase chain reaction. He said he got that under the influence of LSD. So the notion that the alert problem-solving state of consciousness is the only valuable state of consciousness is disproved by valuable experiences that people have had in a visionary state. But the question that remains unresolved is those entities that we encounter, and not everybody encounters them, and you’re certainly not going to encounter them on every ayahuasca trip. There are ayahuasca journeys where nothing seems to happen. I suspect something does happen, but it happens at a subconscious level. I know that shamans in the Amazon regard those trips where actually you don’t see visions as amongst the most valuable, and they say you are learning stuff that you’re not remembering, but you’re learning it anyway.
These sentient others that are encountered, what are they? Are they just figments of our brain on drugs or are we actually gaining access to a parallel reality, which is inhabited by consciousness which is in a non-physical form? And I’m equally open to that idea. I think that may be what is going on here with ayahuasca.
But the other thing is that there is a presence within the ayahuasca brew, and she is present both in ayahuasca and in yachay. And that’s one of the reasons why the shamans say that actually the master of the process is the ayahuasca vine, not the leaves. It’s as though the vine has harnessed the leaves to gain access to human consciousness. And there, if you have sufficient exposure to ayahuasca or yachay, you drink it enough times, I’ve had maybe 75 or 80 journeys with ayahuasca, you definitely start to feel an intelligent presence with a definite personality, which I interpret as feminine, and which most people in the West interpret it as feminine and they call her Mother Ayahuasca. There are some tribes in the Amazon who interpret the spirit of ayahuasca as male, but in all cases, that spirit is seen as a teacher. That’s fundamentally what ayahuasca is. It’s a teacher. And it teaches moral lessons.
And that’s fascinating, that a mixture of two plants should cause us to reflect on our own behavior and how it may have hurt and damaged and affected others and fill us with a powerful wish not to repeat that negative behavior again in the future. The more baggage you carry in your life, the harder the beating the ayahuasca is going to give you, until it forces you to confront and take responsibility for your own behavior. And that is an extraordinary thing to come from a plant brew in that way.
And I think yes, I think ayahuasca is the most powerful of all the plant medicines for accessing these mysterious realms. But there’s no doubt you can access them. They’re all tryptamines. They’re all related to one another in one way. You can access them through LSD and you certainly can access them through psilocyb mushrooms as well in large enough dose.
Lex Fridman
Both possibilities, as you describe, are interesting. And to me, they’re kind of akin to each other. I wonder what the limit of the brain’s capacity is to create imaginary worlds and treat them seriously and make them real, and in those worlds, explore and have real moral, deep brainstorming sessions with those entities. So it’s almost like the power of the human mind to imagine taken to its limit.
Both possibilities, as you describe, are interesting. And to me, they’re kind of akin to each other. I wonder what the limit of the brain’s capacity is to create imaginary worlds and treat them seriously and make them real, and in those worlds, explore and have real moral, deep brainstorming sessions with those entities. So it’s almost like the power of the human mind to imagine taken to its limit.
Graham Hancock
It is. And the curious thing is that the same iconography… People paint their visions after ayahuasca sessions. People were painting in Europe in the cave of Lascaux, for example, and of course they had access to psilocyb mushrooms in prehistoric Europe. There’s a remarkable commonality in the imagery that is painted.
It is. And the curious thing is that the same iconography… People paint their visions after ayahuasca sessions. People were painting in Europe in the cave of Lascaux, for example, and of course they had access to psilocyb mushrooms in prehistoric Europe. There’s a remarkable commonality in the imagery that is painted.
I like to give credit where credit is due, and there are two names that need to be mentioned here. One is the late, great Terence McKenna and his book Food of the Gods, where he proposed the idea very strongly that it was our ancestral encounters with psychedelics that made us fully human. That’s what switched on the modern human mind.
And very much the same idea began to be explored a bit earlier by Professor David Lewis-Williams at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, fabulous book called The Mind in the Cave, where he is again arguing that these astonishing similarities in cave art and rock art all around the world can only be properly explained by people in deeply altered states of consciousness attempting to remember, when they return to a normal everyday state of consciousness, attempting to remember their visions and document them on permanent media like the wall of a cave.
So, typically you get a lot of geometric patterns, but you also got entities. And those entities often are therianthropes, part animal, part human in form. Might have the head of a wolf and the body of a human being, might have the head of a bird and the body of a human being, and so on and so forth. And that they communicate with us in the visionary state.
Interestingly, although this sounds like woo-woo, and it is an area that most scientists would steer clear of at risk of their careers, there is very serious work now being done at Imperial College in London and at the University of California at San Diego, where volunteers are being given extended DMT. There’s a new technology, DMTx, where the DMT is fed directly into the bloodstream by drip, and it’s possible to keep the individual in the peak DMT state. Which normally when you smoke or vape DMT, you’re looking, if you’re lucky, at 10 minutes, or if you’re unlucky, if it’s a bad journey, because those 10 minutes can seem like forever. But with DMTx, with the drip-feeding of DMT into the bloodstream, these volunteers actually could be kept in the peak state for hours.
And unlike LSD where you rapidly build up tolerance, nobody ever builds up tolerance to DMT. It always hits you with the same power. Even if you took it yesterday and the day before and you’re taking it tomorrow as well, it’s still going to have that same power. There’s no tolerance there. So that’s how they can use that lack of tolerance to keep volunteers in this state.
And then when they debrief those volunteers… They’re also putting them in MRI scanners and looking at what’s happening in the brain. But when they debrief them, they’re all talking about encounters with sentient others. There’s even a group now called Sentient Others, where volunteers are now exchanging their experiences. They weren’t allowed to do so at the beginning of the experiment, but now that most of them have left it, they’re exchanging their experiences, and it’s all about encounters with sentient others who wish to teach them moral lessons.
Now, to me, that’s wild. What is going on here? How do we account for this? Yeah, I get the notion of hallucinations and brightly colored visuals, but the moral lessons that come with it, those are very odd.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And would you say that the reason that could give birth to a civilization, is it because such visions can help create myths, and especially religious myths, that would be a cohesive thing for a large group of people to get around?
Yeah. And would you say that the reason that could give birth to a civilization, is it because such visions can help create myths, and especially religious myths, that would be a cohesive thing for a large group of people to get around?
Graham Hancock
Yes. And can help us to be better members of our own community.
Yes. And can help us to be better members of our own community.
Lex Fridman
Right, with moral lessons.
Right, with moral lessons.
Graham Hancock
Yeah. More contributing members of our community. More caring, more nurturing members of our community. That’s got to be good for any community. I’ve said this a dozen times, but I’ll say it again. If I had the power to do so, I would make it a law, an absolute law, that anybody running for a powerful political position, particularly if that position is president or head of state in any kind of way, that that person has to undergo the ayahuasca ordeal first. They have to have 10 or 12 sessions of ayahuasca as a condition for applying for the job. I suspect that most who had had those experiences wouldn’t want to apply for the job anymore. They would want to live a different kind of life. And those who did want to carry on being a leader of a nation would be very different people from the people who are leading the nations of the earth into chaos and destruction today.
Yeah. More contributing members of our community. More caring, more nurturing members of our community. That’s got to be good for any community. I’ve said this a dozen times, but I’ll say it again. If I had the power to do so, I would make it a law, an absolute law, that anybody running for a powerful political position, particularly if that position is president or head of state in any kind of way, that that person has to undergo the ayahuasca ordeal first. They have to have 10 or 12 sessions of ayahuasca as a condition for applying for the job. I suspect that most who had had those experiences wouldn’t want to apply for the job anymore. They would want to live a different kind of life. And those who did want to carry on being a leader of a nation would be very different people from the people who are leading the nations of the earth into chaos and destruction today.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, they would be doing it for the right reasons. I mentioned to you, I recently interviewed Donald Trump, and I actually brought up this same idea that it would be a much better world if most of Congress and most politicians would take some form of psychedelic, at the very least.
Yeah, they would be doing it for the right reasons. I mentioned to you, I recently interviewed Donald Trump, and I actually brought up this same idea that it would be a much better world if most of Congress and most politicians would take some form of psychedelic, at the very least.
Graham Hancock
Yeah. I have no doubt that it would be a better world. I mean, this raises an interesting point, which is the role of government in controlling our consciousness. And in my opinion, the so-called War on Drugs is one of the fundamental abuses of human rights that have been undertaken in the past 60 years. It should be a Republican issue. If I understand the Republican Party correctly, the Republican Party believes in individual freedom for adults as much as possible, and particularly the freedom to make choices over their own bodies.
Yeah. I have no doubt that it would be a better world. I mean, this raises an interesting point, which is the role of government in controlling our consciousness. And in my opinion, the so-called War on Drugs is one of the fundamental abuses of human rights that have been undertaken in the past 60 years. It should be a Republican issue. If I understand the Republican Party correctly, the Republican Party believes in individual freedom for adults as much as possible, and particularly the freedom to make choices over their own bodies.
But in the case of even cannabis, I know, this is one of the great things that’s happening in America. It’s happening state by state where cannabis is being legalized and that draconian hand of government is being taken off the back of people who are consuming a medicine that is far less harmful than alcohol, which is glorified in our society.
We cannot say that we are free if we allow our government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness, while doing no harm to others. And the point there is we already have a whole raft of laws that deal with us when we do harm to others. Do we really need laws that tell us what we may or may not experience in the inner sanctum of our own consciousness? I think it’s a fundamental violation of adult sovereignty. And we would have much less drug problems if these drugs were all legalized and made available to people without shaming them, without punishing them in any way, but just part of normal social life. And then you could be sure that you were getting good product rather than really shitty product, which has been cut with all sorts of other things.
Ultimately, the way forward is for adults to take responsibility for their own behavior, and for society to allow that to happen, and not to have big government taking responsibility for decisions that should be in the hands of individuals.
Lex Fridman
And for me also, it’s exciting. Some of these substances like psilocybin are being integrated into scientific studies in large scales. It’s really interesting.
And for me also, it’s exciting. Some of these substances like psilocybin are being integrated into scientific studies in large scales. It’s really interesting.
Graham Hancock
We’ve seen a revolution in the way science looks at psychedelics in the last 20, 25 years. They were in that highly demonized category. But again, it’s one of those paradigms which gets overwhelmed by new evidence, and it began to be realized that psilocybin and other psychedelics are very helpful in a range of conditions from which people suffer. Post-traumatic stress disorder. The fear of death when you’re suffering from terminal cancer can be overwhelming, and it’s been found that psilocybin can remove that. Deep depressions can be evaporated with one single massive psilocybin journey. They just go away. There’s really good science on this. And they are being integrated into conventional medicine more and more. We’ll see it happening. I’m not sure if it’ll happen as fast as I would like to see it happen in my lifetime, but it is going to happen.
We’ve seen a revolution in the way science looks at psychedelics in the last 20, 25 years. They were in that highly demonized category. But again, it’s one of those paradigms which gets overwhelmed by new evidence, and it began to be realized that psilocybin and other psychedelics are very helpful in a range of conditions from which people suffer. Post-traumatic stress disorder. The fear of death when you’re suffering from terminal cancer can be overwhelming, and it’s been found that psilocybin can remove that. Deep depressions can be evaporated with one single massive psilocybin journey. They just go away. There’s really good science on this. And they are being integrated into conventional medicine more and more. We’ll see it happening. I’m not sure if it’ll happen as fast as I would like to see it happen in my lifetime, but it is going to happen.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I actually just recently found out that you had a TED Talk, War on Consciousness, that was taken down, and that was just part of just the general resistance. Because it was a pretty… It wasn’t radical. It wasn’t really a radical-
Yeah, I actually just recently found out that you had a TED Talk, War on Consciousness, that was taken down, and that was just part of just the general resistance. Because it was a pretty… It wasn’t radical. It wasn’t really a radical-
Graham Hancock
I was talking about ayahuasca and I was talking about the view that I hold very strongly that as long as we do no harm to others, sovereign adults should be allowed to make decisions about their own bodies and not face a jail sentence or shaming as the result. So it was a TEDx Talk, not a TED Talk, organized by a local TED group. They called them TEDx Talks. And I gave this talk about the war on consciousness, and it was immediately pulled down from TED’s main channel with all kinds of bizarre reasons being given. But unfortunately, it was too late because a number of people had already downloaded the talk and then uploaded it onto other YouTube channels. And actually, their banning of it made it go viral in a way that would not have happened otherwise. But again, it’s a sign that points of view that are not acceptable to those in positions of power are simply dismissed and shut down, or at least attempts are made to do so.
I was talking about ayahuasca and I was talking about the view that I hold very strongly that as long as we do no harm to others, sovereign adults should be allowed to make decisions about their own bodies and not face a jail sentence or shaming as the result. So it was a TEDx Talk, not a TED Talk, organized by a local TED group. They called them TEDx Talks. And I gave this talk about the war on consciousness, and it was immediately pulled down from TED’s main channel with all kinds of bizarre reasons being given. But unfortunately, it was too late because a number of people had already downloaded the talk and then uploaded it onto other YouTube channels. And actually, their banning of it made it go viral in a way that would not have happened otherwise. But again, it’s a sign that points of view that are not acceptable to those in positions of power are simply dismissed and shut down, or at least attempts are made to do so.
Lex Fridman
In general, just along that line of thinking, I’m pretty sure that what we understand about consciousness today will seem silly to humans from a hundred years from now.
In general, just along that line of thinking, I’m pretty sure that what we understand about consciousness today will seem silly to humans from a hundred years from now.
Graham Hancock
You bet it will. Especially if we harness psychedelics to investigate consciousness. And that is what is happening at Imperial College right now is the investigation of the experience. They’re not looking… There are other trials that are looking for the therapeutic potential of DMT, but in this case, they’re looking entirely at the experiences that people have and why they’re so similar from people from different age groups and different genders and different parts of the world, they’re all having the same experiences.
You bet it will. Especially if we harness psychedelics to investigate consciousness. And that is what is happening at Imperial College right now is the investigation of the experience. They’re not looking… There are other trials that are looking for the therapeutic potential of DMT, but in this case, they’re looking entirely at the experiences that people have and why they’re so similar from people from different age groups and different genders and different parts of the world, they’re all having the same experiences.
Lex Fridman
And for me, from an engineer perspective, it’s interesting if it’s possible to engineer consciousness in artificial beings. It’s another way to approach the question of how special is human consciousness. From where does it arise? Is it something that permeates all of life? And then in that case, what is the thing that makes life special? What is life? What is these living organisms that we have here that evolve to create humans? And what is truly special about humans? It’s both scary and exciting to consider the possibility that we can create something like this.
And for me, from an engineer perspective, it’s interesting if it’s possible to engineer consciousness in artificial beings. It’s another way to approach the question of how special is human consciousness. From where does it arise? Is it something that permeates all of life? And then in that case, what is the thing that makes life special? What is life? What is these living organisms that we have here that evolve to create humans? And what is truly special about humans? It’s both scary and exciting to consider the possibility that we can create something like this.
Graham Hancock
But why not? We are a vehicle for consciousness, in my view. I think consciousness is present in all life on earth. I don’t think it’s limited to human beings. We have the equipment to manifest and express that consciousness in the way that a dog, for example, doesn’t have or a snail doesn’t have or a pigeon doesn’t have. But when I look at two pigeons sitting on my garden fence and rubbing up close to each other and enjoying each other’s company and taking off together and hanging out together, I think they’re conscious beings. And I think consciousness is everywhere. I think it’s the basis of everything. And I suspect that fundamentally, consciousness is non-physical, and that it can manifest in physical forms where it can then have experiences that would not be available in the non-physical state. That’s a guess.
But why not? We are a vehicle for consciousness, in my view. I think consciousness is present in all life on earth. I don’t think it’s limited to human beings. We have the equipment to manifest and express that consciousness in the way that a dog, for example, doesn’t have or a snail doesn’t have or a pigeon doesn’t have. But when I look at two pigeons sitting on my garden fence and rubbing up close to each other and enjoying each other’s company and taking off together and hanging out together, I think they’re conscious beings. And I think consciousness is everywhere. I think it’s the basis of everything. And I suspect that fundamentally, consciousness is non-physical, and that it can manifest in physical forms where it can then have experiences that would not be available in the non-physical state. That’s a guess.
Lex Fridman
That’d be a fascinating… Because then you can construct all kinds of physical forms to manifest the consciousness.
That’d be a fascinating… Because then you can construct all kinds of physical forms to manifest the consciousness.
Graham Hancock
Yeah. And see if consciousness enters, if they become conscious. Isn’t there some suggestion that artificial intelligence is already becoming conscious?
Yeah. And see if consciousness enters, if they become conscious. Isn’t there some suggestion that artificial intelligence is already becoming conscious?
Lex Fridman
That makes humans really uncomfortable, because we are at the top of the food chain, we consider ourselves truly special, and to consider that there’s other things that could be special is scary.
That makes humans really uncomfortable, because we are at the top of the food chain, we consider ourselves truly special, and to consider that there’s other things that could be special is scary.
Graham Hancock
Well, look how other people make us uncomfortable too. I mean, look at the state of the world today. All the conflicts that are raging. That’s because we’re afraid. When I say we, I’m speaking nation by nation, we are afraid of other people. We fear that they’re going to hurt us or damage us in some way. And so we seek to stop that. It’s the root of many, many conflicts, this fear. And so fear of AI may not be such a good idea after all. It might be very interesting to go down that route and see where it comes. Certainly in terms of exploring consciousness, it is very interesting.
Well, look how other people make us uncomfortable too. I mean, look at the state of the world today. All the conflicts that are raging. That’s because we’re afraid. When I say we, I’m speaking nation by nation, we are afraid of other people. We fear that they’re going to hurt us or damage us in some way. And so we seek to stop that. It’s the root of many, many conflicts, this fear. And so fear of AI may not be such a good idea after all. It might be very interesting to go down that route and see where it comes. Certainly in terms of exploring consciousness, it is very interesting.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, fear is a useful thing, but it can also be destructive.
Yeah, fear is a useful thing, but it can also be destructive.
Graham Hancock
Well, it can be destructive and it can shut you down completely.
Well, it can be destructive and it can shut you down completely.
How the Great Pyramid was built
Lex Fridman
If you look into the future, maybe the next a hundred years, what do you hope are the interesting discoveries in archeology that we’ll find?
If you look into the future, maybe the next a hundred years, what do you hope are the interesting discoveries in archeology that we’ll find?
Graham Hancock
Well, I’d really like to know how the Great Pyramid was built. And we now have, with new tech, with scanning technology, it’s now become apparent that there are many major voids within the Great Pyramid. Right above the Grand Gallery, there’s what looks like a second Grand Gallery that has been identified with remote scanning. And new chambers, one of them has even been opened up already, are being found as a result of this. So it may be that the Great Pyramid will ultimately give up its secrets.
Well, I’d really like to know how the Great Pyramid was built. And we now have, with new tech, with scanning technology, it’s now become apparent that there are many major voids within the Great Pyramid. Right above the Grand Gallery, there’s what looks like a second Grand Gallery that has been identified with remote scanning. And new chambers, one of them has even been opened up already, are being found as a result of this. So it may be that the Great Pyramid will ultimately give up its secrets.
I often think that the Great Pyramid is partly designed to do that. It’s designed to invite its own initiates. Some people aren’t interested in the Great Pyramid at all, but some people are fascinated by it and they’re drawn towards it. And when they’re drawn towards it, it immediately starts raising questions in their minds, and they seek answers to their questions.
So it’s like saying, ” Here I stand. Investigate me. Find out about me. Figure out what I am. Why have I got these two shafts cut into the side of the so-called Queen’s Chamber?” Why do they slope up through the body of the Great Pyramid? Why do they not exit on the outside of the Great Pyramid? Why, when we send a robot up those shafts, do we find them after about 160 feet blocked by a door with metal handles. Why when we drill through that door to see what’s beyond it, three or four feet away, we see another door. It’s very frustrating. But it’s saying to us, “Keep on exploring. If you’re persistent enough, we’ll eventually give you the answer.”
So I’m hoping that that answer will come as to how this most mysterious of monuments was actually built and the inspiration that lay behind it. Certainly, I’m sure it was never a tomb, or a tomb only. The later pyramids might’ve been. Actually no pharaonic burial has been discovered in any pyramid. But nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that the later pyramids with the pyramid texts written on the walls, like the pyramid of Unas, Fifth Dynasty pyramid at Saqqara, were tombs.
But the Great Pyramid, to go to that length to create a tomb, to make it a scale model of the earth, to orient it perfectly to true north, to make it 6 million tons. This is not a tomb. This is something else. This is a curiosity device. This is something that is asking us to understand it. And I hope we will understand it. And I hope Egyptologists will be willing to set aside that prejudice that they’re only looking at a tomb and consider other possibilities. And as new tech is revealing these previously unknown inner spaces within the Great Pyramid, I think that’s going to become more and more likely.
Lex Fridman
So not just the how it was built, but the why.
So not just the how it was built, but the why.
Graham Hancock
But the why.
But the why.
Lex Fridman
And to you, it seems obvious that there would be a cosmic motivation.
And to you, it seems obvious that there would be a cosmic motivation.
Graham Hancock
Yeah, very, very much so. As above, so below. Which is an idea in the Hermetica. The God Hermes for the Greeks was the Greek version of Thoth, the wisdom God of Ancient Egypt. And that’s where that saying comes from. It comes from the Hermetica. But it’s expressing an ancient Egyptian idea, to mirror the perfection of the heavens on earth.
Yeah, very, very much so. As above, so below. Which is an idea in the Hermetica. The God Hermes for the Greeks was the Greek version of Thoth, the wisdom God of Ancient Egypt. And that’s where that saying comes from. It comes from the Hermetica. But it’s expressing an ancient Egyptian idea, to mirror the perfection of the heavens on earth.
Lex Fridman
So you think there’s something interesting to be discovered about the how it was built? You mean beyond the ideas of using ramps and wet sand.
So you think there’s something interesting to be discovered about the how it was built? You mean beyond the ideas of using ramps and wet sand.
Graham Hancock
Yeah. Ramps won’t do it. Ramps won’t do it. Nor will wet sand. It’s true that the ancient Egyptians did haul big objects on sleds on wet sand. There are even reliefs that show the process where an individual is standing on the front of the sledge pouring water down to lubricate the sand underneath. And that’s a perfectly respectable way to move a 200 ton block of stone across sand, flat sand, if you have enough people to pull it. But that is not going to help you get dozens of 70 ton granite blocks 300 feet in the air to form the roof of the King’s Chamber and the floor of the chamber above it, and the roof of that chamber, and the floor of the chamber above that, and so on and so forth. Wet sand never got those objects up there. Somehow they were lifted up there.
Yeah. Ramps won’t do it. Ramps won’t do it. Nor will wet sand. It’s true that the ancient Egyptians did haul big objects on sleds on wet sand. There are even reliefs that show the process where an individual is standing on the front of the sledge pouring water down to lubricate the sand underneath. And that’s a perfectly respectable way to move a 200 ton block of stone across sand, flat sand, if you have enough people to pull it. But that is not going to help you get dozens of 70 ton granite blocks 300 feet in the air to form the roof of the King’s Chamber and the floor of the chamber above it, and the roof of that chamber, and the floor of the chamber above that, and so on and so forth. Wet sand never got those objects up there. Somehow they were lifted up there.
Now, yeah, ramps are proposed as the solution, but where are the remains of those ramps? If you’re going to carry blocks weighing up to two or three tons right to the top of the Great Pyramid to complete your work, you’re going to need a ramp that’s going to extend out into the desert for more than a mile at a 10 degree slope. And it’s calculated that a 10 degree slope is about the maximum slope that human labor can haul objects up a ramp. And that ramp can’t just be compacted sand, since heavy objects are being hauled up. It’s going to have to be made of very solid material, almost as solid as the pyramid itself. Where is it? We don’t see any trace of those so-called ramps that are supposed to have been involved in the construction of the pyramid. I think we don’t know. I think we have no idea it’s built. That’s why there’s so many different theories. We haven’t got the answer yet. But the how of it is one of the big mysteries from our past.
Lex Fridman
I love the Great Pyramids as a kind of puzzle that was created by the ancient peoples to be solved by later peoples. I don’t know if you’re aware of the 10,000-year clock that was built by Jeff Bezos and Danny Hillis in Sierra Diablo mountains in Texas. They’re building a clock that ticks once a year for 10,000 years.
I love the Great Pyramids as a kind of puzzle that was created by the ancient peoples to be solved by later peoples. I don’t know if you’re aware of the 10,000-year clock that was built by Jeff Bezos and Danny Hillis in Sierra Diablo mountains in Texas. They’re building a clock that ticks once a year for 10,000 years.
Graham Hancock
Oh, wow.
Oh, wow.
Lex Fridman
So it’s talking about… And it’s supposed to sort of run, if there’s a nuclear apocalypse, it just runs.
So it’s talking about… And it’s supposed to sort of run, if there’s a nuclear apocalypse, it just runs.
Graham Hancock
It’ll keep running.
It’ll keep running.
Lex Fridman
It’s an example of modern humans thinking like, okay, if 10,000 years from now and beyond, if something goes wrong or the future humans that are way different come back and they analyze what happened here, how can we create monuments that they could then analyze, and in that way be curious about. In their curiosity, discover some deep truths about this current time. It’s an interesting kind of notion of what can we build now.
It’s an example of modern humans thinking like, okay, if 10,000 years from now and beyond, if something goes wrong or the future humans that are way different come back and they analyze what happened here, how can we create monuments that they could then analyze, and in that way be curious about. In their curiosity, discover some deep truths about this current time. It’s an interesting kind of notion of what can we build now.
Graham Hancock
That would last. And the answer is that the majority of what we build now wouldn’t last.
That would last. And the answer is that the majority of what we build now wouldn’t last.
Lex Fridman
It wouldn’t.
It wouldn’t.
Graham Hancock
It would be gone within a few thousand years. But what would last is massive megalithic structures like the Great Pyramid. That would last. And it could be used to send a message to the future. I think Göbekli Tepe serves a similar function. I mean, there it was, it was buried 10,400 years ago. And then for the next 10,000 years, nobody touched it. Nobody knew it was there. It took the genius of Klaus Schmidt, the original excavator, to realize what he’d found and what it was. But the great thing about the ceiling of Göbekli Tepe, the deliberate burial of Göbekli Tepe, is it means that no later culture trod over it and imposed their organic materials on it and messed up the dating sequences and so on and so forth, or vandalized it or used it as a quarry. It’s all there intact.
It would be gone within a few thousand years. But what would last is massive megalithic structures like the Great Pyramid. That would last. And it could be used to send a message to the future. I think Göbekli Tepe serves a similar function. I mean, there it was, it was buried 10,400 years ago. And then for the next 10,000 years, nobody touched it. Nobody knew it was there. It took the genius of Klaus Schmidt, the original excavator, to realize what he’d found and what it was. But the great thing about the ceiling of Göbekli Tepe, the deliberate burial of Göbekli Tepe, is it means that no later culture trod over it and imposed their organic materials on it and messed up the dating sequences and so on and so forth, or vandalized it or used it as a quarry. It’s all there intact.
Mortality
Lex Fridman
So you mentioned that the pyramids, and some of the other amazing things that humans have built, was the result of us humans struggling with our mortality.
So you mentioned that the pyramids, and some of the other amazing things that humans have built, was the result of us humans struggling with our mortality.
Graham Hancock
That’s the ultimate goal. That seems to me what’s at the heart of many pyramids around the world is that they’re connected in one way or another to the notion of death and to the notion of the exploration of the afterlife. And this is of course, the fundamental mystery that all human beings face. We may wish to ignore it, we may wish to pretend that it’s not going to happen, but we are of course, all mortal. Every one of us, all 8 billion or however many of us that are on the planet right now, we’re all going to face death sooner or later. And the question is what happens?
That’s the ultimate goal. That seems to me what’s at the heart of many pyramids around the world is that they’re connected in one way or another to the notion of death and to the notion of the exploration of the afterlife. And this is of course, the fundamental mystery that all human beings face. We may wish to ignore it, we may wish to pretend that it’s not going to happen, but we are of course, all mortal. Every one of us, all 8 billion or however many of us that are on the planet right now, we’re all going to face death sooner or later. And the question is what happens?
And there are a few cultures that really intensely, deeply studied that mystery. We are not one of them. The general view of science, I think, is that we’re accidents of evolution. When we die, the light blinks out. There’s no more of us. There’s no such thing as the soul. But that’s not a proven point. There’s no experiment that proves that’s the case. We know we die, but we don’t know whether there’s such a thing as a soul or not.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s the great mystery.
Yeah, it’s the great mystery.
Graham Hancock
It’s a great mystery that we all share, and those cultures that have investigated it, and Ancient Egypt is the best example, have investigated it thoroughly and map out the journey that we make after death. But that notion of a journey after death and of hazards and challenges along the way and ultimately of a judgment, that notion is found right around the world, and it even manifests into the three monotheistic faiths that are still present in the world today.
It’s a great mystery that we all share, and those cultures that have investigated it, and Ancient Egypt is the best example, have investigated it thoroughly and map out the journey that we make after death. But that notion of a journey after death and of hazards and challenges along the way and ultimately of a judgment, that notion is found right around the world, and it even manifests into the three monotheistic faiths that are still present in the world today.
Lex Fridman
Well, you’re one such human, and you said you contemplate your own death.
Well, you’re one such human, and you said you contemplate your own death.
Graham Hancock
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Are you afraid of it?
Are you afraid of it?
Graham Hancock
No. I’m not afraid of death at all. I’m curious about death. I think it could be very interesting. I think it’s the beginning of the next great adventure. So I don’t fear it. And I would like to live as long as my body is healthy enough to make living worthwhile. But I don’t fear death. What I do fear is pain. I do fear the humiliation that old age and the collapse of the faculties can bring. I do fear the cancers that can strike us down and riddle us with pain and agony. That I fear very, very much indeed.
No. I’m not afraid of death at all. I’m curious about death. I think it could be very interesting. I think it’s the beginning of the next great adventure. So I don’t fear it. And I would like to live as long as my body is healthy enough to make living worthwhile. But I don’t fear death. What I do fear is pain. I do fear the humiliation that old age and the collapse of the faculties can bring. I do fear the cancers that can strike us down and riddle us with pain and agony. That I fear very, very much indeed.
But death is going to come to all of us. I accept it. It’s going to come to me. I’m not going to say I’m looking forward to it, but when it happens, I’m going to approach it, I hope, with a sense of curiosity and a sense of adventure, that there’s something beyond this life. It isn’t heaven, it isn’t hell, but there’s something. The soul goes on. I think reincarnation is a very plausible idea. Again, modern science would reject that. But there’s the excellent work of Ian Stevenson, Children Who Remember Past Lives, who found that children up to the age of seven often have memories of past lives.
And in cultures where memories of past lives are discouraged, they tend not to express that much. But in cultures where memories of past lives are encouraged, like India, they do express it. And he found several subjects, children under the age of seven in India, who were able to remember specific details of a past life, and he was able to go to the place where that past life unfolded and validate those details. So if consciousness is the basis of everything, if it’s the essence of everything, and consciousness benefits in some way from being incarnated in physical form, then reincarnation makes a lot of sense. All the investment that the universe has put into creating this home for life may have a much bigger purpose than just accident.
Lex Fridman
What a beautiful mystery this whole thing is.
What a beautiful mystery this whole thing is.
Graham Hancock
Yeah. We are immersed in mystery. We live in the midst of mystery. We’re surrounded by mystery. And if we pretend otherwise, we’re deluding ourselves.
Yeah. We are immersed in mystery. We live in the midst of mystery. We’re surrounded by mystery. And if we pretend otherwise, we’re deluding ourselves.
Lex Fridman
And Graham, thank you so much for inspiring the world to explore that mystery. Thank you for talking today.
And Graham, thank you so much for inspiring the world to explore that mystery. Thank you for talking today.
Graham Hancock
Thank you, Lex. It’s been a pleasure.
Thank you, Lex. It’s been a pleasure.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Graham Hancock. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Graham Hancock. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #448
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #448 with Jordan Peterson.
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So there’s other people whose thought is of equivalent value. I’ve returned recently, and I’m going to do a course on to the work of this Romanian historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, who’s not nearly as well known as he should be, and whose work, by the way, is a real antidote to the postmodern, nihilistic, Marxist stream of literary interpretation that the universities as a whole have adopted. And Eliade is like that too. I used this book called The Sacred and the Profane quite extensively in a book that I’m releasing in mid-November, We Who Wrestle with God, and it’s of the same sort. It’s endlessly analyzable. Eliade walked through the whole history of religious ideas and he had the intellect that enabled him to do that. And everything he wrote is dreamlike in its density. So every sentence or paragraph is evocative in an image-rich manner. And that also, what would you say deepens and broadens the scope.
That’s part of often what distinguishes writing that has a literary end from writing that’s more merely technical. The literary writings have this imagistic and dreamlike reference space around them. It takes a long time to turn a complex image into something semantic. And so if you’re writing evokes deep imagery, it has a depth that can’t be captured merely in words. And the great romantic poetic philosophers, Nietzsche is a very good example, Dostoevsky is a good example, so is Mircea Eliade, they have that quality and it’s a good way of thinking about it. It’s kind of interesting from the perspective of technical analysis of intelligence, and there’s a good book called The User Illusion, which is the best book on consciousness that I ever read. It explains the manner in which our communication is understandable in this manner. So imagine that when you’re communicating something, you’re trying to change the way that your target audience perceives and acts in the world.
So that’s an embodied issue, but you’re using words which obviously aren’t equivalent to the actions themselves. You can imagine that the words are surrounded by a cloud of images that they evoke and that the images can be translated into actions. And the greatest writing uses words in a manner that evokes images that profoundly affects perception and action. And so I would take the manner in which I act and behave, I would translate that into a set of images. My dreams do that for me, for example. Then I compress them into words. I toss you the words, you decompose them, decompress them into the images and then into the actions. And that’s what happens in a meaningful conversation. It’s a very good way of understanding how we communicate linguistically.
You’re sampling and you’re only sampling a small element of the space that’s in front of you, and the element that you choose to sample is dependent on your aims and your goals. So it’s value saturated. And so all your perceptions are action predicated and partly what you’re doing when you’re communicating is therefore not only changing people’s actions, let’s say, but you’re also changing the strategy that they use to perceive. And so you change the way the world reveals itself for them. See, this is why it’s such a profound experience to read a particularly deep thinker because you could also think of your perceptions as the axioms of your thought. That’s a good way of thinking about it. A perception is like a… what would you say? It’s a thought that’s so set in concrete that you now see it rather than conceptualize it. A really profound thinker changes the way you perceive the world. That’s way deeper than just how you think about it or how you feel about it.
Now, Nietzsche was very interested in that, and I don’t think he got that exactly right. But the postmodernists, for example, especially the ones, and this is most of them with the Neo-Marxist bent, their presumption is that the fundamental unifying idea is power, that everything’s about compulsion and force essentially, and that that’s the only true unifying ethos of mankind, which is, I don’t know if there’s a worse idea than that. I mean, there are ideas that are potentially as dangerous. The nihilistic idea is pretty dangerous, although it’s more of a disintegrating notion than a unifying idea. The hedonistic idea that you live for pleasure, for example, that’s also very dangerous. But if you wanted to go for sheer pathology, the notion that, and this is Foucault in a nutshell and Marx for that matter, that power rules everything. Not only is that a terrible unifying idea, but it fully justifies your own use of power.
And I don’t mean the power Nietzsche talks about. His will to power was more his insistence that a human being is an expression of will rather than a mechanism of self-protection and security. He thought of the life force in human beings as something that strived not to protect itself, but to exhaust itself in being and becoming. It’s like an upward oriented motivational drive even towards meaning. Now he called it the will to power, and that had some unfortunate consequences, at least that’s how it’s translated. But he didn’t mean the power motivation that people like Foucault or Marx became so hung up on.
But the truth of the matter is that you can force people to see things your way, let’s say, but it’s nowhere near as good as strategy even practically than the strategy that would be associated with something like voluntary joint agreement of pattern of movement strategy towards a goal. See, this is such an important thing to understand because it helps you start to understand the distinction between a unifying force that’s based on power and compulsion, and one that is much more in keeping, I would say with the ethos that governs western societies, free western societies, there’s really a qualitative difference, and it’s not some morally relativistic illusion.
Fractionation of your goals, so that means you’re less motivated to move forward than you might be because there’s many things competing for your attention. And also anxiety, because anxiety actually signals something like goal conflict. So there’s an inescapable proclivity of value systems to unite. Now, if you kill the thing that’s uniting them, that’s the death of God, they either fractionate and you get confusion, anxiety and hopelessness, or you get social disunity or and you get social disunity or something else arises out of the abyss to constitute that unifying force. And Nietzsche said specifically that he believed that one of those manifestations would be that of communism and that that would kill… he said this in Will to Power, that that would kill tens of millions of people in the upcoming 20th century.
He could see that coming 50 years earlier. And Dostoevsky did the same thing in his book, Demons. So this is the thing that the areligious have to contend with. It’s a real conundrum because I mean, you could dispute the idea that our value systems tend towards a unity and society does as well because otherwise we’re disunified. But the cost of that disunity, as I said, is goal confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness. So it’s like a real cost. So you could dispense with the notion of unity altogether, and the Postmodernists did that to some degree, but they pulled off a sleight of hand too where they replaced it by power. Now, Nietzsche did. He’s responsible for that to some degree because Nietzsche said with his conception of the Ãœbermensch, let’s say, is that human beings would have to create their own values because the value structure that had descended from on high was now shunted aside.
But there’s a major problem with that, many major problems. The psychoanalysts were the first people who really figured this out after Nietzsche, because imagine that we don’t have a relationship with the transcendental anymore that orients us. Okay, now we have to turn to ourselves. Now, if we were a unity, a clear unity within ourselves, let’s say, then we could turn to ourselves for that discovery. But if we’re a fractionated plurality internally, then when we turn to ourselves, we turn to a fractionated plurality. Well, that was Freud’s observation. It’s like, well, how can you make your own values when you’re not the master in your own house?
You’re a war of competing motivations, or maybe you’re someone who’s dominated by the will to force and compulsion. And so why do you think that you can rely on yourself as the source of values? And why do you think you’re wise enough to consult with yourself to find out what those values are or what they should be say in the course of a single life? I mean, it’s difficult to organize your own personal relationship like one relationship in the course of your life, let alone to try to imagine that out of whole cloth you could construct an ethos that would be psychologically and socially stabilizing and last over the long run. And of course, Marx people like that, the people who reduce human motivation to a single axis, they had the intellectual hubris to imagine that they could do that. Postmodernists are a good example of that as well.
We’re seeing this happen online. One of the things that you’re seeing happening online, I’m sure you’ve noticed this, especially on the right wing psychopathic troll side of the distribution, is the weaponization of a certain form of Christian ideation. And that’s often marked at least online by the presence of, what would you say, cliches like Christ is king, which has a certain religious meaning, but a completely different meaning in this sphere of emerging right wing pathology, “right wing”. The political dimension isn’t the right dimension of analysis, but it’s definitely the case that the best possible ideas can be used for the worst possible purposes. And that also brings up another specter, which is like, well, is there any reliable and valid way of distinguishing truly beneficial, unifying ideas from those that are pathological? And so that’s another thing that I tried to detail out in these lectures, but also in this new book, it’s like, how do you tell the good actors from the bad actors at the most fundamental level of analysis?
Part of the way… See, that problem is actually resolved to some degree in the notion of… in the developing notion of sacrifice that emerges in the western canon over thousands and thousands of years. So one of the suggestions, for example, and this is something exemplified in the passion story, is that you can tell the valid holder of an idea because that holder will take the responsibility for the consequences of his idea onto himself. And that’s why, for example, you see one way of conceptualizing Christ in the gospel story is as the ultimate sacrifice to God. So you might ask, well, what’s the ultimate sacrifice? And there are variants of the answer to that. One form of ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of a child, the offering of a child, and the other is the offering of the self. And the story of Christ brings both of those together because he’s the son of God that’s offered to God.
And so it’s a marketable resolution of that tension between ultimate sacrifice, ultimate because once you’re a parent, most parents would rather sacrifice themselves than their children. So you have something that becomes of even more value than yourself. But the sacrifice of self is also a very high order level of sacrifice. Christ is an archetype of the pattern of being that’s predicated on the decision to take… to offer everything up to the highest value, that pattern of self-sacrifice. And I think part of the reason that’s valid is because the person who undertakes to do that pays the price themselves. It’s not externalized. They’re not trying to change anyone else except maybe by example. It’s your problem. Like Solzhenitsyn pointed that out too when he was struggling with the idea of good versus evil, and you see this in more sophisticated literature.
In really unsophisticated literature or drama, there’s a good guy and the bad guy and the good guy’s all good, and the bad guy’s all bad. And in more sophisticated literature, the good and bad are abstracted. You can think of them as spirits. And then those spirits possess all the characters in the complex drama to a greater or lesser degree and that battle is fought out both socially and internally. In the high order religious conceptualizations in the West, if they culminate, let’s say in the Christian story, the notion is that battle between good and evil is fundamentally played out as an internal drama.
But given the alignment, let’s say, of the more mainstream Protestant movements with the woke mob, I don’t think it’s an absurd criticism. It’s something like the degeneration of Christianity into the notion that good and harmless are the same thing, or good and empathic are the same thing, which is simply not true and far too simplified. And I also think Nietzsche was extremely wrong in his presumption that human beings should take it to themselves to construct their own values. I think he made a colossal error in that presumption.
You can’t gerrymander the foundation because your foundational beliefs have to put you in harmony like musical harmony with the actual structure of reality as such. So I can give you an example of that. So our goal insofar as we’re conducting ourselves properly, is to have the kind of interesting conversation that allows both of us to express ourselves in a manner that enables us to learn and grow, such that we can share that with everyone who’s listening. And if our aim is true and upward, then that’s what we’re doing. Well, that means that we’re going to have to match ourselves to a pattern of interaction, and that’s marked for us emotionally. Like you and I both know this, if we’re doing this right…
To do that, we have to align with that pattern. I can’t decide that there’s some arbitrary way that I’m going to play you. I mean, I could do that if I was a psychopathic manipulator. But to do that optimally, I’m not going to impose a certain A priori aim, let’s say, on our communication and manipulate you into that. So the constraints on my ethos reflect the actual structure of the world.
This is the communist presumptions. It’s like, we’re going to burn everything down and we’re going to start from scratch. And we’ve got these axiomatic presumptions, and we’re going to put them into place. And we’re going to socialize people so they now think and live like communists from day one. And human beings are infinitely malleable, and we can use a rational set of presuppositions to decide what sort of beings they should be.
The transhumanists are doing this too. It’s like, no, there’s a pattern of being that you have to fall into alignment with. I think it’s the pattern of being, by the way, that if you fall into alignment with, it gives you hope, it protects you from anxiety, and it gives you a sense of harmony with your surroundings and with other people. And none of that’s arbitrary.
And that space of play is going to depend on the sophistication of the player, obviously. But those who are capable of engaging in deeper conversations talk about more fundamental things with more play. Now, we have to come to the conversation with a certain degree of structure, because we wouldn’t be able to understand each other or communicate if a lot of things weren’t already assumed or taken for granted.
There’s more patterns of potential games on a chessboard than there are subatomic particles in the observable universe. It’s an insane space. So it’s not like there’s not freedom within it. But it’s a weird paradox in a way, isn’t it? Because music is like this too, is that there are definitely rules. You can’t throw a basketball into a chess board and still be playing chess. But weirdly enough, if you adhere to the rules, the realm of freedom increases rather than decreasing.
I think you can make the same case for a playful conversation. It’s like we’re playing by certain rules and a lot of them are implicit, but that doesn’t mean that… It might mean the reverse of constraint. Because in this seminar, for example, that I was referring to, the Exodus Seminar and then the Gospel Seminar, everybody in this seminar, there’s about eight of us, played fair.
Nobody used power. Nobody tried to prove they were right. They put forward their points, but they were like, “Here’s a way of looking at that. Assess it.” They were also doing it genuinely. It’s like, this is what I’ve concluded about say this story. And I’m going to make a case for it, but I’d like to hear what you have to say because maybe you can change it, you can extend it, you can find a flaw in it.
Well, that’s a conversation that has flow and that’s engaging and that other people will listen to as well. See, I think that one of the things that we can conclude now, and we can do this even from a neuroscientific basis, is that that sense of engaged meaning is a marker not only for the emergence of harmony between you and your environment, but for the emergence of that harmony in a way that is developmentally rich, that moves you upward towards…
What would you say? Well, I think towards a more effective entropic state. That’s actually the technical answer to that. But it makes you more than you are, and there’s a directionality in that.
Because there’s ambiguity, there’s room for play in communism and Marxism, because they had a utopian sense of where everybody’s headed, don’t know how it’s going to happen. Maybe revolution is required. But after the revolution is done, we’ll figure it out. And there’s an underlying assumption that maybe human beings are good and they’ll figure it out once you remove the oppressor.
I mean, all these ideas, until you put them into practice, it can be quite convincing if you were in the 19th century. If I was reading, which is fascinating, the 19th century produced such powerful ideas, Marx and Nietzsche.
And that once we become civilized, so we produce societies that are united even among people who don’t know one another, different principles have to apply as a consequence of scale. So that’s partly an engineering response, but I think there’s a deeper way of going after the communist problem. So I think part of the fundamental problem with the communist axioms is the notion that the world of complex social interactions can be simplified sufficiently so that centralized planning authorities can deal with it.
And I think the best way to think about the free exchange rejoinder to that presumption is no, the sum total of human interactions in a large civilization are so immense that you need a distributed network of cognition in order to compute the proper way forward. And so what you do is you give each actor their domain of individual choice so that they can maximize their own movement forward.
And you allow the aggregate direction to emerge from that rather than trying to impose it from the top down, which I think is computationally impossible. So that might be one engineering reason why the communist solution doesn’t work. Like I read in Solzhenitsyn, for example, that the Central Soviet authorities often had to make 200 pricing decisions a day. Now, if you’ve ever started a business or created a product and had to wrestle with the problem of pricing, you’d become aware of just how intractable that is.
How do you calculate worth? Well, there’s the central existential problem of life. How do you calculate worth? It’s not something like a central authority can sit down and just manage. There is a lot of inputs that go into a pricing decision. And the free market answer to that is something like, well, if you get the price right, people will buy it and you’ll survive.
And so Eliade and Jung, Erich Neumann and Campbell, they were looking and Campbell, they were looking at patterns of narrative that were common across religious traditions that had spanned millennia and found many patterns. The hero’s myth, for example, is one of those patterns. And it’s, I think, the evidence that it has its reflection in human neurophysiology and neuropsychology is incontrovertible.
And so these foundational narratives, they last. They’re common across multiple religious traditions. They unite. They work psychologically, but they also reflect the underlying neurophysiological architecture. So I can give you an example of that. So the hero myth is really a quest myth. And a quest myth is really a story of exploration and expansion of adaptation.
So Bilbo the Hobbit, he’s kind of an ordinary every man. He lives in a very constrained and orderly and secure world. And then the quest call comes and he goes out and he expands his personality and develops his wisdom. And that’s reflected in human neuropsychological architecture at a very low level, way below cognition. So one of the most fundamental elements of the mammalian brain, and even in lower animal forms, is the hypothalamus.
It’s the root of primary motivation. So it governs lust, and it regulates your breathing, and it regulates your hunger, and it regulates your thirst, and it regulates your temperature. Like really low level biological necessities are regulated by the hypothalamus. When you get hungry, it’s the hypothalamus. When you’re activated in a defensively aggressive manner, that’s the hypothalamus.
Half the hypothalamus is the origin of the dopaminergic tracts, and they subsume exploration. And so you could think of the human motivational reality as a domain that’s governed by axiomatic motivational states, love, sex, defensive aggression, hunger, and another domain that’s governed by exploration. And the rule would be something like when your basic motivational states are sated, explore.
And that’s not cognitive. Like I said, this is deep, deep brain architecture. It’s extraordinarily ancient. And the exploration story is something like go out into the unknown and take the risks because the information that you discover and the skills you develop will be worthwhile, even in sating the basic motivational drives. And then you want to learn to do that in a iterative manner so it sustains across time, and you want to do it in a way that unites you with other people.
And there’s a pattern to that, and I do think that’s the pattern that we strive to encapsulate in our deep religious narratives. And I think that in many ways we’ve done that successfully.
So he speaks in the voice of a cynical nihilistic and bitter bureaucrat who’s been a failure, who’s talking cynically about the nature of human beings, but also very accurately. And one of the things he points out with regards to modern utopianism is that human beings are very strange creatures.
And that if you gave them what the socialist utopians want to give them, so let’s say all your needs are taken care of, all your material needs are taken care of and even indefinitely, Dostoevsky’s claim was, well, you don’t understand human beings very well. Because if you put them in an environment that was that comfortable, they would purposefully go insane just to break it into bits just so something interesting would happen.
Right. And he says it’s the human proclivity to curse and complain. He says this in quite a cynic and caustic manner, but he’s pointing to something deep, which is that we’re not built for comfort and security. We’re not infants. We’re not after satiation. So then you might ask, well, what the hell are we after then? That’s what the Abraham story addresses. Abraham is the first true individual in the biblical narrative.
So you could think about his story as the archetypal story of the developing individual. So you said, well, what’s God? Well, in the Abraham story, God has characterized a lot of different ways in the classic religious texts. Like the Bible is actually a compilation of different characterizations of the divine with the insistence that they reflect an underlying unity. In the story of Abraham, the divine is the call to adventure.
So Abraham has the socialist utopia at hand. He’s from a wealthy family, and he has everything he needs. And he actually doesn’t do anything until he’s in his 70s. Now, hypothetically, people in those times lived much longer. But a voice comes to Abraham and it tells him something very specific. It says, “Leave your zone of comfort. Leave your parents. Leave your tent. Leave your community. Leave your tribe. Leave your land. Go out into the world.”
And Abraham thinks, well, why? I’ve got naked slave girls peeling grapes and feeding them to me. It’s like, what do I need an adventure for? And God tells them, and this is the covenant, by the way, part of the covenant that the God of the Israelites makes with his people. It’s very, very specific. It’s very brilliant. He says, “If you follow the voice of adventure, you’ll become a blessing to yourself.”
So that’s a good deal because people generally live at odds with themselves. And he says, God says, “That’s not all. You’ll become a blessing to yourself in a way that furthers your reputation among people and validly, so that you’ll accomplish things that were real and people will know it. And you’ll be held high in their esteem and that will be valid.” So that’s a pretty good deal because social people would like to be regarded as of utility and worth by others.
And so that’s a good deal. And God says, “That’s not all. You’ll establish something of lasting permanent and deep value.” That’s why Abraham becomes the father of nations. And finally, he caps it off and he says, “There’s a better element even to it. There’s a capstone. You’ll do all three of those things in a way that’s maximally beneficial to everyone else.” And so the divinity in the Abrahamic story is making a claim.
He says, first of all, there’s a drive that you should attend to, so the spirit of adventure that calls you out of your zone of comfort. Now, if you attend to that and you make the sacrifices necessary to follow that path, then the following benefits will accrue to you. Your life will be a blessing. Everyone will hold you in high esteem. You’ll establish something of permanent value, and you’ll do it in a way that’s maximally beneficial to everyone else.
And so think about what this means biologically or from an engineering standpoint. It means that the instinct to develop that characterizes outward moving children, let’s say, or adults is the same instinct that allows for psychological stability, that allows for movement upward in a social hierarchy that establishes something iterable, and that does that in a manner that allows everyone else to partake in the same process.
Well, that’s a good deal. I can’t see how it cannot be true, because the alternative hypothesis would be that the spirit that moves you beyond yourself to develop, the spirit of a curious child, let’s say, what, is that antithetical to your own esteem? Is that antithetical to other people’s best interest? Is it not the thing that increases the probability that you’ll do something permanent? That’s a stupid theory.
That’s a terrible thing, A, because the passion story is a catastrophic tragedy, although it obviously has its redemptive elements. But one of the things that’s implied there is that there’s no distinction between the true adventure of life and taking on the pathway of maximal responsibility and burden. And I can’t see how that cannot be true. Because the counter hypothesis is, well, Lex, the best thing for you to do in your life is to shrink from all challenge and hide, to remain infantile, to remain secure, not to ever push yourself beyond your limits, not to take any risks. Well, no one thinks that’s true.
And you might say, well, could you undertake that voluntarily as an adventure? And the answer to that is something like, well, what’s your relationship with death? That’s a problem you have to solve. And you could fight it and you could be bitter about it. And there’s reasons for that, especially if it’s painful and degrading. But the alternative is something like… Well, it’s what’s fleshed out in religious imagery always.
It’s very difficult to cast into words. It’s like, no, you welcome the struggle. That’s why I called the book, We Who Wrestle with God. You welcome the struggle. And Lex, I don’t see how you can come to terms with life without construing it as something like, bring it on. Welcome the struggle. I can’t see that there’s a limit to that. It’s like, well, I welcome the struggle until it gets difficult.
So it’s not merely tragedy. And I think the malevolence is actually worse. The reason I think that is because I know the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder, and most people who encounter, let’s say, a challenge that’s so brutal that it fragments them, it isn’t mere suffering that does that to people. It’s an encounter with malevolence that does that to people.
Their own sometimes often, by the way. Soldier will go out into a battlefield and find out that there’s a part of him that really enjoys the mayhem, and that conceptualization doesn’t fit in well with everything he thinks he knows about himself and humanity. And after that contact with that dark part of himself, he never recovers. That happens to people, and it happens to people who encounter bad actors in the world too.
If you’re a naive person and the right narcissistic psychopath comes your way, you are in mortal trouble because you might die, but that’s not where the trouble ends.
It’s like part of the way you can tell that that’s wrong is that you can’t voluntarily gerrymander your own interests. You find some things interesting, and that seems natural and autonomous, and other things you don’t find interesting and you can’t really force yourself to be interested in them. So what is the domain of interest that makes itself manifest to you? Well, it’s like an autonomous spirit. It’s like certain things in your field of perception are illuminated to you.
You think, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s compelling. That’s gripping.” Rudolf Otto, who studied the phenomenology of religious experience, describe that as numinous. The thing grips you because compelled by it, and maybe it’s also somewhat anxiety provoking. It’s the same reaction like a cat has to a dog. When the cat’s hair stands on end, that’s an awe response. And so there’s going to be things in your phenomenological field that pull you forward, compel you.
That’s like the voice of positive emotion and enthusiasm. Things draw you into the world. It might be love. It might be aesthetic interest. It might be friendship. It might be social status. It might be duty and industriousness. There’s various domains of interest that shine for people. That’s on the positive side. God is calling. That would be akin to the spirit of adventure for Abraham. But there’s also God as conscience, and this is a useful thing to know too.
Certain things bother you. They take root within you and they turn your thoughts towards certain issues. Like there are things you’re interested in that you’ve pursued your whole life. There are things I’m interested in that I felt as a moral compulsion. And so you could think and I think the way you can think about it technically is that something pulls you forward so that you move ahead and you develop.
And then another voice, this a voice of negative emotion, says while you’re moving forward, stay on this narrow pathway. And it’ll mark deviations, and it marks deviations with shame and guilt and anxiety, regret. And that actually has a voice. Don’t do that. Well, why not? Well, you’re wandering off the straight narrow path. So the divine marks the pathway forward and reveals it, but then puts up the constraints of conscience. And the divine in the Old Testament is portrayed not least as the dynamic between calling and conscience.
You could learn from your failure. When you failed, you invited in the spirit of envy and resentment, and you allowed it to possess you. And that’s why you’re miserable.” And so Cain is embittered by that response, and that’s when he kills Abel. You might say, well, how do you fortify yourself against that pathway of resentment? Part of classic religious practice is aimed to do that precisely. What’s the antithesis of envy? Gratitude. That’s something you can practice. And I mean, literally practice.
Well, how about, here’s an answer. You don’t have enough faith in yourself. And maybe you don’t have enough faith in, well, I would say the divine. You don’t believe that the world is characterized by enough potentiality so that even miserable you has a crack at the brass ring. I talked about this actually practically in one of my previous books, because I wrote a chapter called Compare Yourself to Who You Are and Not to Someone Else at the Present Time. Well, why? Well, your best benchmark for tomorrow is you today. And you might not be able to have what someone else has on the particular axis you’re comparing yourself with them on, but you could make an incremental improvement over your current state regardless of the direction that you’re aiming.
And it is the case, and this is a law. The return on incremental improvement is exponential or geometric and not linear. So even if you start … This is why the hero is always born in a lowly place, mythologically. Christ, who redeems the world is born in a manger with the animals to poverty parents in the middle of a God-forsaken desert in a non-descript time and place, isolated. Well, why? Well, because everyone young struggles with their insufficiency. But that doesn’t mean that great things can’t make themselves manifest. And part of the insistence in the biblical text, for example, is that it’s incumbent on you to have the courage to have faith in yourself and in the spirit of reality, the essence of reality, regardless of how you construe the evidence at hand. Right. Look at me, I’m so useless. I don’t know anything. I don’t have anything. It’s hopeless. I don’t have it within me. The world couldn’t offer me that possibility. Well, what the hell do you know about that?
This is what job figures out in the midst of his suffering in the Book of Job, because Job is tortured terribly by God, who makes a bet with Satan himself to bring him down. And Job’s decision in the face of his intense suffering is, “I’m not going to lose faith in my essential goodness, and I’m not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of being itself, regardless of how terrible the face it’s showing to me at the moment happens to be.” And I think, okay, what do you make of that claim? Well, let’s look at it practically.
You’re being tortured by the arbitrariness of life. That’s horrible. Now you lose faith in yourself and you become cynical about being. So are you infinitely worse off instantly? And then you might say, “Well yeah,” but it’s really asking a lot of people that they maintain faith even in their darkest hours. It’s like, yeah, that might be asking everything from people. But then you also might ask … This is a very strange question. If you were brought into being by something that was essentially good, wouldn’t that thing that brought you into being demand that you make the best in yourself manifest? And wouldn’t it be precisely when you most need that it be that you’d be desperate enough to risk what it would take to let it emerge?
But then I would also say there’s every suggestion that the pathway of adventure itself is the best pathway to romantic attractiveness. And we know this, in some ways in very blunt manner. The Google boys, the engineers who are too … What would you say? Naively oriented towards empirical truth to note when they’re being politically incorrect, they wrote a great book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, which I really like. It’s a very good book. And it’s engineers as psychologists. And so they’ll say all sorts of things that no one with any sense would ever say that happen to be true. And they studied the pattern of pornographic fantasy, and women like pornographic stories, not images. So women’s use of pornography is literary. Who are the main protagonists in female pornographic fantasy? Pirates, werewolves, vampires, surgeons, billionaires. Tony Stark.
And so the basic pornographic narrative is Beauty and the Beast. Those five categories. Terrible, aggressive male, tamable by the right relationship, hot erotic attraction. And so I would say to the young men who, and I have many times to the young men who are locked in isolation, it’s first of all, “Join the bloody club.” Because the default value of a 15 year-old male on the mating market is zero. And there’s reason for that. Zero is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. And the reason for that is, well, what the hell do you know? You’re not good for anything. You have potential and maybe plenty, and hopefully that’ll be made manifest, but you shouldn’t be all upset because you’re the same loser as everyone else your age has always been since the beginning of time.
But then you might ask, “Well, what should I do about it?” and the answer is, get yourself together. Stand up straight with your shoulders back, take on some adventure, find your calling, abide by your conscience, put yourself together and you’ll become attractive. And we know this is … Look, we know this is true. The correlation between male sexual opportunity and relative masculine status is about 0.6. That’s higher than the correlation between intelligence and academic achievement. I don’t think that there’s a larger correlation between two independent phenomena in the entire social science and health literature than the correlation between relative male social status and reproductive success. It’s by far the most fundamental determinant.
There’s a documentary I watch from time to time, which I think is the most brilliant documentary I’ve ever seen. It’s called Crumb, and it’s the story of this underground cartoonist. Robert Crumb, who in high school was in the category of males for whom a date was not only not likely, but unimaginable. So he was at the bottom of the bottom rung, and almost all the reactions he got from females wasn’t just no, it was like, “Are you out of your mind?” With that contempt. And then he became successful. And so the documentary is super interesting because it tracks the utter pathology of his sexual fantasies because he was bitter and resentful. And if you want to understand the psychology of serial sexual killers and the like, and you watch Crumb, you’ll find out a lot more about that than anybody with any sense would want to know.
But then he makes this transition, and partly because he does take the heroic adventure path, and he actually has a family and children, and he is actually a pretty functional person as opposed to his brothers, one of whom commits suicide, and one of whom is literally a repeat sexual offender. It’s a brutal documentary. But what he did in his adolescence after being rejected was he found what he was interested in. He was a very good artist. He was very interested in music, and he started to pursue those single-mindedly, and he became successful. And as soon as he became successful, and the documentary tracks this beautifully, he’s immediately attractive to women. And then you might ask too, even if you’re cynical, it’s like, “Well, why do I have to perform for women?” And the answer to that is something like, why the hell should they have anything to do with you if you’re useless? They’re going to have infants. They don’t need another one.
Partly the reason that women are hypergamous, they want males who are of higher status than they are, is because they’re trying to redress the reproductive burden. And it’s substantial. The female of any species is the sex that devotes more to the reproductive function. That’s a more fundamental definition than chromosomal differentiation. And that’s taken to its ultimate extreme with humans. And so of course women are going to want someone around that’s useful, because the cost of sex for them is an 18 year-old period of dependency with an infant. So I think the adventure comes first.
The rule for me when he was on the stairs was as soon as you’re willing to be a civilized human being, you can get off the stairs. And you might think, well, that’s nothing but arbitrary superego, patriarchal oppressive constraint. Or you could say, “Well, no, what I’m actually doing is facilitating his cortical maturation.” Because when a child misbehaves, it’s usually because they’re under the domination of some primordial emotional or motivational impulse. They’re angry, they’re over-enthusiastic, they’re upset, they’re selfish. It’s narrow self-centeredness expressed in a immature manner.
Now, you can also find that model in books, and people do that sometimes. I’ve interviewed people who had pretty fragmented childhoods, who turned to books and found the pattern that guided them in, let’s say, the adventures of the heroes of the past, because that’s a good way of thinking about it. And I read a book called Angela’s Ashes that was written by an Irish author, Frank McCourt. Fantastic book, beautiful book. And his father was an alcoholic of gargantuan proportions. An Irish drinker who drank every cent that came into the family and many of whose children died in poverty.
And what Frank did is a testament to the human spirit, is he sort of divided his father conceptually into two elements. There was sober morning father who was encouraging and with whom he had a relationship, and then there was drunk and useless later afternoon and evening father, and he rejected the negative and he amplified his relationship with the positive. Now, he had other things going for him, but he did a very good job of discriminating.
And partly the question that you’re raising is to what degree is it useful to have a beneficial adversary? Yeah, struggle-free progress is not possible. And I think there are situations under which where you might be motivated to prove someone in your immediate circle wrong, but then that also implies that at some level, for some reason, you actually care about their judgment. You just didn’t write them off completely.
And part of what I would say is twisted pseudo-Christian morality that Nietzsche was criticizing was exactly of that sort, and it tied into resentment and envy. And he tied that in explicitly said that failure in life masked by the morality that’s nothing but weak cowardice turns to the resentment that undermines and destroys everything, and that does that purposefully.
If we can descend from the realm of ideas down to history and reality. I would say the time between World War I and World War II was one of history’s biggest testing of ideas, and really the most dramatic kinds of ideas that helped us understand the nature of good and evil. I just want to ask you a question about good and evil. Churchill, in many ways, was not a good man. Stalin, as you’ve documented extensively, was a horrible man. But you can make the case that both were necessary for stopping an even worse human being in Hitler. So to what degree do you need monsters to fight monsters? Do you need bad men to be able to fight off greater evils?
He’s a rather slight guy, but he’s got a spine of steel, and there’s more than a bit of what’s a monstrous in him. And Jocko Willink is like that, and Joe Rogan is like that, and you’re like that.
I mean, it was very common when I was teaching both at Harvard and at the University of Toronto for the students in my personality class where we studied Solzhenitsyn, who’s actually an existential psychologist in many ways and a deep one, none of them knew anything about the Soviet atrocities. None of them knew anything about what happened in Ukraine and the death of 6 million productive people, had no idea that the communists killed tens of millions of people in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
I think what we’re doing, this is happening on Twitter continually, is we’re giving the 5% of psychopaths a radically disproportionate voice. And what they’re doing is there’s a bunch of them on the left, and they’re all, we’re so compassionate, and there’s a bunch of them on the right, and at the moment they’re all, we’re so Christian and free speech oriented. It’s like, no, you’re not. You’re narcissistic psychopaths, and that’s your camouflage. And you hide behind your anonymity and you use fractious and divisive language to attract fools and to elevate your social status and your clout. And not only that, to gain, what would you say, satisfaction for your sadistic impulses.
And it’s an ugly place to inhabit, that’s for sure. But it’s also the case that a very tiny minority of seriously bad actors can have a disproportionate influence. And one of the things I’ve always hoped for for social media channels is that they separate the anonymous accounts from the verified accounts. They should just be in different categories. People who will say what they think and take the hits to their reputation, anonymous types. If you want to see what the anonymous types say, you can see it. But don’t be confusing them with actual people because they’re not the same. We know that people behave more badly when they’re anonymous. That’s a very well-established psychological finding. Well, and I think the danger to our culture is substantive. I think the reason that perhaps the reason that everything started to go sideways pretty seriously around 2015 is because we invented these new modes of communication. We have no idea how to police them. And so the psychopathic manipulators, they have free reign. About 30% of the internet is pornography.
A huge amount of internet traffic is outright criminal. And there’s a penumbra around that’s psychopathic, narcissistic troublemaking trolls. And that might constitute the bulk of the interactions online. And it’s partly because people can’t be held responsible, so the free riders have free reign.
If you keep them in prison until they’re in the middle of their late twenties, most of them stop. And the easiest way to understand that might just be delayed maturation. So are most people salvageable? Yes, definitely. Is everyone salvageable? Well, at some point it becomes, first of all, they have to want to be salvaged. That’s a problem. But then it also becomes something like, well, how much resources are you going to devote to that? The farther down the rabbit hole you’ve gone, the more energy it takes to haul you up. So there comes a point where the probability that you’ll be able to get enough resources devoted to you to rescue you from the pit of hell that you’ve dug is zero. And that’s a very sad thing. And it’s very hard to be around someone who’s in that situation, very, very hard.
Okay, well, where are you when you’re as far away from that as you could possibly get? What does that mean? And it does have something to do with play, as far as I’m concerned. I think the antithesis of tyranny is play. So that took me a long time to figure out that specifically. So that was very dark. I spent a lot of time studying the worst behaviors that I could discover abstractly in books, but also in my clinical practice and in my observations of people. And so that’s rough. More recently, I was very ill and in a tremendous amount of pain that lasted pretty much without any break for three years. And what was particularly useful to me then was the strength of my relationships, my immediate relationships, my friendships. Also, the relationships that I had established more broadly with people.
Because by the time I became ill, I was reasonably well known and people were very supportive when I was having trouble, and that was very helpful. But it’s certainly the case that it was the connections I had, particularly with my family, but also with my friends, that were the saving grace. And that’s something to know. I mean, it’s necessary to bear the burdens of the world on your own shoulders, that’s for sure, the burdens of your own existence and whatever other responsibilities you can mount. But that by no means, means that you can or should do it alone. And so you might say, well, welcoming the adversity of life as a redemptive challenge is a task that’s beyond the ability of the typical person or even maybe of anyone. But then when you think, well, you’re not alone, maybe you’re not alone socially, you’re not alone familial, maybe you’re not alone metaphysically as well, there’s an insistence.
And I think it’s true. There’s an insistence, for example, in the old and the new testament alike, that the more darkness you’re willing to voluntarily encounter, the more likely it is that the spirit of Abraham and the patriarchs will walk with you. And I think that’s right. I think it’s sort of technically true in that the best parts of yourself make themselves manifest. If you want to think about it that way, the best parts of yourself, whatever that means, make themselves manifest when you’re contending actively and voluntarily with the most difficult challenges. Why wouldn’t it be that way? And then you could think, well, that’s yourself. It’s like, well, are the best unrevealed parts of you yourself? Well, no, they’re a kind of metaphysical reality. They’re not yet manifest. They only exist in potential. They transcend anything you’re currently capable of, but they have an existence. You could call that yourself.
But it was Jung’s contention, for example, with regards to such terminology that the reason we use the term self instead of God is because when God was dispensed with, let’s say, by the processes Nietzsche described, we just found the same thing deep within the instinctive realm. Let’s say we found it at the bottom…
That’s the burning bush. And bush is a tree. That’s life. That’s the tree of life. And the fact that it’s on fire is that’s life exaggerated because everything that’s alive is on fire. And so what calls to Moses is the spirit of being itself, and it tracks him off the beaten track, and he decides to go investigate. So Moses is everyone who goes off the beaten track to investigate. And so as he investigates, he delves more and more deeply until he starts to understand that he’s now walking on sacred ground. So he takes off his shoes, and that’s a symbolic reference of identity transformation. He’s no longer walking the same path. He no longer has the same identity. He’s in a state of flux. And that’s when what happens is that he continues to interact with this calling and Moses asks what it is that’s being revealed, and God says, I’m the spirit of being itself.
That’s basically the answer. I am what I am. It’s a more complex utterance than that. I am what I will be. I am what was becoming. It’s all of that at the same time, it’s the spirit of being that’s speaking to him, the spirit of being and becoming. And it tells Moses that he now, because he’s delved so deeply into something so compelling, his identity has transformed and he’s become the leader who can speak truth to power. And so he allies himself with his brother Aaron, who’s the political arm and who can communicate, and he goes back to Egypt to confront the tyrant. And that’s an indication of that idea that if you wrestle with life properly, that the spirit of being and becoming walks with you. And it’s like, how can that not be true? Because the contrary would be that there would be no growth in challenge. Well, you have to be infinitely nihilistic to believe that.
He refuses to lose faith. And the way the story ends is that Job gets everything back and more. So that’s a dissent and assent story. And a cynic might say, “Well, the ends don’t justify the means.” And I would say, “Fair enough.” But that’s a pretty shallow interpretation of the story. What it indicates instead is that if you’re fortunate, because let’s not forget that, and you optimize your attitude even in the face of adversity, that it’s not infrequently the case that your fortunes will reverse. And I’ve found that in many situations, the journalists whose goal was most malicious in relationship to me, who were most concerned with improving their own, what would you say? Fostering their own notoriety and gaining social status at my expense, were the ones who did me the greatest favor. Those were the interviews that went viral. And so that’s interesting because they were definitely the places where the most disaster was at hand. And I felt that in the aftermath every time that happened, my whole family was destabilized for two months because things… It wasn’t obvious at all which way the dice were going to roll.
This was Sisyphus on steroids. It was very difficult to maintain hope in that, because I would do what I could. There were times when it took me like an hour and a half in the morning to stand up. I’d do all that and more or less put myself back into something remotely resembling human by the end of the day. And then I knew perfectly well, exhausted, if I fell asleep that I was going to be right at the bottom of the bloody hill again. And so after a couple of years of that, it was definitely the fact that I had a family that carried me through that.
We’re very, very… There’s no difference between ourselves and the people that we love. And there might be no difference between ourselves and everyone everywhere, but we can at least realize that, to begin with, in the form of the people that we love. And I hope I’m better at that than I was. I think I’m better at it than I was. I’m a lot more grateful for just ordinariness than I was because when I first recovered, I remember, I first started to recover I was standing in this pharmacy waiting for a prescription in a little town, and they weren’t being particularly efficient about it.
And so I was in that, standing in the aisle for 20 minutes, and I thought, “I’m not on fire. I could just stand here for the rest of my life, just not being in pain and enjoying that.” And that would have been something that before that would have been, I would have been impatient and raring to go because I didn’t have 20 minutes to stand in the middle of an aisle. And I thought, “Well, if you’re just standing there and you’re not on fire, things are a lot better than they might be.” And I certainly, I know that, and I think I remember it almost all the time.
That was like Dante’s Inferno level down. It was a long-term, psychiatric inpatient ward. Some of the people had been there for 30 years. It made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look like a romantic comedy. And she had come back to see if she could take some of those people for a walk, and was trying to find out how to get permission to do it. Better than other people. Some people are more intelligent, some people are more beautiful, some people are more athletic. Maybe it’s possible for everyone at all levels of attainment to strive towards the good. And maybe those talents that are given to people unfairly don’t privilege them in relationship to their moral conduct. And I think that’s true. There’s no evidence, for example, that there’s any correlation whatsoever between intelligence and morality. You’re not better because you’re smart. And what that also implies is if you’re smart, you can be a lot better at being worse.
Look, here’s a developmental sequence for you, naive and trusting, hurt and cynical. Okay, well, is hurt and cynical better than naive and trusting? It’s like, yeah, probably. Is that where it ends? How about cynical and trusting as step three? And then the trust becomes courage. It’s like, yeah, I’ll put my hand out for you, but it’s not because I’m a fool. And I think that’s right, because that’s the re-instantiation of that initial trust that makes childhood magical and paradisal. But it’s the admixture of that with wisdom. It’s like, yeah, we could walk together uphill, but that doesn’t mean, and I’ll presume that that’s your aim, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to watch.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:08 – Nietzsche
- 7:49 – Power and propaganda
- 12:55 – Nazism
- 17:55 – Religion
- 34:19 – Communism
- 40:04 – Hero myth
- 42:13 – Belief in God
- 52:25 – Advice for young people
- 1:05:03 – Sex
- 1:25:01 – Good and evil
- 1:37:47 – Psychopathy
- 1:51:16 – Hardship
- 2:03:32 – Pain and gratitude
- 2:14:33 – Truth
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson. His second time on this, The Lex Fridman Podcast.
The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson. His second time on this, The Lex Fridman Podcast.
Nietzsche
Lex Fridman
You have given a set of lectures on Nietzsche as part of the new Peterson Academy, and the lectures were powerful. There’s some element of the contradictions, the tensions, the drama, the way you like, lock in on an idea, but then are struggling with that idea, all of that, that feels like it’s a Nietzschean.
You have given a set of lectures on Nietzsche as part of the new Peterson Academy, and the lectures were powerful. There’s some element of the contradictions, the tensions, the drama, the way you like, lock in on an idea, but then are struggling with that idea, all of that, that feels like it’s a Nietzschean.
Jordan Peterson
Well, he’s a big influence on me stylistically and in terms of the way I approached writing, and also many of the people that were other influences of mine were very influenced by him. So I was blown away when I first came across his writings. They’re so intellectually dense that I don’t know if there’s anything that approximates that. Dostoevsky maybe, although he’s much more wordy. Nietzsche is very succinct partly he was so ill because he would think all day he couldn’t spend a lot of time writing. And he condenses writings into very short while this Aphoristic style he had, and it’s really something to strive for. And then he’s also an exciting writer like Dostoevsky and dynamic and romantic in that emotional way. And so it’s really something, and I really enjoyed doing that. I did that lecture that you described, that lecture series is on the first half of Beyond Good and Evil, which is a stunning book. And that was really fun to take pieces of it and then to describe what they mean and how they’ve echoed across the decades since he wrote them. And yeah, it’s been great.
Well, he’s a big influence on me stylistically and in terms of the way I approached writing, and also many of the people that were other influences of mine were very influenced by him. So I was blown away when I first came across his writings. They’re so intellectually dense that I don’t know if there’s anything that approximates that. Dostoevsky maybe, although he’s much more wordy. Nietzsche is very succinct partly he was so ill because he would think all day he couldn’t spend a lot of time writing. And he condenses writings into very short while this Aphoristic style he had, and it’s really something to strive for. And then he’s also an exciting writer like Dostoevsky and dynamic and romantic in that emotional way. And so it’s really something, and I really enjoyed doing that. I did that lecture that you described, that lecture series is on the first half of Beyond Good and Evil, which is a stunning book. And that was really fun to take pieces of it and then to describe what they mean and how they’ve echoed across the decades since he wrote them. And yeah, it’s been great.
Lex Fridman
Taking each sentence seriously and deconstructing it and really struggling with it. I think underpinning that approach to writing requires deep respect for the person. I think if we approach writing with that kind of respect, you can take Orwell, you can take a lot of writers and really dig in on singular sentences.
Taking each sentence seriously and deconstructing it and really struggling with it. I think underpinning that approach to writing requires deep respect for the person. I think if we approach writing with that kind of respect, you can take Orwell, you can take a lot of writers and really dig in on singular sentences.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, those are the great writers because the greatest writers virtually everything they wrote is worth attending to. And I think Nietzsche is in some ways the ultimate exemplar of that because often when I read a book, I’ll mark one way or another, I often fold the corner of the page over to indicate something that I’ve found that’s worth remembering. I couldn’t do that with a book like Beyond Good and Evil because every page ends up marked. And that’s in marked contrast, so to speak, to many of the books I read now where it’s quite frequently now that I’ll read a book and there won’t be an idea in it that I haven’t come across before. And with a thinker like Nietzsche, that’s just not the case at the sentence level. And I don’t think there’s anyone that I know of who did that to a greater extent than he did.
Yeah, well, those are the great writers because the greatest writers virtually everything they wrote is worth attending to. And I think Nietzsche is in some ways the ultimate exemplar of that because often when I read a book, I’ll mark one way or another, I often fold the corner of the page over to indicate something that I’ve found that’s worth remembering. I couldn’t do that with a book like Beyond Good and Evil because every page ends up marked. And that’s in marked contrast, so to speak, to many of the books I read now where it’s quite frequently now that I’ll read a book and there won’t be an idea in it that I haven’t come across before. And with a thinker like Nietzsche, that’s just not the case at the sentence level. And I don’t think there’s anyone that I know of who did that to a greater extent than he did.
So there’s other people whose thought is of equivalent value. I’ve returned recently, and I’m going to do a course on to the work of this Romanian historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, who’s not nearly as well known as he should be, and whose work, by the way, is a real antidote to the postmodern, nihilistic, Marxist stream of literary interpretation that the universities as a whole have adopted. And Eliade is like that too. I used this book called The Sacred and the Profane quite extensively in a book that I’m releasing in mid-November, We Who Wrestle with God, and it’s of the same sort. It’s endlessly analyzable. Eliade walked through the whole history of religious ideas and he had the intellect that enabled him to do that. And everything he wrote is dreamlike in its density. So every sentence or paragraph is evocative in an image-rich manner. And that also, what would you say deepens and broadens the scope.
That’s part of often what distinguishes writing that has a literary end from writing that’s more merely technical. The literary writings have this imagistic and dreamlike reference space around them. It takes a long time to turn a complex image into something semantic. And so if you’re writing evokes deep imagery, it has a depth that can’t be captured merely in words. And the great romantic poetic philosophers, Nietzsche is a very good example, Dostoevsky is a good example, so is Mircea Eliade, they have that quality and it’s a good way of thinking about it. It’s kind of interesting from the perspective of technical analysis of intelligence, and there’s a good book called The User Illusion, which is the best book on consciousness that I ever read. It explains the manner in which our communication is understandable in this manner. So imagine that when you’re communicating something, you’re trying to change the way that your target audience perceives and acts in the world.
So that’s an embodied issue, but you’re using words which obviously aren’t equivalent to the actions themselves. You can imagine that the words are surrounded by a cloud of images that they evoke and that the images can be translated into actions. And the greatest writing uses words in a manner that evokes images that profoundly affects perception and action. And so I would take the manner in which I act and behave, I would translate that into a set of images. My dreams do that for me, for example. Then I compress them into words. I toss you the words, you decompose them, decompress them into the images and then into the actions. And that’s what happens in a meaningful conversation. It’s a very good way of understanding how we communicate linguistically.
Lex Fridman
So if the words spring to the full visual complexity and then that can then transform itself into action.
So if the words spring to the full visual complexity and then that can then transform itself into action.
Jordan Peterson
And change in perception because-
And change in perception because-
Lex Fridman
Change in perception. Yeah.
Change in perception. Yeah.
Jordan Peterson
Well, those are both relevant and it’s an important thing to understand because the classic empiricists make the presumption, and it’s an erroneous presumption that perception is a value-free enterprise. And they assume that partly because they think of perception as something passive. You just turn your head and you look at the world and there it is. It’s like perception is not passive. There is no perception without action ever, ever. And that’s a weird thing to understand because even when you’re looking at something like your eyes are moving back and forth, if they ever stop moving for a tenth of a second, you stop being able to see. So your eyes are jiggling back and forth just to keep them active. And then there’s involuntary movements of your eyes and then there’s voluntary movements of your eyes. What you’re doing with your eyes is very much like what a blind person would do if they were feeling out the contours of a object.
Well, those are both relevant and it’s an important thing to understand because the classic empiricists make the presumption, and it’s an erroneous presumption that perception is a value-free enterprise. And they assume that partly because they think of perception as something passive. You just turn your head and you look at the world and there it is. It’s like perception is not passive. There is no perception without action ever, ever. And that’s a weird thing to understand because even when you’re looking at something like your eyes are moving back and forth, if they ever stop moving for a tenth of a second, you stop being able to see. So your eyes are jiggling back and forth just to keep them active. And then there’s involuntary movements of your eyes and then there’s voluntary movements of your eyes. What you’re doing with your eyes is very much like what a blind person would do if they were feeling out the contours of a object.
You’re sampling and you’re only sampling a small element of the space that’s in front of you, and the element that you choose to sample is dependent on your aims and your goals. So it’s value saturated. And so all your perceptions are action predicated and partly what you’re doing when you’re communicating is therefore not only changing people’s actions, let’s say, but you’re also changing the strategy that they use to perceive. And so you change the way the world reveals itself for them. See, this is why it’s such a profound experience to read a particularly deep thinker because you could also think of your perceptions as the axioms of your thought. That’s a good way of thinking about it. A perception is like a… what would you say? It’s a thought that’s so set in concrete that you now see it rather than conceptualize it. A really profound thinker changes the way you perceive the world. That’s way deeper than just how you think about it or how you feel about it.
Power and propaganda
Lex Fridman
What about not just profound thinkers, but thinkers that deliver a powerful idea, for example, utopian ideas of Marx or utopian ideas, you could say dystopian ideas of Hitler? Those ideas are powerful and they can saturate all your perception with values and they focus you in a way where there’s only a certain set of actions.
What about not just profound thinkers, but thinkers that deliver a powerful idea, for example, utopian ideas of Marx or utopian ideas, you could say dystopian ideas of Hitler? Those ideas are powerful and they can saturate all your perception with values and they focus you in a way where there’s only a certain set of actions.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right. Even a certain set of emotions as well.
Yeah, right. Even a certain set of emotions as well.
Lex Fridman
And it’s intense and it’s direct, and they’re so powerful that they completely altered the perception and the words spring to life.
And it’s intense and it’s direct, and they’re so powerful that they completely altered the perception and the words spring to life.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, it’s like a form of possession. So there’s two things you need to understand to make that clear. The first issue is that as we suggested or implied, that perception is action predicated, but action is goal predicated, the act towards goal. And these propagandistic thinkers that you described, they attempt to unify all possible goals into a coherent singularity. And there’s advantages of that. There’s the advantage of simplicity, for example, which is a major advantage. And there’s also the advantage of motivation. So if you provide people with a simple manner of integrating all their actions, you decrease their anxiety and you increase their motivation. That can be a good thing if the unifying idea that you’ve put forward is valid, but it’s the worst of all possible ideas if you put forward an invalid, unifying idea, and then you might say, well, how do you distinguish between a valid unifying idea and an invalid unifying idea?
Yeah, it’s like a form of possession. So there’s two things you need to understand to make that clear. The first issue is that as we suggested or implied, that perception is action predicated, but action is goal predicated, the act towards goal. And these propagandistic thinkers that you described, they attempt to unify all possible goals into a coherent singularity. And there’s advantages of that. There’s the advantage of simplicity, for example, which is a major advantage. And there’s also the advantage of motivation. So if you provide people with a simple manner of integrating all their actions, you decrease their anxiety and you increase their motivation. That can be a good thing if the unifying idea that you’ve put forward is valid, but it’s the worst of all possible ideas if you put forward an invalid, unifying idea, and then you might say, well, how do you distinguish between a valid unifying idea and an invalid unifying idea?
Now, Nietzsche was very interested in that, and I don’t think he got that exactly right. But the postmodernists, for example, especially the ones, and this is most of them with the Neo-Marxist bent, their presumption is that the fundamental unifying idea is power, that everything’s about compulsion and force essentially, and that that’s the only true unifying ethos of mankind, which is, I don’t know if there’s a worse idea than that. I mean, there are ideas that are potentially as dangerous. The nihilistic idea is pretty dangerous, although it’s more of a disintegrating notion than a unifying idea. The hedonistic idea that you live for pleasure, for example, that’s also very dangerous. But if you wanted to go for sheer pathology, the notion that, and this is Foucault in a nutshell and Marx for that matter, that power rules everything. Not only is that a terrible unifying idea, but it fully justifies your own use of power.
And I don’t mean the power Nietzsche talks about. His will to power was more his insistence that a human being is an expression of will rather than a mechanism of self-protection and security. He thought of the life force in human beings as something that strived not to protect itself, but to exhaust itself in being and becoming. It’s like an upward oriented motivational drive even towards meaning. Now he called it the will to power, and that had some unfortunate consequences, at least that’s how it’s translated. But he didn’t mean the power motivation that people like Foucault or Marx became so hung up on.
Lex Fridman
So it’s not power like you’re trying to destroy the other. It’s power, full flourishing of a human being, the creative force of a human being in that way.
So it’s not power like you’re trying to destroy the other. It’s power, full flourishing of a human being, the creative force of a human being in that way.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, you could imagine that… and you should, you could imagine that you could segregate competence and ability. Imagine that you and I were going to work on a project, we could organize our project in relationship to the ambition that we wanted to attain, and we can organize an agreement so that you were committed to the project voluntarily and so that I was committed to the project voluntarily. So that means that we would actually be united in our perceptions and our actions by the motivation of something approximating voluntary play. Now, you could also imagine another situation where I said, here’s our goal and you better help me, or I’m going to kill your family. Well, the probability is that you would be quite motivated to undertake my bidding. And so then you might say, well, that’s how the world works. It’s power and compulsion.
Yeah. Well, you could imagine that… and you should, you could imagine that you could segregate competence and ability. Imagine that you and I were going to work on a project, we could organize our project in relationship to the ambition that we wanted to attain, and we can organize an agreement so that you were committed to the project voluntarily and so that I was committed to the project voluntarily. So that means that we would actually be united in our perceptions and our actions by the motivation of something approximating voluntary play. Now, you could also imagine another situation where I said, here’s our goal and you better help me, or I’m going to kill your family. Well, the probability is that you would be quite motivated to undertake my bidding. And so then you might say, well, that’s how the world works. It’s power and compulsion.
But the truth of the matter is that you can force people to see things your way, let’s say, but it’s nowhere near as good as strategy even practically than the strategy that would be associated with something like voluntary joint agreement of pattern of movement strategy towards a goal. See, this is such an important thing to understand because it helps you start to understand the distinction between a unifying force that’s based on power and compulsion, and one that is much more in keeping, I would say with the ethos that governs western societies, free western societies, there’s really a qualitative difference, and it’s not some morally relativistic illusion.
Nazism
Lex Fridman
If we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche’s thought, the idea he first introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the Ãœbermensch. That’s another one that’s very easy to misinterpret because it sounds awfully a lot like it’s about power. For example, in the 20th century, it was misrepresented and co-opted by Hitler to advocate for the extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races.
If we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche’s thought, the idea he first introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the Ãœbermensch. That’s another one that’s very easy to misinterpret because it sounds awfully a lot like it’s about power. For example, in the 20th century, it was misrepresented and co-opted by Hitler to advocate for the extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races.
Jordan Peterson
And the dominion of the superior Aryans. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was partly because Nietzsche’s work also was misrepresented by his sister after his death. But I also think that there’s a fundamental flaw in that Nietzschean conceptualization. So Nietzsche of course, famously announced the death of God, but he did that in a manner that was accompanied by dire warnings like Nietzsche said, because people tend to think of that as a triumphalist statement. But Nietzsche actually said that he really said something like the unifying ethos under which we’ve organized ourselves psychologically and socially has now been fatally undermined by, well, by the rationalist proclivity, by the empiricist proclivity. There’s a variety of reasons. Mostly it was conflict between the enlightenment view, let’s say, and the classic religious view, and that there will be dire consequences for that. And Nietzsche knew like Dostoevsky knew that, see, there’s a proclivity for the human psyche and for human societies to move towards something approximating a unity because the cost of disunity is high.
And the dominion of the superior Aryans. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was partly because Nietzsche’s work also was misrepresented by his sister after his death. But I also think that there’s a fundamental flaw in that Nietzschean conceptualization. So Nietzsche of course, famously announced the death of God, but he did that in a manner that was accompanied by dire warnings like Nietzsche said, because people tend to think of that as a triumphalist statement. But Nietzsche actually said that he really said something like the unifying ethos under which we’ve organized ourselves psychologically and socially has now been fatally undermined by, well, by the rationalist proclivity, by the empiricist proclivity. There’s a variety of reasons. Mostly it was conflict between the enlightenment view, let’s say, and the classic religious view, and that there will be dire consequences for that. And Nietzsche knew like Dostoevsky knew that, see, there’s a proclivity for the human psyche and for human societies to move towards something approximating a unity because the cost of disunity is high.
Fractionation of your goals, so that means you’re less motivated to move forward than you might be because there’s many things competing for your attention. And also anxiety, because anxiety actually signals something like goal conflict. So there’s an inescapable proclivity of value systems to unite. Now, if you kill the thing that’s uniting them, that’s the death of God, they either fractionate and you get confusion, anxiety and hopelessness, or you get social disunity or and you get social disunity or something else arises out of the abyss to constitute that unifying force. And Nietzsche said specifically that he believed that one of those manifestations would be that of communism and that that would kill… he said this in Will to Power, that that would kill tens of millions of people in the upcoming 20th century.
He could see that coming 50 years earlier. And Dostoevsky did the same thing in his book, Demons. So this is the thing that the areligious have to contend with. It’s a real conundrum because I mean, you could dispute the idea that our value systems tend towards a unity and society does as well because otherwise we’re disunified. But the cost of that disunity, as I said, is goal confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness. So it’s like a real cost. So you could dispense with the notion of unity altogether, and the Postmodernists did that to some degree, but they pulled off a sleight of hand too where they replaced it by power. Now, Nietzsche did. He’s responsible for that to some degree because Nietzsche said with his conception of the Ãœbermensch, let’s say, is that human beings would have to create their own values because the value structure that had descended from on high was now shunted aside.
But there’s a major problem with that, many major problems. The psychoanalysts were the first people who really figured this out after Nietzsche, because imagine that we don’t have a relationship with the transcendental anymore that orients us. Okay, now we have to turn to ourselves. Now, if we were a unity, a clear unity within ourselves, let’s say, then we could turn to ourselves for that discovery. But if we’re a fractionated plurality internally, then when we turn to ourselves, we turn to a fractionated plurality. Well, that was Freud’s observation. It’s like, well, how can you make your own values when you’re not the master in your own house?
You’re a war of competing motivations, or maybe you’re someone who’s dominated by the will to force and compulsion. And so why do you think that you can rely on yourself as the source of values? And why do you think you’re wise enough to consult with yourself to find out what those values are or what they should be say in the course of a single life? I mean, it’s difficult to organize your own personal relationship like one relationship in the course of your life, let alone to try to imagine that out of whole cloth you could construct an ethos that would be psychologically and socially stabilizing and last over the long run. And of course, Marx people like that, the people who reduce human motivation to a single axis, they had the intellectual hubris to imagine that they could do that. Postmodernists are a good example of that as well.
Religion
Lex Fridman
Okay. But if we lay on the table, religion, communism, Nazism, they are all unifying ethos. They’re unifying ideas, but they’re also horribly dividing ideas. They both unify and divide. Religion has also divided people because in the nuances of how the different peoples wrestle with God, they have come to different conclusions, and then they use those conclusions that perhaps the people in power use those conclusions to then start wars, to start hatred, to divide.
Okay. But if we lay on the table, religion, communism, Nazism, they are all unifying ethos. They’re unifying ideas, but they’re also horribly dividing ideas. They both unify and divide. Religion has also divided people because in the nuances of how the different peoples wrestle with God, they have come to different conclusions, and then they use those conclusions that perhaps the people in power use those conclusions to then start wars, to start hatred, to divide.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, it’s one of the key sub-themes in the gospels is the sub-theme of the Pharisees. And so the fundamental enemies of Christ in the gospels are the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers. So what does that mean? The Pharisees are religious hypocrites. The scribes are academics who worship their own intellect, and the lawyers are the legal minds who use the law as a weapon. And so they’re the enemy of the Redeemer. That’s a subplot in the gospel stories, and that actually all means something. The Pharisaic problem is that the best of all possible ideas can be used by the worst actors in the worst possible way. And maybe this is an existential conundrum, is that the most evil people use the best possible ideas to the worst possible ends. And then you have the conundrum of how do you separate out, let’s say, the genuine religious people from those who use the religious enterprise only for their own machinations.
Yeah. Well, it’s one of the key sub-themes in the gospels is the sub-theme of the Pharisees. And so the fundamental enemies of Christ in the gospels are the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers. So what does that mean? The Pharisees are religious hypocrites. The scribes are academics who worship their own intellect, and the lawyers are the legal minds who use the law as a weapon. And so they’re the enemy of the Redeemer. That’s a subplot in the gospel stories, and that actually all means something. The Pharisaic problem is that the best of all possible ideas can be used by the worst actors in the worst possible way. And maybe this is an existential conundrum, is that the most evil people use the best possible ideas to the worst possible ends. And then you have the conundrum of how do you separate out, let’s say, the genuine religious people from those who use the religious enterprise only for their own machinations.
We’re seeing this happen online. One of the things that you’re seeing happening online, I’m sure you’ve noticed this, especially on the right wing psychopathic troll side of the distribution, is the weaponization of a certain form of Christian ideation. And that’s often marked at least online by the presence of, what would you say, cliches like Christ is king, which has a certain religious meaning, but a completely different meaning in this sphere of emerging right wing pathology, “right wing”. The political dimension isn’t the right dimension of analysis, but it’s definitely the case that the best possible ideas can be used for the worst possible purposes. And that also brings up another specter, which is like, well, is there any reliable and valid way of distinguishing truly beneficial, unifying ideas from those that are pathological? And so that’s another thing that I tried to detail out in these lectures, but also in this new book, it’s like, how do you tell the good actors from the bad actors at the most fundamental level of analysis?
Lex Fridman
And good ideas from the bad ideas, and you lecture on truth that Nietzsche also struggled with, so how do you know that communism is a bad idea versus it’s a good idea implemented by bad actors?
And good ideas from the bad ideas, and you lecture on truth that Nietzsche also struggled with, so how do you know that communism is a bad idea versus it’s a good idea implemented by bad actors?
Jordan Peterson
Right. That’s a more subtle variant of the religious problem. And that’s what the communists say all the time, the modern day communists like, “Real communism has never been tried,” and you could say, I suppose with some justification, you could say that real Christianity has never been tried because we always fall short of the ideal mark. My rejoinder to the communists is something like every single time it’s been implemented, wherever it’s been implemented regardless of the culture and the background of the people who’ve implemented it, it’s had exactly the same catastrophic consequences. It’s like, I don’t know how many examples you need of that, but I believe we’ve generated sufficient examples so that that case is basically resolved. Now, the general rejoinder to that is it’s really something like, “Well, if I was in charge of the communist enterprise, the utopia would’ve come about,” but that’s also a form of dangerous pretense.
Right. That’s a more subtle variant of the religious problem. And that’s what the communists say all the time, the modern day communists like, “Real communism has never been tried,” and you could say, I suppose with some justification, you could say that real Christianity has never been tried because we always fall short of the ideal mark. My rejoinder to the communists is something like every single time it’s been implemented, wherever it’s been implemented regardless of the culture and the background of the people who’ve implemented it, it’s had exactly the same catastrophic consequences. It’s like, I don’t know how many examples you need of that, but I believe we’ve generated sufficient examples so that that case is basically resolved. Now, the general rejoinder to that is it’s really something like, “Well, if I was in charge of the communist enterprise, the utopia would’ve come about,” but that’s also a form of dangerous pretense.
Part of the way… See, that problem is actually resolved to some degree in the notion of… in the developing notion of sacrifice that emerges in the western canon over thousands and thousands of years. So one of the suggestions, for example, and this is something exemplified in the passion story, is that you can tell the valid holder of an idea because that holder will take the responsibility for the consequences of his idea onto himself. And that’s why, for example, you see one way of conceptualizing Christ in the gospel story is as the ultimate sacrifice to God. So you might ask, well, what’s the ultimate sacrifice? And there are variants of the answer to that. One form of ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of a child, the offering of a child, and the other is the offering of the self. And the story of Christ brings both of those together because he’s the son of God that’s offered to God.
And so it’s a marketable resolution of that tension between ultimate sacrifice, ultimate because once you’re a parent, most parents would rather sacrifice themselves than their children. So you have something that becomes of even more value than yourself. But the sacrifice of self is also a very high order level of sacrifice. Christ is an archetype of the pattern of being that’s predicated on the decision to take… to offer everything up to the highest value, that pattern of self-sacrifice. And I think part of the reason that’s valid is because the person who undertakes to do that pays the price themselves. It’s not externalized. They’re not trying to change anyone else except maybe by example. It’s your problem. Like Solzhenitsyn pointed that out too when he was struggling with the idea of good versus evil, and you see this in more sophisticated literature.
In really unsophisticated literature or drama, there’s a good guy and the bad guy and the good guy’s all good, and the bad guy’s all bad. And in more sophisticated literature, the good and bad are abstracted. You can think of them as spirits. And then those spirits possess all the characters in the complex drama to a greater or lesser degree and that battle is fought out both socially and internally. In the high order religious conceptualizations in the West, if they culminate, let’s say in the Christian story, the notion is that battle between good and evil is fundamentally played out as an internal drama.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So for a religious ethos, the battle between good and evil is fought within each individual human heart.
Yeah. So for a religious ethos, the battle between good and evil is fought within each individual human heart.
Jordan Peterson
Right. It’s your moral duty to constrain evil within yourself. And while there’s more to it than that, because there’s also the insistence that if you do that, that makes you the most effective possible like warrior, let’s say, against evil itself in the social world, that you start with the battle that occurs within you in the soul, let’s say. The soul becomes the battleground between the forces of good and evil. There’s an idea there too, which is if that battle is undertaken successfully, then it doesn’t have to be played out in the social world as actual conflict. You can rectify the conflict internally without it having to be played out as fate as Jung put it.
Right. It’s your moral duty to constrain evil within yourself. And while there’s more to it than that, because there’s also the insistence that if you do that, that makes you the most effective possible like warrior, let’s say, against evil itself in the social world, that you start with the battle that occurs within you in the soul, let’s say. The soul becomes the battleground between the forces of good and evil. There’s an idea there too, which is if that battle is undertaken successfully, then it doesn’t have to be played out in the social world as actual conflict. You can rectify the conflict internally without it having to be played out as fate as Jung put it.
Lex Fridman
So what would you say to Nietzsche who called Christianity the slave morality, and his critique of religion in that way was slave morality versus master morality, and then you put an Ãœbermensch into that?
So what would you say to Nietzsche who called Christianity the slave morality, and his critique of religion in that way was slave morality versus master morality, and then you put an Ãœbermensch into that?
Jordan Peterson
Well see, I would say that the woke phenomenon is the manifestation of the slave morality that Nietzsche criticized and that there are elements of Christianity that can be gerrymandered to support that mode of perception and conception. But I think he was wrong and he was wrong in his essential criticism of Christianity in that regard. Now, it’s complicated with Nietzsche because Nietzsche never criticizes the gospel stories directly. What he basically criticizes is something like the pathologies of institutionalized religion. And I would say most particularly of the, what would you say, of the sort of casually too nice Protestant form, that’s a thumbnail sketch and perhaps somewhat unfair.
Well see, I would say that the woke phenomenon is the manifestation of the slave morality that Nietzsche criticized and that there are elements of Christianity that can be gerrymandered to support that mode of perception and conception. But I think he was wrong and he was wrong in his essential criticism of Christianity in that regard. Now, it’s complicated with Nietzsche because Nietzsche never criticizes the gospel stories directly. What he basically criticizes is something like the pathologies of institutionalized religion. And I would say most particularly of the, what would you say, of the sort of casually too nice Protestant form, that’s a thumbnail sketch and perhaps somewhat unfair.
But given the alignment, let’s say, of the more mainstream Protestant movements with the woke mob, I don’t think it’s an absurd criticism. It’s something like the degeneration of Christianity into the notion that good and harmless are the same thing, or good and empathic are the same thing, which is simply not true and far too simplified. And I also think Nietzsche was extremely wrong in his presumption that human beings should take it to themselves to construct their own values. I think he made a colossal error in that presumption.
Lex Fridman
And that is the idea of the Ãœbermensch, that the great individual, the best of us should create our own values.
And that is the idea of the Ãœbermensch, that the great individual, the best of us should create our own values.
Jordan Peterson
Well, and I think the reason that he was wrong about that is that, so when God gives instructions to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he basically tells them that they can do anything they want in the walled garden. So that’s the kind of balance between order and nature that makes up the human environment. Human beings have the freedom vouchsafe to them by God to do anything they want in the garden except to mess with the most fundamental rule. So God says to people, “You’re not to eat of the fruit of the tree, of the knowledge of good and evil,” which fundamentally means there is an implicit moral order and you’re to abide by it. Your freedom stops at the foundation. And you can think about that. I’d be interested even in your ideas about this as an engineer, let’s say, is that there is an ethos that’s implicit in being itself, and your ethos has to be a reflection of that, and that isn’t under your control.
Well, and I think the reason that he was wrong about that is that, so when God gives instructions to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he basically tells them that they can do anything they want in the walled garden. So that’s the kind of balance between order and nature that makes up the human environment. Human beings have the freedom vouchsafe to them by God to do anything they want in the garden except to mess with the most fundamental rule. So God says to people, “You’re not to eat of the fruit of the tree, of the knowledge of good and evil,” which fundamentally means there is an implicit moral order and you’re to abide by it. Your freedom stops at the foundation. And you can think about that. I’d be interested even in your ideas about this as an engineer, let’s say, is that there is an ethos that’s implicit in being itself, and your ethos has to be a reflection of that, and that isn’t under your control.
You can’t gerrymander the foundation because your foundational beliefs have to put you in harmony like musical harmony with the actual structure of reality as such. So I can give you an example of that. So our goal insofar as we’re conducting ourselves properly, is to have the kind of interesting conversation that allows both of us to express ourselves in a manner that enables us to learn and grow, such that we can share that with everyone who’s listening. And if our aim is true and upward, then that’s what we’re doing. Well, that means that we’re going to have to match ourselves to a pattern of interaction, and that’s marked for us emotionally. Like you and I both know this, if we’re doing this right…
Jordan Peterson
…marked for us emotionally. Like you and I both know this, if we’re doing this right, we’re going to be interested in the conversation. We’re not going to be looking at our watch. We’re not going to be thinking about what we’re aiming at. We’re just going to communicate. Now, the religious interpretation of that would be that we were doing something like making the redemptive logos manifest between us in dialogue, and that’s something that can be shared.
…marked for us emotionally. Like you and I both know this, if we’re doing this right, we’re going to be interested in the conversation. We’re not going to be looking at our watch. We’re not going to be thinking about what we’re aiming at. We’re just going to communicate. Now, the religious interpretation of that would be that we were doing something like making the redemptive logos manifest between us in dialogue, and that’s something that can be shared.
To do that, we have to align with that pattern. I can’t decide that there’s some arbitrary way that I’m going to play you. I mean, I could do that if I was a psychopathic manipulator. But to do that optimally, I’m not going to impose a certain A priori aim, let’s say, on our communication and manipulate you into that. So the constraints on my ethos reflect the actual structure of the world.
This is the communist presumptions. It’s like, we’re going to burn everything down and we’re going to start from scratch. And we’ve got these axiomatic presumptions, and we’re going to put them into place. And we’re going to socialize people so they now think and live like communists from day one. And human beings are infinitely malleable, and we can use a rational set of presuppositions to decide what sort of beings they should be.
The transhumanists are doing this too. It’s like, no, there’s a pattern of being that you have to fall into alignment with. I think it’s the pattern of being, by the way, that if you fall into alignment with, it gives you hope, it protects you from anxiety, and it gives you a sense of harmony with your surroundings and with other people. And none of that’s arbitrary.
Lex Fridman
But don’t you think we both arrived to this conversation with rigid axioms? Maybe we’re blind to them, but in the same way that the Marxists came with very rigid axioms about the way the world is and the way it should be. Aren’t we coming to that?
But don’t you think we both arrived to this conversation with rigid axioms? Maybe we’re blind to them, but in the same way that the Marxists came with very rigid axioms about the way the world is and the way it should be. Aren’t we coming to that?
Jordan Peterson
Well, we definitely come to the conversation with a hierarchy of foundational axioms. And I would say the more sophisticated you are as a thinker, the deeper the level at which you’re willing to play. So imagine first that you have presumptions of different depth. There’s more predicated on the more fundamental axioms, and then that there’s a space of play around those.
Well, we definitely come to the conversation with a hierarchy of foundational axioms. And I would say the more sophisticated you are as a thinker, the deeper the level at which you’re willing to play. So imagine first that you have presumptions of different depth. There’s more predicated on the more fundamental axioms, and then that there’s a space of play around those.
And that space of play is going to depend on the sophistication of the player, obviously. But those who are capable of engaging in deeper conversations talk about more fundamental things with more play. Now, we have to come to the conversation with a certain degree of structure, because we wouldn’t be able to understand each other or communicate if a lot of things weren’t already assumed or taken for granted.
Lex Fridman
How rigid is the hierarchy of axioms that religion provides? This is what I’m trying to understand, the rigidity of that hierarchy.
How rigid is the hierarchy of axioms that religion provides? This is what I’m trying to understand, the rigidity of that hierarchy.
Jordan Peterson
It’s as rigid as play.
It’s as rigid as play.
Lex Fridman
Well, play is not rigid at all.
Well, play is not rigid at all.
Jordan Peterson
No, no, no, no, no, no. It’s got a rigidity.
No, no, no, no, no, no. It’s got a rigidity.
Lex Fridman
There’s some constraints.
There’s some constraints.
Jordan Peterson
It took me about 40 years to figure out the answer to that question. I’m serious about that. It wasn’t a random answer. So play is very rigid in some ways. If you and I go out to play basketball or chess, there are rules and you can’t break the rules because then you’re no longer in the game. But then there’s a dynamism within those rules that’s… Well, with chess, it’s virtually infinite. I mean, I think, what is it?
It took me about 40 years to figure out the answer to that question. I’m serious about that. It wasn’t a random answer. So play is very rigid in some ways. If you and I go out to play basketball or chess, there are rules and you can’t break the rules because then you’re no longer in the game. But then there’s a dynamism within those rules that’s… Well, with chess, it’s virtually infinite. I mean, I think, what is it?
There’s more patterns of potential games on a chessboard than there are subatomic particles in the observable universe. It’s an insane space. So it’s not like there’s not freedom within it. But it’s a weird paradox in a way, isn’t it? Because music is like this too, is that there are definitely rules. You can’t throw a basketball into a chess board and still be playing chess. But weirdly enough, if you adhere to the rules, the realm of freedom increases rather than decreasing.
I think you can make the same case for a playful conversation. It’s like we’re playing by certain rules and a lot of them are implicit, but that doesn’t mean that… It might mean the reverse of constraint. Because in this seminar, for example, that I was referring to, the Exodus Seminar and then the Gospel Seminar, everybody in this seminar, there’s about eight of us, played fair.
Nobody used power. Nobody tried to prove they were right. They put forward their points, but they were like, “Here’s a way of looking at that. Assess it.” They were also doing it genuinely. It’s like, this is what I’ve concluded about say this story. And I’m going to make a case for it, but I’d like to hear what you have to say because maybe you can change it, you can extend it, you can find a flaw in it.
Well, that’s a conversation that has flow and that’s engaging and that other people will listen to as well. See, I think that one of the things that we can conclude now, and we can do this even from a neuroscientific basis, is that that sense of engaged meaning is a marker not only for the emergence of harmony between you and your environment, but for the emergence of that harmony in a way that is developmentally rich, that moves you upward towards…
What would you say? Well, I think towards a more effective entropic state. That’s actually the technical answer to that. But it makes you more than you are, and there’s a directionality in that.
Communism
Lex Fridman
The reason I like talking about communism because it has clearly been shown as a set of ideas to be destructive to humanity. But I would like to understand from an engineering perspective the characteristics of communism versus religion where you could identify religious thought is going to lead to a better human being, a better society and communist Marxist thought does not.
The reason I like talking about communism because it has clearly been shown as a set of ideas to be destructive to humanity. But I would like to understand from an engineering perspective the characteristics of communism versus religion where you could identify religious thought is going to lead to a better human being, a better society and communist Marxist thought does not.
Because there’s ambiguity, there’s room for play in communism and Marxism, because they had a utopian sense of where everybody’s headed, don’t know how it’s going to happen. Maybe revolution is required. But after the revolution is done, we’ll figure it out. And there’s an underlying assumption that maybe human beings are good and they’ll figure it out once you remove the oppressor.
I mean, all these ideas, until you put them into practice, it can be quite convincing if you were in the 19th century. If I was reading, which is fascinating, the 19th century produced such powerful ideas, Marx and Nietzsche.
Jordan Peterson
Fascism too, for that matter.
Fascism too, for that matter.
Lex Fridman
Fascism. So if I was sitting there, especially if I’m feeling shitty about myself, a lot of these ideas are pretty powerful as a way to plug the nihilist hole.
Fascism. So if I was sitting there, especially if I’m feeling shitty about myself, a lot of these ideas are pretty powerful as a way to plug the nihilist hole.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right, absolutely. Well, and some of them may actually have an appropriate scope of application. It could be that some of the foundational axioms of communism, socialism/communism, are actually functional in a sufficiently small social group, maybe a tribal group even. I’m not sure this is correct, but I have a suspicion that the pervasive attractiveness of some of the radical left ideas that we’re talking about are pervasive precisely because they are functional within say families, but also within the small tribal groups that people might’ve originally evolved into.
Yeah, right, absolutely. Well, and some of them may actually have an appropriate scope of application. It could be that some of the foundational axioms of communism, socialism/communism, are actually functional in a sufficiently small social group, maybe a tribal group even. I’m not sure this is correct, but I have a suspicion that the pervasive attractiveness of some of the radical left ideas that we’re talking about are pervasive precisely because they are functional within say families, but also within the small tribal groups that people might’ve originally evolved into.
And that once we become civilized, so we produce societies that are united even among people who don’t know one another, different principles have to apply as a consequence of scale. So that’s partly an engineering response, but I think there’s a deeper way of going after the communist problem. So I think part of the fundamental problem with the communist axioms is the notion that the world of complex social interactions can be simplified sufficiently so that centralized planning authorities can deal with it.
And I think the best way to think about the free exchange rejoinder to that presumption is no, the sum total of human interactions in a large civilization are so immense that you need a distributed network of cognition in order to compute the proper way forward. And so what you do is you give each actor their domain of individual choice so that they can maximize their own movement forward.
And you allow the aggregate direction to emerge from that rather than trying to impose it from the top down, which I think is computationally impossible. So that might be one engineering reason why the communist solution doesn’t work. Like I read in Solzhenitsyn, for example, that the Central Soviet authorities often had to make 200 pricing decisions a day. Now, if you’ve ever started a business or created a product and had to wrestle with the problem of pricing, you’d become aware of just how intractable that is.
How do you calculate worth? Well, there’s the central existential problem of life. How do you calculate worth? It’s not something like a central authority can sit down and just manage. There is a lot of inputs that go into a pricing decision. And the free market answer to that is something like, well, if you get the price right, people will buy it and you’ll survive.
Lex Fridman
This is a fascinating way to describe how ideas fail. So communism perhaps fails because just like with people who believe the earth is flat, when you look outside, it looks flat, but you can’t see beyond the horizon, I guess. In the same way with communism, communism seems like a great idea in my family and people I love, but it doesn’t scale.
This is a fascinating way to describe how ideas fail. So communism perhaps fails because just like with people who believe the earth is flat, when you look outside, it looks flat, but you can’t see beyond the horizon, I guess. In the same way with communism, communism seems like a great idea in my family and people I love, but it doesn’t scale.
Jordan Peterson
And it doesn’t iterate, and that’s a form of scaling too.
And it doesn’t iterate, and that’s a form of scaling too.
Lex Fridman
Right. Well, I mean, whatever ways it breaks down, it doesn’t scale. And you’re saying religious though is a thing that might scale.
Right. Well, I mean, whatever ways it breaks down, it doesn’t scale. And you’re saying religious though is a thing that might scale.
Jordan Peterson
I would say religious thought is the record of those ideas that have in fact scaled. Right, right.
I would say religious thought is the record of those ideas that have in fact scaled. Right, right.
Lex Fridman
And iterated.
And iterated.
Jordan Peterson
And iterated.
And iterated.
Lex Fridman
Does religious thought iterate? I mean, there’s a fundamental conservative aspect to religious thought, tradition.
Does religious thought iterate? I mean, there’s a fundamental conservative aspect to religious thought, tradition.
Jordan Peterson
This is why I like Mircea Eliade, for example, who I referred to earlier. One of the things Eliade did and very effectively, and people like Joseph Campbell, who in some ways were popularizers of Eliade’s ideas and Carl Jung’s, what they really did was devote themselves to an analysis of those ideas that scaled and iterated across the largest possible spans of time.
This is why I like Mircea Eliade, for example, who I referred to earlier. One of the things Eliade did and very effectively, and people like Joseph Campbell, who in some ways were popularizers of Eliade’s ideas and Carl Jung’s, what they really did was devote themselves to an analysis of those ideas that scaled and iterated across the largest possible spans of time.
And so Eliade and Jung, Erich Neumann and Campbell, they were looking and Campbell, they were looking at patterns of narrative that were common across religious traditions that had spanned millennia and found many patterns. The hero’s myth, for example, is one of those patterns. And it’s, I think, the evidence that it has its reflection in human neurophysiology and neuropsychology is incontrovertible.
And so these foundational narratives, they last. They’re common across multiple religious traditions. They unite. They work psychologically, but they also reflect the underlying neurophysiological architecture. So I can give you an example of that. So the hero myth is really a quest myth. And a quest myth is really a story of exploration and expansion of adaptation.
Hero myth
So Bilbo the Hobbit, he’s kind of an ordinary every man. He lives in a very constrained and orderly and secure world. And then the quest call comes and he goes out and he expands his personality and develops his wisdom. And that’s reflected in human neuropsychological architecture at a very low level, way below cognition. So one of the most fundamental elements of the mammalian brain, and even in lower animal forms, is the hypothalamus.
It’s the root of primary motivation. So it governs lust, and it regulates your breathing, and it regulates your hunger, and it regulates your thirst, and it regulates your temperature. Like really low level biological necessities are regulated by the hypothalamus. When you get hungry, it’s the hypothalamus. When you’re activated in a defensively aggressive manner, that’s the hypothalamus.
Half the hypothalamus is the origin of the dopaminergic tracts, and they subsume exploration. And so you could think of the human motivational reality as a domain that’s governed by axiomatic motivational states, love, sex, defensive aggression, hunger, and another domain that’s governed by exploration. And the rule would be something like when your basic motivational states are sated, explore.
And that’s not cognitive. Like I said, this is deep, deep brain architecture. It’s extraordinarily ancient. And the exploration story is something like go out into the unknown and take the risks because the information that you discover and the skills you develop will be worthwhile, even in sating the basic motivational drives. And then you want to learn to do that in a iterative manner so it sustains across time, and you want to do it in a way that unites you with other people.
And there’s a pattern to that, and I do think that’s the pattern that we strive to encapsulate in our deep religious narratives. And I think that in many ways we’ve done that successfully.
Belief in God
Lex Fridman
What is the believe in God, how does that fit in? What does it mean to believe in God?
What is the believe in God, how does that fit in? What does it mean to believe in God?
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so in one of the stories that I cover in We Who Wrestle with God, which I only recently begun to take apart say in the last two years, is the story of Abraham. It’s a very cool story, and it’s also related, by the way, to your question about what makes communism wrong. And Dostoevsky knew this. Not precisely the Abraham story, but the same reason. In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky made a very telling observation.
Okay, so in one of the stories that I cover in We Who Wrestle with God, which I only recently begun to take apart say in the last two years, is the story of Abraham. It’s a very cool story, and it’s also related, by the way, to your question about what makes communism wrong. And Dostoevsky knew this. Not precisely the Abraham story, but the same reason. In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky made a very telling observation.
So he speaks in the voice of a cynical nihilistic and bitter bureaucrat who’s been a failure, who’s talking cynically about the nature of human beings, but also very accurately. And one of the things he points out with regards to modern utopianism is that human beings are very strange creatures.
And that if you gave them what the socialist utopians want to give them, so let’s say all your needs are taken care of, all your material needs are taken care of and even indefinitely, Dostoevsky’s claim was, well, you don’t understand human beings very well. Because if you put them in an environment that was that comfortable, they would purposefully go insane just to break it into bits just so something interesting would happen.
Right. And he says it’s the human proclivity to curse and complain. He says this in quite a cynic and caustic manner, but he’s pointing to something deep, which is that we’re not built for comfort and security. We’re not infants. We’re not after satiation. So then you might ask, well, what the hell are we after then? That’s what the Abraham story addresses. Abraham is the first true individual in the biblical narrative.
So you could think about his story as the archetypal story of the developing individual. So you said, well, what’s God? Well, in the Abraham story, God has characterized a lot of different ways in the classic religious texts. Like the Bible is actually a compilation of different characterizations of the divine with the insistence that they reflect an underlying unity. In the story of Abraham, the divine is the call to adventure.
So Abraham has the socialist utopia at hand. He’s from a wealthy family, and he has everything he needs. And he actually doesn’t do anything until he’s in his 70s. Now, hypothetically, people in those times lived much longer. But a voice comes to Abraham and it tells him something very specific. It says, “Leave your zone of comfort. Leave your parents. Leave your tent. Leave your community. Leave your tribe. Leave your land. Go out into the world.”
And Abraham thinks, well, why? I’ve got naked slave girls peeling grapes and feeding them to me. It’s like, what do I need an adventure for? And God tells them, and this is the covenant, by the way, part of the covenant that the God of the Israelites makes with his people. It’s very, very specific. It’s very brilliant. He says, “If you follow the voice of adventure, you’ll become a blessing to yourself.”
So that’s a good deal because people generally live at odds with themselves. And he says, God says, “That’s not all. You’ll become a blessing to yourself in a way that furthers your reputation among people and validly, so that you’ll accomplish things that were real and people will know it. And you’ll be held high in their esteem and that will be valid.” So that’s a pretty good deal because social people would like to be regarded as of utility and worth by others.
And so that’s a good deal. And God says, “That’s not all. You’ll establish something of lasting permanent and deep value.” That’s why Abraham becomes the father of nations. And finally, he caps it off and he says, “There’s a better element even to it. There’s a capstone. You’ll do all three of those things in a way that’s maximally beneficial to everyone else.” And so the divinity in the Abrahamic story is making a claim.
He says, first of all, there’s a drive that you should attend to, so the spirit of adventure that calls you out of your zone of comfort. Now, if you attend to that and you make the sacrifices necessary to follow that path, then the following benefits will accrue to you. Your life will be a blessing. Everyone will hold you in high esteem. You’ll establish something of permanent value, and you’ll do it in a way that’s maximally beneficial to everyone else.
And so think about what this means biologically or from an engineering standpoint. It means that the instinct to develop that characterizes outward moving children, let’s say, or adults is the same instinct that allows for psychological stability, that allows for movement upward in a social hierarchy that establishes something iterable, and that does that in a manner that allows everyone else to partake in the same process.
Well, that’s a good deal. I can’t see how it cannot be true, because the alternative hypothesis would be that the spirit that moves you beyond yourself to develop, the spirit of a curious child, let’s say, what, is that antithetical to your own esteem? Is that antithetical to other people’s best interest? Is it not the thing that increases the probability that you’ll do something permanent? That’s a stupid theory.
Lex Fridman
So God is a call to adventure with some constraints.
So God is a call to adventure with some constraints.
Jordan Peterson
A call to true adventure.
A call to true adventure.
Lex Fridman
To true adventure.
To true adventure.
Jordan Peterson
True adventure. Yeah. And then that’s a good observation because that begs the question, what constitutes the most true adventure? Well, that’s not fully fleshed out until, at least from the Christian perspective, let’s say, that’s not fully fleshed out until the gospels, because the Passion of Christ is the… This is the perfectly reasonable way of looking at it. The Passion of Christ is the truest adventure of Abraham.
True adventure. Yeah. And then that’s a good observation because that begs the question, what constitutes the most true adventure? Well, that’s not fully fleshed out until, at least from the Christian perspective, let’s say, that’s not fully fleshed out until the gospels, because the Passion of Christ is the… This is the perfectly reasonable way of looking at it. The Passion of Christ is the truest adventure of Abraham.
That’s a terrible thing, A, because the passion story is a catastrophic tragedy, although it obviously has its redemptive elements. But one of the things that’s implied there is that there’s no distinction between the true adventure of life and taking on the pathway of maximal responsibility and burden. And I can’t see how that cannot be true. Because the counter hypothesis is, well, Lex, the best thing for you to do in your life is to shrink from all challenge and hide, to remain infantile, to remain secure, not to ever push yourself beyond your limits, not to take any risks. Well, no one thinks that’s true.
Lex Fridman
So basically, the maximally worthwhile adventure could possibly be highly correlated with the hardest possible available adventure.
So basically, the maximally worthwhile adventure could possibly be highly correlated with the hardest possible available adventure.
Jordan Peterson
The hardest possible available adventure voluntarily undertaken.
The hardest possible available adventure voluntarily undertaken.
Lex Fridman
Does it have to be voluntary?
Does it have to be voluntary?
Jordan Peterson
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
How do you define voluntarily?
How do you define voluntarily?
Jordan Peterson
Well, here’s an example of that. That’s a good question too. The night before the crucifixion, which in principle he knows is coming, he asks God to relieve him of his burden, and understandably so. I mean, that’s the scene famously in which he’s literally sweating blood because he knows what’s coming. And the Romans designed crucifixion to be the most agonizing, humiliating, and disgusting possible death. Right. So there was every reason to be apprehensive about that.
Well, here’s an example of that. That’s a good question too. The night before the crucifixion, which in principle he knows is coming, he asks God to relieve him of his burden, and understandably so. I mean, that’s the scene famously in which he’s literally sweating blood because he knows what’s coming. And the Romans designed crucifixion to be the most agonizing, humiliating, and disgusting possible death. Right. So there was every reason to be apprehensive about that.
And you might say, well, could you undertake that voluntarily as an adventure? And the answer to that is something like, well, what’s your relationship with death? That’s a problem you have to solve. And you could fight it and you could be bitter about it. And there’s reasons for that, especially if it’s painful and degrading. But the alternative is something like… Well, it’s what’s fleshed out in religious imagery always.
It’s very difficult to cast into words. It’s like, no, you welcome the struggle. That’s why I called the book, We Who Wrestle with God. You welcome the struggle. And Lex, I don’t see how you can come to terms with life without construing it as something like, bring it on. Welcome the struggle. I can’t see that there’s a limit to that. It’s like, well, I welcome the struggle until it gets difficult.
Lex Fridman
So there’s not a bell curve, like the struggle of moderation. Basically, you have to welcome whatever as hard as it gets, and the crucifixion in that way is a symbol.
So there’s not a bell curve, like the struggle of moderation. Basically, you have to welcome whatever as hard as it gets, and the crucifixion in that way is a symbol.
Jordan Peterson
Of that. Well, it’s worse than that in some ways because the crucifixion exemplifies the worst possible death. But that isn’t the only element of the struggle. Because mythologically, classically, after Christ’s death, he harrows hell. And what that means, as far as I can tell psychologically, is that you’re not only required, let’s say, to take on the full existential burden of life and to welcome it regardless of what it is and to maintain your upward aim despite all temptations to the contrary, but you also have to confront the root of malevolence itself.
Of that. Well, it’s worse than that in some ways because the crucifixion exemplifies the worst possible death. But that isn’t the only element of the struggle. Because mythologically, classically, after Christ’s death, he harrows hell. And what that means, as far as I can tell psychologically, is that you’re not only required, let’s say, to take on the full existential burden of life and to welcome it regardless of what it is and to maintain your upward aim despite all temptations to the contrary, but you also have to confront the root of malevolence itself.
So it’s not merely tragedy. And I think the malevolence is actually worse. The reason I think that is because I know the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder, and most people who encounter, let’s say, a challenge that’s so brutal that it fragments them, it isn’t mere suffering that does that to people. It’s an encounter with malevolence that does that to people.
Their own sometimes often, by the way. Soldier will go out into a battlefield and find out that there’s a part of him that really enjoys the mayhem, and that conceptualization doesn’t fit in well with everything he thinks he knows about himself and humanity. And after that contact with that dark part of himself, he never recovers. That happens to people, and it happens to people who encounter bad actors in the world too.
If you’re a naive person and the right narcissistic psychopath comes your way, you are in mortal trouble because you might die, but that’s not where the trouble ends.
Advice for young people
Lex Fridman
If there’s a young man in their 20s listening to this, how do they escape the pull of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground? With the eyes open to the world, how do they select the adventure?
If there’s a young man in their 20s listening to this, how do they escape the pull of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground? With the eyes open to the world, how do they select the adventure?
Jordan Peterson
So there’s other characterizations of the divine say in the Old Testament story. So one pattern of characterization that I think is really relevant to that question is the conception of God as calling and conscience. Okay, so what does it mean? It’s a description of the manner in which your destiny announces itself to you. I’m using that terminology, and it’s distinguishable say from Nietzsche’s notion that you create your own values.
So there’s other characterizations of the divine say in the Old Testament story. So one pattern of characterization that I think is really relevant to that question is the conception of God as calling and conscience. Okay, so what does it mean? It’s a description of the manner in which your destiny announces itself to you. I’m using that terminology, and it’s distinguishable say from Nietzsche’s notion that you create your own values.
It’s like part of the way you can tell that that’s wrong is that you can’t voluntarily gerrymander your own interests. You find some things interesting, and that seems natural and autonomous, and other things you don’t find interesting and you can’t really force yourself to be interested in them. So what is the domain of interest that makes itself manifest to you? Well, it’s like an autonomous spirit. It’s like certain things in your field of perception are illuminated to you.
You think, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s compelling. That’s gripping.” Rudolf Otto, who studied the phenomenology of religious experience, describe that as numinous. The thing grips you because compelled by it, and maybe it’s also somewhat anxiety provoking. It’s the same reaction like a cat has to a dog. When the cat’s hair stands on end, that’s an awe response. And so there’s going to be things in your phenomenological field that pull you forward, compel you.
That’s like the voice of positive emotion and enthusiasm. Things draw you into the world. It might be love. It might be aesthetic interest. It might be friendship. It might be social status. It might be duty and industriousness. There’s various domains of interest that shine for people. That’s on the positive side. God is calling. That would be akin to the spirit of adventure for Abraham. But there’s also God as conscience, and this is a useful thing to know too.
Certain things bother you. They take root within you and they turn your thoughts towards certain issues. Like there are things you’re interested in that you’ve pursued your whole life. There are things I’m interested in that I felt as a moral compulsion. And so you could think and I think the way you can think about it technically is that something pulls you forward so that you move ahead and you develop.
And then another voice, this a voice of negative emotion, says while you’re moving forward, stay on this narrow pathway. And it’ll mark deviations, and it marks deviations with shame and guilt and anxiety, regret. And that actually has a voice. Don’t do that. Well, why not? Well, you’re wandering off the straight narrow path. So the divine marks the pathway forward and reveals it, but then puts up the constraints of conscience. And the divine in the Old Testament is portrayed not least as the dynamic between calling and conscience.
Lex Fridman
What do you do with the negative emotions? You didn’t mention envy. There’s some really dark ones that can really pull you into some bad places, envy, fear.
What do you do with the negative emotions? You didn’t mention envy. There’s some really dark ones that can really pull you into some bad places, envy, fear.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, envy is a really bad one. Pride and envy are among the worst. Those are the sins of Cain, by the way, in the story of Cain and Abel, because Cain fails because his sacrifices are insufficient. He doesn’t offer his best. And so he’s rejected and that makes him bitter and unhappy. And he goes to complain to God, and God says to him two things. God tells him, “If your sacrifices were appropriate, you’d be accepted.” It’s a brutal thing. It’s a brutal rejoinder. And he also says, “You can’t blame your misery on your failure.
Yeah, envy is a really bad one. Pride and envy are among the worst. Those are the sins of Cain, by the way, in the story of Cain and Abel, because Cain fails because his sacrifices are insufficient. He doesn’t offer his best. And so he’s rejected and that makes him bitter and unhappy. And he goes to complain to God, and God says to him two things. God tells him, “If your sacrifices were appropriate, you’d be accepted.” It’s a brutal thing. It’s a brutal rejoinder. And he also says, “You can’t blame your misery on your failure.
You could learn from your failure. When you failed, you invited in the spirit of envy and resentment, and you allowed it to possess you. And that’s why you’re miserable.” And so Cain is embittered by that response, and that’s when he kills Abel. You might say, well, how do you fortify yourself against that pathway of resentment? Part of classic religious practice is aimed to do that precisely. What’s the antithesis of envy? Gratitude. That’s something you can practice. And I mean, literally practice.
Lex Fridman
I think envy is one of the biggest enemies for a young person because basically you’re starting from nowhere. Life is hard. You’ve achieved nothing. And you’re striving and you’re failing constantly because…
I think envy is one of the biggest enemies for a young person because basically you’re starting from nowhere. Life is hard. You’ve achieved nothing. And you’re striving and you’re failing constantly because…
Jordan Peterson
And you see other people whom you think aren’t having the same problem.
And you see other people whom you think aren’t having the same problem.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, and they succeed. And they could be your neighbor, they could be succeeding by a little bit, or somebody on the internet succeeding by a lot. And I think that that can really pull a person down. That kind of envy can really destroy a person.
Yeah, and they succeed. And they could be your neighbor, they could be succeeding by a little bit, or somebody on the internet succeeding by a lot. And I think that that can really pull a person down. That kind of envy can really destroy a person.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, the gratitude element would be something like, well, yeah, you don’t know anything and you’re at the bottom, but you’re not 80. One of the best predictors of wealth in the United States is age. So then you might say, well, who’s got it better, the old rich guy or the young poor guy? And I would say most old rich guys would trade their wealth for youth. So it’s…
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, the gratitude element would be something like, well, yeah, you don’t know anything and you’re at the bottom, but you’re not 80. One of the best predictors of wealth in the United States is age. So then you might say, well, who’s got it better, the old rich guy or the young poor guy? And I would say most old rich guys would trade their wealth for youth. So it’s…
Jordan Peterson
Old rich guys would trade their wealth for youth. So it’s not exactly clear at all at any stage who’s got the upper hand, who’s got the advantage? And you could say, “Well, I’ve got all these burdens in front of me because I’m young and oh my God.” Or you could say, “Every dragon has its treasure.” And that’s actually a pattern of perception. I’m not saying that people don’t have their challenges. They certainly do. But discriminating between a challenge and an opportunity is very, very difficult. And learning to see a challenge as an opportunity, that’s the beginning of wisdom.
Old rich guys would trade their wealth for youth. So it’s not exactly clear at all at any stage who’s got the upper hand, who’s got the advantage? And you could say, “Well, I’ve got all these burdens in front of me because I’m young and oh my God.” Or you could say, “Every dragon has its treasure.” And that’s actually a pattern of perception. I’m not saying that people don’t have their challenges. They certainly do. But discriminating between a challenge and an opportunity is very, very difficult. And learning to see a challenge as an opportunity, that’s the beginning of wisdom.
Lex Fridman
It’s interesting. I don’t know how it works. Maybe you can elucidate, but when you have envy towards somebody, if you just celebrate them, so gratitude, but actually as opposed to sort of ignoring and being grateful for the things you have, literally celebrate that person. It transforms … It lights the way. I don’t know why that is exactly.
It’s interesting. I don’t know how it works. Maybe you can elucidate, but when you have envy towards somebody, if you just celebrate them, so gratitude, but actually as opposed to sort of ignoring and being grateful for the things you have, literally celebrate that person. It transforms … It lights the way. I don’t know why that is exactly.
Jordan Peterson
Absolutely. The only reason you’re envious is because you see someone who has something that you want. Okay, so let’s think about it. Well, first of all, the fact that they have it means that in principle, you could get it. At least someone has. So that’s a pretty good deal. And then you might say, “Well, the fact that I’m envious of that person means that I actually want something.” And then you might think, “Well, what am I envious of? I’m envious of their attractiveness to women.” It’s like, okay, well now you know something about yourself. You know that one true motivation that’s making itself manifest to you is that you wish that you would be the sort of person who is attractive to women. Now, of course, that’s an extremely common longing among men, period. But particularly among young men. It’s like, well, what makes you so sure you couldn’t have that?
Absolutely. The only reason you’re envious is because you see someone who has something that you want. Okay, so let’s think about it. Well, first of all, the fact that they have it means that in principle, you could get it. At least someone has. So that’s a pretty good deal. And then you might say, “Well, the fact that I’m envious of that person means that I actually want something.” And then you might think, “Well, what am I envious of? I’m envious of their attractiveness to women.” It’s like, okay, well now you know something about yourself. You know that one true motivation that’s making itself manifest to you is that you wish that you would be the sort of person who is attractive to women. Now, of course, that’s an extremely common longing among men, period. But particularly among young men. It’s like, well, what makes you so sure you couldn’t have that?
Well, how about, here’s an answer. You don’t have enough faith in yourself. And maybe you don’t have enough faith in, well, I would say the divine. You don’t believe that the world is characterized by enough potentiality so that even miserable you has a crack at the brass ring. I talked about this actually practically in one of my previous books, because I wrote a chapter called Compare Yourself to Who You Are and Not to Someone Else at the Present Time. Well, why? Well, your best benchmark for tomorrow is you today. And you might not be able to have what someone else has on the particular axis you’re comparing yourself with them on, but you could make an incremental improvement over your current state regardless of the direction that you’re aiming.
And it is the case, and this is a law. The return on incremental improvement is exponential or geometric and not linear. So even if you start … This is why the hero is always born in a lowly place, mythologically. Christ, who redeems the world is born in a manger with the animals to poverty parents in the middle of a God-forsaken desert in a non-descript time and place, isolated. Well, why? Well, because everyone young struggles with their insufficiency. But that doesn’t mean that great things can’t make themselves manifest. And part of the insistence in the biblical text, for example, is that it’s incumbent on you to have the courage to have faith in yourself and in the spirit of reality, the essence of reality, regardless of how you construe the evidence at hand. Right. Look at me, I’m so useless. I don’t know anything. I don’t have anything. It’s hopeless. I don’t have it within me. The world couldn’t offer me that possibility. Well, what the hell do you know about that?
This is what job figures out in the midst of his suffering in the Book of Job, because Job is tortured terribly by God, who makes a bet with Satan himself to bring him down. And Job’s decision in the face of his intense suffering is, “I’m not going to lose faith in my essential goodness, and I’m not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of being itself, regardless of how terrible the face it’s showing to me at the moment happens to be.” And I think, okay, what do you make of that claim? Well, let’s look at it practically.
You’re being tortured by the arbitrariness of life. That’s horrible. Now you lose faith in yourself and you become cynical about being. So are you infinitely worse off instantly? And then you might say, “Well yeah,” but it’s really asking a lot of people that they maintain faith even in their darkest hours. It’s like, yeah, that might be asking everything from people. But then you also might ask … This is a very strange question. If you were brought into being by something that was essentially good, wouldn’t that thing that brought you into being demand that you make the best in yourself manifest? And wouldn’t it be precisely when you most need that it be that you’d be desperate enough to risk what it would take to let it emerge?
Lex Fridman
So you kind of make it seem that reason could be the thing that takes you out of a place of darkness. Finding that calling through reason. I think it’s also possible when reason fails you to just take the leap. Navigate not by reason, but by finding the thing that scares you. The risk. Take the risk, take the leap, and then figure it out while you’re in the air.
So you kind of make it seem that reason could be the thing that takes you out of a place of darkness. Finding that calling through reason. I think it’s also possible when reason fails you to just take the leap. Navigate not by reason, but by finding the thing that scares you. The risk. Take the risk, take the leap, and then figure it out while you’re in the air.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, I think that’s always part of a heroic adventure is that ability to cut the Gordian knot. But you could also ask from an engineering perspective, okay, what are the axioms that make a decision like that possible?” And the answer would be something like, I’m going to make the presumption that if I move forward in good faith, whatever happens to me will be the best thing that could possibly happen, no matter what it is. And I think that’s actually how you make an alliance with truth. And I also think that truth is an adventure. And the way you make an alliance with truth is by assuming that whatever happens to you, if you are living in truth, is the best thing that could happen, even if you can’t see that at any given moment. Because otherwise you’d say that truth would be just the handmaiden of advantage. Well, I’m going to say something truthful, and I pay a price. Well, that means I shouldn’t have said it. Well, possibly, but that’s not the only possible standard of evaluation. Because what you’re doing is you’re making the outcome, your deity. Well, I’d just reversed that and say, no, no. Truth is the deity. The outcome is variable, but that doesn’t eradicate the initial axiom. Where’s the constant? What’s the constant?
Yeah. Well, I think that’s always part of a heroic adventure is that ability to cut the Gordian knot. But you could also ask from an engineering perspective, okay, what are the axioms that make a decision like that possible?” And the answer would be something like, I’m going to make the presumption that if I move forward in good faith, whatever happens to me will be the best thing that could possibly happen, no matter what it is. And I think that’s actually how you make an alliance with truth. And I also think that truth is an adventure. And the way you make an alliance with truth is by assuming that whatever happens to you, if you are living in truth, is the best thing that could happen, even if you can’t see that at any given moment. Because otherwise you’d say that truth would be just the handmaiden of advantage. Well, I’m going to say something truthful, and I pay a price. Well, that means I shouldn’t have said it. Well, possibly, but that’s not the only possible standard of evaluation. Because what you’re doing is you’re making the outcome, your deity. Well, I’d just reversed that and say, no, no. Truth is the deity. The outcome is variable, but that doesn’t eradicate the initial axiom. Where’s the constant? What’s the constant?
Sex
Lex Fridman
It may be when you said Abraham was being fed by naked ladies-
It may be when you said Abraham was being fed by naked ladies-
Jordan Peterson
That’s an interpolation, obviously, but would’ve been out of keeping for the times.
That’s an interpolation, obviously, but would’ve been out of keeping for the times.
Lex Fridman
But it does make me think sort of in stark contrast in Nietzsche’s own life, that perhaps getting laid early on in life as a useful starter. Step one, get laid, and then go for adventure. There’s some basic satiation of base desires.
But it does make me think sort of in stark contrast in Nietzsche’s own life, that perhaps getting laid early on in life as a useful starter. Step one, get laid, and then go for adventure. There’s some basic satiation of base desires.
Jordan Peterson
So I think it’s perfectly reasonable to bring the sexual element in because it’s a powerful motivating force, and it has to be integrated. I don’t think it’s adventure. It’s romantic adventure.
So I think it’s perfectly reasonable to bring the sexual element in because it’s a powerful motivating force, and it has to be integrated. I don’t think it’s adventure. It’s romantic adventure.
Lex Fridman
Right, but the lack of basic interaction, sexual interaction, I feel like is the engine that drives towards that cynicism of the incel in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.
Right, but the lack of basic interaction, sexual interaction, I feel like is the engine that drives towards that cynicism of the incel in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.
Jordan Peterson
There’s very little doubt about that. We know perfectly well anthropologically that the most unstable social situation you can generate is young men with no access to women. That’s not good. They’ll do anything, anything to reverse that situation. So that’s very dangerous.
There’s very little doubt about that. We know perfectly well anthropologically that the most unstable social situation you can generate is young men with no access to women. That’s not good. They’ll do anything, anything to reverse that situation. So that’s very dangerous.
But then I would also say there’s every suggestion that the pathway of adventure itself is the best pathway to romantic attractiveness. And we know this, in some ways in very blunt manner. The Google boys, the engineers who are too … What would you say? Naively oriented towards empirical truth to note when they’re being politically incorrect, they wrote a great book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, which I really like. It’s a very good book. And it’s engineers as psychologists. And so they’ll say all sorts of things that no one with any sense would ever say that happen to be true. And they studied the pattern of pornographic fantasy, and women like pornographic stories, not images. So women’s use of pornography is literary. Who are the main protagonists in female pornographic fantasy? Pirates, werewolves, vampires, surgeons, billionaires. Tony Stark.
And so the basic pornographic narrative is Beauty and the Beast. Those five categories. Terrible, aggressive male, tamable by the right relationship, hot erotic attraction. And so I would say to the young men who, and I have many times to the young men who are locked in isolation, it’s first of all, “Join the bloody club.” Because the default value of a 15 year-old male on the mating market is zero. And there’s reason for that. Zero is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. And the reason for that is, well, what the hell do you know? You’re not good for anything. You have potential and maybe plenty, and hopefully that’ll be made manifest, but you shouldn’t be all upset because you’re the same loser as everyone else your age has always been since the beginning of time.
But then you might ask, “Well, what should I do about it?” and the answer is, get yourself together. Stand up straight with your shoulders back, take on some adventure, find your calling, abide by your conscience, put yourself together and you’ll become attractive. And we know this is … Look, we know this is true. The correlation between male sexual opportunity and relative masculine status is about 0.6. That’s higher than the correlation between intelligence and academic achievement. I don’t think that there’s a larger correlation between two independent phenomena in the entire social science and health literature than the correlation between relative male social status and reproductive success. It’s by far the most fundamental determinant.
Lex Fridman
What’s the cause and effect there?
What’s the cause and effect there?
Jordan Peterson
It’s a loop. Men are motivated to attain social status because it confers upon them reproductive success. And that’s not only cognitively, but biologically. I’ll give you an example of this.
It’s a loop. Men are motivated to attain social status because it confers upon them reproductive success. And that’s not only cognitively, but biologically. I’ll give you an example of this.
There’s a documentary I watch from time to time, which I think is the most brilliant documentary I’ve ever seen. It’s called Crumb, and it’s the story of this underground cartoonist. Robert Crumb, who in high school was in the category of males for whom a date was not only not likely, but unimaginable. So he was at the bottom of the bottom rung, and almost all the reactions he got from females wasn’t just no, it was like, “Are you out of your mind?” With that contempt. And then he became successful. And so the documentary is super interesting because it tracks the utter pathology of his sexual fantasies because he was bitter and resentful. And if you want to understand the psychology of serial sexual killers and the like, and you watch Crumb, you’ll find out a lot more about that than anybody with any sense would want to know.
But then he makes this transition, and partly because he does take the heroic adventure path, and he actually has a family and children, and he is actually a pretty functional person as opposed to his brothers, one of whom commits suicide, and one of whom is literally a repeat sexual offender. It’s a brutal documentary. But what he did in his adolescence after being rejected was he found what he was interested in. He was a very good artist. He was very interested in music, and he started to pursue those single-mindedly, and he became successful. And as soon as he became successful, and the documentary tracks this beautifully, he’s immediately attractive to women. And then you might ask too, even if you’re cynical, it’s like, “Well, why do I have to perform for women?” And the answer to that is something like, why the hell should they have anything to do with you if you’re useless? They’re going to have infants. They don’t need another one.
Partly the reason that women are hypergamous, they want males who are of higher status than they are, is because they’re trying to redress the reproductive burden. And it’s substantial. The female of any species is the sex that devotes more to the reproductive function. That’s a more fundamental definition than chromosomal differentiation. And that’s taken to its ultimate extreme with humans. And so of course women are going to want someone around that’s useful, because the cost of sex for them is an 18 year-old period of dependency with an infant. So I think the adventure comes first.
Lex Fridman
Heroic adventure comes first.
Heroic adventure comes first.
Jordan Peterson
Well, it’s complex. Because the other problem, let’s say with the Crumb boys, is that their mother was extremely pathological and they didn’t get a lot of genuine feminine nurturance and affection.
Well, it’s complex. Because the other problem, let’s say with the Crumb boys, is that their mother was extremely pathological and they didn’t get a lot of genuine feminine nurturance and affection.
Lex Fridman
Of course. The family and society are not going to help you most of the time with a heroic adventure, right? They’re going to be a barrier versus a catalyst.
Of course. The family and society are not going to help you most of the time with a heroic adventure, right? They’re going to be a barrier versus a catalyst.
Jordan Peterson
Well, in good families they’re both. Because they put up constraints on your behavior. I’ve interviewed a lot of successful people about their calling, let’s say, because I do that with all my podcast guests. How did the path that you took to success make itself manifest? And the pattern’s very typical. Almost all the people that I’ve interviewed had a mother and a father. Now, it’s not invariant, but I’d say it’s there in 99% of the time. It’s really high. And both of the parents, or at least one of them, but often both were very encouraging of the person’s interests and pathway to development.
Well, in good families they’re both. Because they put up constraints on your behavior. I’ve interviewed a lot of successful people about their calling, let’s say, because I do that with all my podcast guests. How did the path that you took to success make itself manifest? And the pattern’s very typical. Almost all the people that I’ve interviewed had a mother and a father. Now, it’s not invariant, but I’d say it’s there in 99% of the time. It’s really high. And both of the parents, or at least one of them, but often both were very encouraging of the person’s interests and pathway to development.
Lex Fridman
That’s fascinating. I’ve heard you analyze it that way before, and I had a reaction to that idea, because you focused on the positive of the parents. I feel like it was the … Maybe I see biographies differently, but it feels like the struggle within the family was the catalyst for greatness in a lot of biographies. Maybe I’m misinterpreting it, but I just-
That’s fascinating. I’ve heard you analyze it that way before, and I had a reaction to that idea, because you focused on the positive of the parents. I feel like it was the … Maybe I see biographies differently, but it feels like the struggle within the family was the catalyst for greatness in a lot of biographies. Maybe I’m misinterpreting it, but I just-
Jordan Peterson
No, no. I think that that’s a reflection, maybe … Correct me if I’m wrong. I think that’s a reflection of that dynamic between positive and negative emotion. Like my son, for example, who’s doing just fine, he’s firing on all cylinders as far as I’m concerned. He has a nice family, he gets along with his wife, he’s a really good musician, he’s got a company he’s running well. He’s a delight to be around. He was a relatively disagreeable infant. He was tough-minded, and he didn’t take no for an answer. And so there was some tussle in regulating his behavior. He spent a lot of time when he was two sitting on the steps trying to get his act together. And so that was the constraint. But that wasn’t something that was … It’s an opposition to him away because it was in opposition to the immediate manifestation of his hedonistic desires, but it was also an impetus to further development.
No, no. I think that that’s a reflection, maybe … Correct me if I’m wrong. I think that’s a reflection of that dynamic between positive and negative emotion. Like my son, for example, who’s doing just fine, he’s firing on all cylinders as far as I’m concerned. He has a nice family, he gets along with his wife, he’s a really good musician, he’s got a company he’s running well. He’s a delight to be around. He was a relatively disagreeable infant. He was tough-minded, and he didn’t take no for an answer. And so there was some tussle in regulating his behavior. He spent a lot of time when he was two sitting on the steps trying to get his act together. And so that was the constraint. But that wasn’t something that was … It’s an opposition to him away because it was in opposition to the immediate manifestation of his hedonistic desires, but it was also an impetus to further development.
The rule for me when he was on the stairs was as soon as you’re willing to be a civilized human being, you can get off the stairs. And you might think, well, that’s nothing but arbitrary superego, patriarchal oppressive constraint. Or you could say, “Well, no, what I’m actually doing is facilitating his cortical maturation.” Because when a child misbehaves, it’s usually because they’re under the domination of some primordial emotional or motivational impulse. They’re angry, they’re over-enthusiastic, they’re upset, they’re selfish. It’s narrow self-centeredness expressed in a immature manner.
Lex Fridman
But see … Okay. Tell me if I’m wrong, but it feels like the engine of greatness, at least on the male side of things, has often been trying to prove the father wrong, or trying to gain the acceptance of the father. So that tension, where the parent is not encouraging like you mentioned, but is basically saying, “No, you won’t be able to do this.”
But see … Okay. Tell me if I’m wrong, but it feels like the engine of greatness, at least on the male side of things, has often been trying to prove the father wrong, or trying to gain the acceptance of the father. So that tension, where the parent is not encouraging like you mentioned, but is basically saying, “No, you won’t be able to do this.”
Jordan Peterson
Okay. So my observation as a psychologist has been that it’s very, very difficult for someone to get their act together unless they have at least one figure in their life that’s encouraging and shows them the pathway forward. So you can have a lot of adversity in your life, and if you have one person around who’s a good model and you’re neurologically intact, you can latch onto that model.
Okay. So my observation as a psychologist has been that it’s very, very difficult for someone to get their act together unless they have at least one figure in their life that’s encouraging and shows them the pathway forward. So you can have a lot of adversity in your life, and if you have one person around who’s a good model and you’re neurologically intact, you can latch onto that model.
Now, you can also find that model in books, and people do that sometimes. I’ve interviewed people who had pretty fragmented childhoods, who turned to books and found the pattern that guided them in, let’s say, the adventures of the heroes of the past, because that’s a good way of thinking about it. And I read a book called Angela’s Ashes that was written by an Irish author, Frank McCourt. Fantastic book, beautiful book. And his father was an alcoholic of gargantuan proportions. An Irish drinker who drank every cent that came into the family and many of whose children died in poverty.
And what Frank did is a testament to the human spirit, is he sort of divided his father conceptually into two elements. There was sober morning father who was encouraging and with whom he had a relationship, and then there was drunk and useless later afternoon and evening father, and he rejected the negative and he amplified his relationship with the positive. Now, he had other things going for him, but he did a very good job of discriminating.
And partly the question that you’re raising is to what degree is it useful to have a beneficial adversary? Yeah, struggle-free progress is not possible. And I think there are situations under which where you might be motivated to prove someone in your immediate circle wrong, but then that also implies that at some level, for some reason, you actually care about their judgment. You just didn’t write them off completely.
Lex Fridman
Well, that’s why I say there’s an archetype of a young man trying to gain the approval of his father. And I think that repeats itself in a bunch of biographies that I’ve read. I don’t know. There must have been an engine somewhere that they found of approval of encouragement. Maybe in books, maybe in the mother, or maybe the role of the parents is flipped.
Well, that’s why I say there’s an archetype of a young man trying to gain the approval of his father. And I think that repeats itself in a bunch of biographies that I’ve read. I don’t know. There must have been an engine somewhere that they found of approval of encouragement. Maybe in books, maybe in the mother, or maybe the role of the parents is flipped.
Jordan Peterson
Well, my father was hard to please. Very.
Well, my father was hard to please. Very.
Lex Fridman
Did you ever succeed?
Did you ever succeed?
Jordan Peterson
Yes, but it wasn’t easy, ever.
Yes, but it wasn’t easy, ever.
Lex Fridman
When was the moment when you succeeded?
When was the moment when you succeeded?
Jordan Peterson
Pretty late. Like 40, maybe later.
Pretty late. Like 40, maybe later.
Lex Fridman
Was it gradual, or a moment when a shift happened?
Was it gradual, or a moment when a shift happened?
Jordan Peterson
My father was always willing to approve of the things I did that were good, although he was not effusive by any stretch of the imagination, and the standards were very high. Now, I was probably fortunate for me. And it does bear on the question you’re asking. If you want someone to motivate you optimally … God, it’s complicated because there has to be a temperamental dance between the two people. What you really want is for someone to apply the highest possible standards to you that you’re capable of reaching. And that’s a vicious dance, because you have to have a relationship with your child to do that properly. Because if you want to be optimally motivating as a father, you keep your children on the edge. It’s like, you might not reward something in your child that you would think would be good in someone else because you think they could do better. And so my father was pretty clear about the idea that he always expected me to do better, and was that troublesome? It was like I felt often when I was young that there was no pleasing him, but I also knew that that wasn’t right. See, I actually knew that wasn’t right. Because I could remember, especially I think when I was very young, that I did things that he was pleased about. I knew that was possible. So it wasn’t unpredictable and arbitrary. It was just difficult.
My father was always willing to approve of the things I did that were good, although he was not effusive by any stretch of the imagination, and the standards were very high. Now, I was probably fortunate for me. And it does bear on the question you’re asking. If you want someone to motivate you optimally … God, it’s complicated because there has to be a temperamental dance between the two people. What you really want is for someone to apply the highest possible standards to you that you’re capable of reaching. And that’s a vicious dance, because you have to have a relationship with your child to do that properly. Because if you want to be optimally motivating as a father, you keep your children on the edge. It’s like, you might not reward something in your child that you would think would be good in someone else because you think they could do better. And so my father was pretty clear about the idea that he always expected me to do better, and was that troublesome? It was like I felt often when I was young that there was no pleasing him, but I also knew that that wasn’t right. See, I actually knew that wasn’t right. Because I could remember, especially I think when I was very young, that I did things that he was pleased about. I knew that was possible. So it wasn’t unpredictable and arbitrary. It was just difficult.
Lex Fridman
It sounds like he’s hit a pretty good optimal. But for each individual human that optimal differs, and that’s what’s hard.
It sounds like he’s hit a pretty good optimal. But for each individual human that optimal differs, and that’s what’s hard.
Jordan Peterson
Well, that’s why you have to have a relationship with your children. You have to know them. Well, with yourself too, and with your wife. You can’t hit that optimal … That optimal is probably love, because love isn’t just acceptance. Love is acceptance and encouragement. And it’s not just that either. It’s also, “No, don’t do that. That’s beneath you. You’re capable of more.” And how harsh should that be? That’s a really hard question. If you really love someone, you’re not going to put up with their stupidity. “Don’t do that.” One of the rules I had with my little kids was don’t do anything that makes you look like an idiot in public. Why? Because I don’t want you disgracing yourself. Why not? Because I like you. I think you’re great, and you’re not going to act like a bloody fool in public so that people get the wrong idea about you. No.
Well, that’s why you have to have a relationship with your children. You have to know them. Well, with yourself too, and with your wife. You can’t hit that optimal … That optimal is probably love, because love isn’t just acceptance. Love is acceptance and encouragement. And it’s not just that either. It’s also, “No, don’t do that. That’s beneath you. You’re capable of more.” And how harsh should that be? That’s a really hard question. If you really love someone, you’re not going to put up with their stupidity. “Don’t do that.” One of the rules I had with my little kids was don’t do anything that makes you look like an idiot in public. Why? Because I don’t want you disgracing yourself. Why not? Because I like you. I think you’re great, and you’re not going to act like a bloody fool in public so that people get the wrong idea about you. No.
Lex Fridman
What about inside a relationship? A successful relationship. How much challenge, how much peace? Is a successful relationship one that is easy or one that is challenging?
What about inside a relationship? A successful relationship. How much challenge, how much peace? Is a successful relationship one that is easy or one that is challenging?
Jordan Peterson
I would say to some degree that depends on your temperament. My wife is quite a provocative person, and there are times when I, I suppose … Do I wish that … There are times when I casually wish that she was easier to get along with, but as soon as I think about it I don’t think that. Because I’ve always liked her. We were friends ever since we were little kids, and she’s plays rough, and I like that, as it turns out. Now, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a pain from time to time. And that is going to be a temperamental issue to some degree, and an issue of negotiation. She plays rough, but fair. And the fair part has been establishing that it’s been part of our ongoing negotiation.
I would say to some degree that depends on your temperament. My wife is quite a provocative person, and there are times when I, I suppose … Do I wish that … There are times when I casually wish that she was easier to get along with, but as soon as I think about it I don’t think that. Because I’ve always liked her. We were friends ever since we were little kids, and she’s plays rough, and I like that, as it turns out. Now, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a pain from time to time. And that is going to be a temperamental issue to some degree, and an issue of negotiation. She plays rough, but fair. And the fair part has been establishing that it’s been part of our ongoing negotiation.
Lex Fridman
And part of it is in the play, you get to find out about yourself or what your temperament is. I don’t think that’s clear until it’s tested.
And part of it is in the play, you get to find out about yourself or what your temperament is. I don’t think that’s clear until it’s tested.
Jordan Peterson
Oh, definitely not. Definitely not. You find out all sorts of things about yourself in a relationship, that’s for sure. Well, and partly the reason that there is provocativeness, especially from women in relationship to men, is they want to test them out. It’s like … Can you hold your temper when someone’s bothering you? Well, why would a woman want to know that? Well, maybe she doesn’t want you to snap and hurt her kids. And so how’s she going to find that out? Ask you? Well, you’re going to say, “Well, I’d never do that.” It’s like, “Never eh? Let’s find out if it’s never.” So we don’t know how people test each other out in relationships, or why exactly, but it’s intense and necessary.
Oh, definitely not. Definitely not. You find out all sorts of things about yourself in a relationship, that’s for sure. Well, and partly the reason that there is provocativeness, especially from women in relationship to men, is they want to test them out. It’s like … Can you hold your temper when someone’s bothering you? Well, why would a woman want to know that? Well, maybe she doesn’t want you to snap and hurt her kids. And so how’s she going to find that out? Ask you? Well, you’re going to say, “Well, I’d never do that.” It’s like, “Never eh? Let’s find out if it’s never.” So we don’t know how people test each other out in relationships, or why exactly, but it’s intense and necessary.
Lex Fridman
What’s your and what’s in general should a man’s relationship with temper be?
What’s your and what’s in general should a man’s relationship with temper be?
Jordan Peterson
You should have one and you should be able to regulate it. That’s part of that attractiveness of the monstrous that characterizes women’s fantasies. And Nietzsche pointed this out too-
You should have one and you should be able to regulate it. That’s part of that attractiveness of the monstrous that characterizes women’s fantasies. And Nietzsche pointed this out too-
Lex Fridman
Pirates.
Pirates.
Jordan Peterson
To go back to Nietzsche.
To go back to Nietzsche.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jordan Peterson
One of Nietzsche’s claims was that most of what passes for morality is nothing but cowardice. I’d never cheat on my wife. Is there anybody asking you to that you actually find attractive, or are there dozens of people asking you to that you find attractive? It’s like, “Well, I would never cheat.” It’s like, “No, you just don’t have the opportunity.” Now, I’m not saying that everyone’s in that position that they would cheat even if they had the opportunity, because that’s not true. And it’s the same with regards to, “Oh, I’m a peaceful man.” It’s like, “No, you’re not. You’re just a weak coward. You wouldn’t dare to have a confrontation, physical or metaphysical, and you’re passing it off as morality because you don’t want to come to terms with the fact of your own weakness and cowardice.”
One of Nietzsche’s claims was that most of what passes for morality is nothing but cowardice. I’d never cheat on my wife. Is there anybody asking you to that you actually find attractive, or are there dozens of people asking you to that you find attractive? It’s like, “Well, I would never cheat.” It’s like, “No, you just don’t have the opportunity.” Now, I’m not saying that everyone’s in that position that they would cheat even if they had the opportunity, because that’s not true. And it’s the same with regards to, “Oh, I’m a peaceful man.” It’s like, “No, you’re not. You’re just a weak coward. You wouldn’t dare to have a confrontation, physical or metaphysical, and you’re passing it off as morality because you don’t want to come to terms with the fact of your own weakness and cowardice.”
And part of what I would say is twisted pseudo-Christian morality that Nietzsche was criticizing was exactly of that sort, and it tied into resentment and envy. And he tied that in explicitly said that failure in life masked by the morality that’s nothing but weak cowardice turns to the resentment that undermines and destroys everything, and that does that purposefully.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think it was criticizing under the facade of niceness, there’s an ocean of resentment.
Yeah, I think it was criticizing under the facade of niceness, there’s an ocean of resentment.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, that’s for sure. For sure. That’s also the danger of being two forthcoming with people. See, this is another thing, let’s say, about my wife, who’s not particularly agreeable. She’s not particularly agreeable, but she’s not resentful, and that’s because she doesn’t give things away that she isn’t willing to. And if you’re agreeable and nice and you’re conflict avoidant, you’ll push yourself too far to please the other person, and then that makes you bitter and resentful. So that’s not helpful.
Yeah, that’s for sure. For sure. That’s also the danger of being two forthcoming with people. See, this is another thing, let’s say, about my wife, who’s not particularly agreeable. She’s not particularly agreeable, but she’s not resentful, and that’s because she doesn’t give things away that she isn’t willing to. And if you’re agreeable and nice and you’re conflict avoidant, you’ll push yourself too far to please the other person, and then that makes you bitter and resentful. So that’s not helpful.
Lex Fridman
Do you think you’ll be in trouble for saying this on a podcast later?
Do you think you’ll be in trouble for saying this on a podcast later?
Jordan Peterson
No, no. We know each other pretty well. And like I said, it’s a trait that I find admirable. It’s provocative and challenging.
No, no. We know each other pretty well. And like I said, it’s a trait that I find admirable. It’s provocative and challenging.
Lex Fridman
And it seems to work.
And it seems to work.
Jordan Peterson
Well, we’ve been together 50 years, so …
Well, we’ve been together 50 years, so …
Good and evil
Lex Fridman
Quick pause, bathroom break.
Quick pause, bathroom break.
If we can descend from the realm of ideas down to history and reality. I would say the time between World War I and World War II was one of history’s biggest testing of ideas, and really the most dramatic kinds of ideas that helped us understand the nature of good and evil. I just want to ask you a question about good and evil. Churchill, in many ways, was not a good man. Stalin, as you’ve documented extensively, was a horrible man. But you can make the case that both were necessary for stopping an even worse human being in Hitler. So to what degree do you need monsters to fight monsters? Do you need bad men to be able to fight off greater evils?
Jordan Peterson
It’s everything in its proper place is the answer to that. We might think that our life would be easier without fear, let’s say. We might say that our life would be easier without anger or pain, but the truth of the matter is that those things are beneficial, even though they can cause great suffering, but they have to be in their proper place. And that capacity that could in one context be a terrible force for evil can in the proper context be the most potent force for good. A good man has to be formidable. And partly what that means, as far as I can tell, is that you have to be able to say no. And no means … I thought a lot about no working as a clinician, because I did a lot of strategic counseling with my clients in a lot of extremely difficult situations, and I learned to take apart what no meant-
It’s everything in its proper place is the answer to that. We might think that our life would be easier without fear, let’s say. We might say that our life would be easier without anger or pain, but the truth of the matter is that those things are beneficial, even though they can cause great suffering, but they have to be in their proper place. And that capacity that could in one context be a terrible force for evil can in the proper context be the most potent force for good. A good man has to be formidable. And partly what that means, as far as I can tell, is that you have to be able to say no. And no means … I thought a lot about no working as a clinician, because I did a lot of strategic counseling with my clients in a lot of extremely difficult situations, and I learned to take apart what no meant-
Jordan Peterson
… called situations, and I learned to take apart what no meant. And also when dealing with my own children, because I used no sparingly because it’s a powerful weapon, let’s say, but I meant it. And with my kids, what it meant was if you continue that pattern of behavior, something you do not like will happen to you with 100% certainty. And when that’s the case and you’re willing to implement it, you don’t have to do it very often. With regards to monstrosity, it’s like weak men aren’t good. They’re just weak. That’s Nietzsche’s observation. That’s partly, again, why he was tempted to place the will to power, let’s say, and to deal with that notion in a manner that when it was tied with the revaluation of all values was counterproductive. Counterproductive in the final analysis. It’s not like there wasn’t something to what he was driving at. Formidable men are admirable and you know, don’t mess with them. Douglas Murray is a good example of that.
… called situations, and I learned to take apart what no meant. And also when dealing with my own children, because I used no sparingly because it’s a powerful weapon, let’s say, but I meant it. And with my kids, what it meant was if you continue that pattern of behavior, something you do not like will happen to you with 100% certainty. And when that’s the case and you’re willing to implement it, you don’t have to do it very often. With regards to monstrosity, it’s like weak men aren’t good. They’re just weak. That’s Nietzsche’s observation. That’s partly, again, why he was tempted to place the will to power, let’s say, and to deal with that notion in a manner that when it was tied with the revaluation of all values was counterproductive. Counterproductive in the final analysis. It’s not like there wasn’t something to what he was driving at. Formidable men are admirable and you know, don’t mess with them. Douglas Murray is a good example of that.
He’s a rather slight guy, but he’s got a spine of steel, and there’s more than a bit of what’s a monstrous in him. And Jocko Willink is like that, and Joe Rogan is like that, and you’re like that.
Lex Fridman
But there’s a different level. I mean, if you look, to me, Churchill might represent the thing you’re talking about, but World War II Hitler would not be stopped without Stalin.
But there’s a different level. I mean, if you look, to me, Churchill might represent the thing you’re talking about, but World War II Hitler would not be stopped without Stalin.
Jordan Peterson
Well, I wonder. Yes, yes.
Well, I wonder. Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman
And if I may insert into this picture of complexity, Hitler would’ve not stopped until he enslaved and exterminated the entirety of the Slavic people, the Jewish people, the Slavic people, the gypsies, everybody who was not Aryan. But then Stalin in the mass rape of German women by the Red Army as they marched towards Berlin is a kind of manifestation, the full monstrosity that a person can be.
And if I may insert into this picture of complexity, Hitler would’ve not stopped until he enslaved and exterminated the entirety of the Slavic people, the Jewish people, the Slavic people, the gypsies, everybody who was not Aryan. But then Stalin in the mass rape of German women by the Red Army as they marched towards Berlin is a kind of manifestation, the full monstrosity that a person can be.
Jordan Peterson
You can easily be in a situation, you can easily, unfortunately find yourself in a situation where all you have in front of you are a variety of bad options. That’s partly why, if you have any sense, you try to conduct yourself very carefully in life because you don’t want to be in a position where you’ve made so many mistakes that all the options left to you are terrible. So you said, well, was it necessary to ally with Stalin? Well, it’s very difficult to second guess the trajectory of something as complex as World War II, but we could say casually, at least as Westerners have in general, that that alliance was necessary. Now, I think the mistake that the West made in the aftermath of World War II was in not dealing as forthrightly with the catastrophes of communism as an ideology as we did with fascism. And that’s especially true of the intellectuals in the universities.
You can easily be in a situation, you can easily, unfortunately find yourself in a situation where all you have in front of you are a variety of bad options. That’s partly why, if you have any sense, you try to conduct yourself very carefully in life because you don’t want to be in a position where you’ve made so many mistakes that all the options left to you are terrible. So you said, well, was it necessary to ally with Stalin? Well, it’s very difficult to second guess the trajectory of something as complex as World War II, but we could say casually, at least as Westerners have in general, that that alliance was necessary. Now, I think the mistake that the West made in the aftermath of World War II was in not dealing as forthrightly with the catastrophes of communism as an ideology as we did with fascism. And that’s especially true of the intellectuals in the universities.
I mean, it was very common when I was teaching both at Harvard and at the University of Toronto for the students in my personality class where we studied Solzhenitsyn, who’s actually an existential psychologist in many ways and a deep one, none of them knew anything about the Soviet atrocities. None of them knew anything about what happened in Ukraine and the death of 6 million productive people, had no idea that the communists killed tens of millions of people in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
Lex Fridman
They know even less about Mao and the Great Leap Forward.
They know even less about Mao and the Great Leap Forward.
Jordan Peterson
Right. Which some estimates are a hundred million people. Now when your error bars are in the tens of millions, well, that’s a real indication of a cataclysm. And nobody knows how many people died from direct oppression or indirect in the Soviet Union. 20 million, it seems like a reasonable estimate. Solzhenitsyn’s upper was higher than that.
Right. Which some estimates are a hundred million people. Now when your error bars are in the tens of millions, well, that’s a real indication of a cataclysm. And nobody knows how many people died from direct oppression or indirect in the Soviet Union. 20 million, it seems like a reasonable estimate. Solzhenitsyn’s upper was higher than that.
Lex Fridman
And how do you measure the intellectual output that was suppressed and killed off the number of intellectuals, artists and writers that were put into the gulags.
And how do you measure the intellectual output that was suppressed and killed off the number of intellectuals, artists and writers that were put into the gulags.
Jordan Peterson
Well, farmers for that matter, and anyone who was willing to tell the truth, right? Absolutely. So, yeah, catastrophic. And so I think the West’s failure wasn’t so much allying with Stalin. I mean, it was Douglas MacArthur who wanted to continue. He thought we should just take the Soviets out after the Second World War, and they removed them from any position of authority where such a thing might be made possible and people were tired, but was MacArthur wrong? Well, he certainly wasn’t wrong in his insistence that Stalin was as big a monster as Hitler or bigger. So the valorization of the radical leftist proclivity is the sin of the West, I think more intensely than allying with Stalin.
Well, farmers for that matter, and anyone who was willing to tell the truth, right? Absolutely. So, yeah, catastrophic. And so I think the West’s failure wasn’t so much allying with Stalin. I mean, it was Douglas MacArthur who wanted to continue. He thought we should just take the Soviets out after the Second World War, and they removed them from any position of authority where such a thing might be made possible and people were tired, but was MacArthur wrong? Well, he certainly wasn’t wrong in his insistence that Stalin was as big a monster as Hitler or bigger. So the valorization of the radical leftist proclivity is the sin of the West, I think more intensely than allying with Stalin.
Lex Fridman
Tricky nuanced topic. But if we look at the modern day and the threat of communism Marxism in the United States, to me it’s disrespectful to the atrocities of the 20th century to call somebody like Kamala Harris a communist. But I see the sort of escalation of the extremeness of language being used when you call somebody like Donald Trump a fascist, that it makes total sense to then use similar extreme terminology for somebody like Kamala Harris. But maybe I could ask your evaluation. If you look at the political landscape today, somebody like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Tricky nuanced topic. But if we look at the modern day and the threat of communism Marxism in the United States, to me it’s disrespectful to the atrocities of the 20th century to call somebody like Kamala Harris a communist. But I see the sort of escalation of the extremeness of language being used when you call somebody like Donald Trump a fascist, that it makes total sense to then use similar extreme terminology for somebody like Kamala Harris. But maybe I could ask your evaluation. If you look at the political landscape today, somebody like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Jordan Peterson
Okay. Well, the first thing I would say is that I think that viewing the political landscape of today as a political landscape is actually wrong. I think it’s not the right frame of reference because what I see happening are a very small percentage of dark tetrad personality types. So Machiavellian, manipulative, narcissistic, wanting undeserved attention, psychopathic that makes them predatory parasites and sadistic, because that goes along with the other three. That’s about in the serious manifestation, that’s probably three to 5% of the population, and they’re generally kept under pretty decent control by civilized people and stable social interactions. I think that their imaginations are disinhibited by cost-free social media communication. So they gain disproportionate influence. Now, these people want undeserved recognition and social status and everything that goes along with it, and they don’t care how they get it, because when I say they want that, I mean that’s all they want.
Okay. Well, the first thing I would say is that I think that viewing the political landscape of today as a political landscape is actually wrong. I think it’s not the right frame of reference because what I see happening are a very small percentage of dark tetrad personality types. So Machiavellian, manipulative, narcissistic, wanting undeserved attention, psychopathic that makes them predatory parasites and sadistic, because that goes along with the other three. That’s about in the serious manifestation, that’s probably three to 5% of the population, and they’re generally kept under pretty decent control by civilized people and stable social interactions. I think that their imaginations are disinhibited by cost-free social media communication. So they gain disproportionate influence. Now, these people want undeserved recognition and social status and everything that goes along with it, and they don’t care how they get it, because when I say they want that, I mean that’s all they want.
Lex Fridman
So in the realm of social media, you mentioned, yes, but are you also suggesting that they’re overrepresented in the realm of politics, politicians and so on?
So in the realm of social media, you mentioned, yes, but are you also suggesting that they’re overrepresented in the realm of politics, politicians and so on?
Jordan Peterson
They’re overrepresented in the realm of fractious political discourse because they can use ideas. First of all, they can use, let’s say, the benevolent ideas of the right and the benevolent ideas of the left, either one, and switch back and forth for that matter as a camouflage for what they’re actually up to.
They’re overrepresented in the realm of fractious political discourse because they can use ideas. First of all, they can use, let’s say, the benevolent ideas of the right and the benevolent ideas of the left, either one, and switch back and forth for that matter as a camouflage for what they’re actually up to.
Lex Fridman
You’ve interviewed a lot of people and you have a really powerful mind. You have a good read on people. So how do you know when you’re sitting across from a psychopath?
You’ve interviewed a lot of people and you have a really powerful mind. You have a good read on people. So how do you know when you’re sitting across from a psychopath?
Jordan Peterson
I wouldn’t say that I do know. In normal social circumstances, we have evolved mechanisms to keep people like that under control. Let’s say that you and I have a series of interactions and you screw me over once. I’m not going to forget that. Now, I might not write you off because of the one time, but if it happens three times, it’s like we’re not going to play together anymore. And in normal times, most of our social networks are connected and interacting. So if you ripped me off three times and I noted that, I’m going to tell everybody I know and they’re going to tell everybody they know, and soon everyone will know, and that’s the end of your tricks. But that assumes that we know who you are and we’re in continual communication. Well, all of that’s gone online. So anonymity does that and so does the amplification of emotional intensity by the social media platforms and their algorithms.
I wouldn’t say that I do know. In normal social circumstances, we have evolved mechanisms to keep people like that under control. Let’s say that you and I have a series of interactions and you screw me over once. I’m not going to forget that. Now, I might not write you off because of the one time, but if it happens three times, it’s like we’re not going to play together anymore. And in normal times, most of our social networks are connected and interacting. So if you ripped me off three times and I noted that, I’m going to tell everybody I know and they’re going to tell everybody they know, and soon everyone will know, and that’s the end of your tricks. But that assumes that we know who you are and we’re in continual communication. Well, all of that’s gone online. So anonymity does that and so does the amplification of emotional intensity by the social media platforms and their algorithms.
I think what we’re doing, this is happening on Twitter continually, is we’re giving the 5% of psychopaths a radically disproportionate voice. And what they’re doing is there’s a bunch of them on the left, and they’re all, we’re so compassionate, and there’s a bunch of them on the right, and at the moment they’re all, we’re so Christian and free speech oriented. It’s like, no, you’re not. You’re narcissistic psychopaths, and that’s your camouflage. And you hide behind your anonymity and you use fractious and divisive language to attract fools and to elevate your social status and your clout. And not only that, to gain, what would you say, satisfaction for your sadistic impulses.
Lex Fridman
See, the problem is it’s hard to tell who is the psychopath and who is a heterodox truth seeker.
See, the problem is it’s hard to tell who is the psychopath and who is a heterodox truth seeker.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, if you were charitable about Tucker Carlson’s recent interview, you’d say that was exactly the conundrum he faced. And it is hard. I’ve thought about, for example, interviewing Andrew Tate, and I thought, I don’t think so. And then I thought, why? I figured it’s not obvious to me at all that he wouldn’t charm me. So I knew this guy, Robert Hare. Robert Hare was the world’s foremost authority on psychopathy. He established the field of clinical analysis of psychopathic behavior, and Hare was a pretty agreeable guy. So he would give people the benefit of the doubt, and he interviewed hundreds of serious psychopaths, like imprisoned violent offenders. And he told me in one of our conversations that every time he sat down with a violent offender psychopath, and he had a measure for psychopathy that was a clinical checklist, so he could identify the psychopaths from just the say, run-of-the-mill criminals. Every time he sat down with them, they pulled the wool over his eyes, and he videotaped the interviews. And it wasn’t until later when he was reviewing the videos that he could see what they were doing, but in person, their tricks were more sophisticated than his detection ability.
Yeah. Well, if you were charitable about Tucker Carlson’s recent interview, you’d say that was exactly the conundrum he faced. And it is hard. I’ve thought about, for example, interviewing Andrew Tate, and I thought, I don’t think so. And then I thought, why? I figured it’s not obvious to me at all that he wouldn’t charm me. So I knew this guy, Robert Hare. Robert Hare was the world’s foremost authority on psychopathy. He established the field of clinical analysis of psychopathic behavior, and Hare was a pretty agreeable guy. So he would give people the benefit of the doubt, and he interviewed hundreds of serious psychopaths, like imprisoned violent offenders. And he told me in one of our conversations that every time he sat down with a violent offender psychopath, and he had a measure for psychopathy that was a clinical checklist, so he could identify the psychopaths from just the say, run-of-the-mill criminals. Every time he sat down with them, they pulled the wool over his eyes, and he videotaped the interviews. And it wasn’t until later when he was reviewing the videos that he could see what they were doing, but in person, their tricks were more sophisticated than his detection ability.
Psychopathy
Lex Fridman
Well, okay, this is fascinating because again, you’re a great interviewer. I would love it if you interviewed somebody like Putin. So this idea that you are a fool in the face of psychopathy just doesn’t jive with me.
Well, okay, this is fascinating because again, you’re a great interviewer. I would love it if you interviewed somebody like Putin. So this idea that you are a fool in the face of psychopathy just doesn’t jive with me.
Jordan Peterson
I’m an agreeable guy. That’s the problem. I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt.
I’m an agreeable guy. That’s the problem. I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt.
Lex Fridman
Right. But that’s good because the way you reveal psychopathy is by being agreeable, not weak, but seeking with empathy to understand the other person. And in the details in the little nuanced ways that they struggle with questions, the psychopathy is revealed just to separate the two things. So one over-representation, psychopathy online with anonymity. That’s a serious fascinating problem. But in the interview one-on-one, I don’t know if the job of a human being in conversation is to not talk to psychopaths, but to talk… How would you interview Hitler?
Right. But that’s good because the way you reveal psychopathy is by being agreeable, not weak, but seeking with empathy to understand the other person. And in the details in the little nuanced ways that they struggle with questions, the psychopathy is revealed just to separate the two things. So one over-representation, psychopathy online with anonymity. That’s a serious fascinating problem. But in the interview one-on-one, I don’t know if the job of a human being in conversation is to not talk to psychopaths, but to talk… How would you interview Hitler?
Jordan Peterson
Well, I’ve had very difficult clinical interviews with people in my clinical practice.
Well, I’ve had very difficult clinical interviews with people in my clinical practice.
Lex Fridman
How do you approach that?
How do you approach that?
Jordan Peterson
Well, I really probably approach that the way I approach most conversations. And it’s something like, I’m going to assume that you’re playing a straight game, but I’m going to watch, and if you throw the odd crooked maneuver in, then I’ll note it. And after you do it three times, I’ll think, okay, I see. I thought we were playing one game, but we’re actually playing another one. And if I’m smart enough to pick that up, that usually works out quite successfully for me. But I’m not always smart enough to pick that up.
Well, I really probably approach that the way I approach most conversations. And it’s something like, I’m going to assume that you’re playing a straight game, but I’m going to watch, and if you throw the odd crooked maneuver in, then I’ll note it. And after you do it three times, I’ll think, okay, I see. I thought we were playing one game, but we’re actually playing another one. And if I’m smart enough to pick that up, that usually works out quite successfully for me. But I’m not always smart enough to pick that up.
Lex Fridman
But see, here’s the nice thing. There’s the one-on-one conversation that’s not recorded is different than one that’s listened by a lot of people because I would venture to… I trust the intelligence of the viewer and the listener to detect even better than you.
But see, here’s the nice thing. There’s the one-on-one conversation that’s not recorded is different than one that’s listened by a lot of people because I would venture to… I trust the intelligence of the viewer and the listener to detect even better than you.
Jordan Peterson
Yes. And I think that’s true, by the way.
Yes. And I think that’s true, by the way.
Lex Fridman
To detect this psychopathy.
To detect this psychopathy.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. I’ve had the odd interview with people that I wasn’t happy with having organized because I felt that I had brought their ideas to a wider audience than might’ve been appropriate. But my conclusion and the conclusion of my producers and the people I talked to was that we could run the interview, the discussion and let the audience sort it out. And I would say they do. I think as a general rule of thumb, that’s true. And I also think that the long form interviews are particularly good at that because it’s not that easy to maintain a manipulative stance, especially if you’re empty for two and a half hours. So you get tired, you get irritable, you show that you lose the track, you’re going to start leaking out your mistakes.
Yeah. I’ve had the odd interview with people that I wasn’t happy with having organized because I felt that I had brought their ideas to a wider audience than might’ve been appropriate. But my conclusion and the conclusion of my producers and the people I talked to was that we could run the interview, the discussion and let the audience sort it out. And I would say they do. I think as a general rule of thumb, that’s true. And I also think that the long form interviews are particularly good at that because it’s not that easy to maintain a manipulative stance, especially if you’re empty for two and a half hours. So you get tired, you get irritable, you show that you lose the track, you’re going to start leaking out your mistakes.
Lex Fridman
And that actually is the case for all the world leaders. I would say one hour is too short. Something happens at two hour plus mark where you start to leak. And I trust in the intelligence of the listener to detect that.
And that actually is the case for all the world leaders. I would say one hour is too short. Something happens at two hour plus mark where you start to leak. And I trust in the intelligence of the listener to detect that.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. And it might be the intelligence of the distributed crowd. And I mean, that’s what I’ve seen with the YouTube interviews is that it’s hard to fool people as such over a protracted period of time. And I guess it’s partly because everybody brings a slightly different set of falsehood detectors to the table. And if you aggregate that, it’s pretty damn accurate.
Yeah. And it might be the intelligence of the distributed crowd. And I mean, that’s what I’ve seen with the YouTube interviews is that it’s hard to fool people as such over a protracted period of time. And I guess it’s partly because everybody brings a slightly different set of falsehood detectors to the table. And if you aggregate that, it’s pretty damn accurate.
Lex Fridman
But of course, it’s complicated because ideas of Nazi ideology spread in the twenties. There was a real battle between Marxism and Nazism.
But of course, it’s complicated because ideas of Nazi ideology spread in the twenties. There was a real battle between Marxism and Nazism.
Jordan Peterson
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman
And I believe there’s some attempts at censorship of Nazi ideology. Censorship very often does the opposite. It gives the fringe ideologies power if they’re being censored, because that’s an indication that the man in power doesn’t want the truth to be hurt, this kind of idea. And that just puts fuel to the fire.
And I believe there’s some attempts at censorship of Nazi ideology. Censorship very often does the opposite. It gives the fringe ideologies power if they’re being censored, because that’s an indication that the man in power doesn’t want the truth to be hurt, this kind of idea. And that just puts fuel to the fire.
Jordan Peterson
It also motivates the paranoid types because one of the reasons that paranoia spirals out of control is because paranoid people almost inevitably end up being persecuted because they’re so touchy and so suspicious that people start to walk on eggshells around them as if there are things going on behind the scenes. And so then they get more distrustful and more paranoid, and eventually they start misbehaving so badly that they are actually persecuted often by legal authorities, and it’s down the rabbit hole they go. And so Musk is betting on that to some degree. Right? He believes that free expression on Twitter X will sort itself out and be of net benefit. And I follow a lot of really bad accounts on X because I like to keep an eye on the pathology of the left, let’s say, and the pathology of the right thinking, at least in my clinical way, that I’m watching the psychopaths dance around and try to do what their subversion.
It also motivates the paranoid types because one of the reasons that paranoia spirals out of control is because paranoid people almost inevitably end up being persecuted because they’re so touchy and so suspicious that people start to walk on eggshells around them as if there are things going on behind the scenes. And so then they get more distrustful and more paranoid, and eventually they start misbehaving so badly that they are actually persecuted often by legal authorities, and it’s down the rabbit hole they go. And so Musk is betting on that to some degree. Right? He believes that free expression on Twitter X will sort itself out and be of net benefit. And I follow a lot of really bad accounts on X because I like to keep an eye on the pathology of the left, let’s say, and the pathology of the right thinking, at least in my clinical way, that I’m watching the psychopaths dance around and try to do what their subversion.
And it’s an ugly place to inhabit, that’s for sure. But it’s also the case that a very tiny minority of seriously bad actors can have a disproportionate influence. And one of the things I’ve always hoped for for social media channels is that they separate the anonymous accounts from the verified accounts. They should just be in different categories. People who will say what they think and take the hits to their reputation, anonymous types. If you want to see what the anonymous types say, you can see it. But don’t be confusing them with actual people because they’re not the same. We know that people behave more badly when they’re anonymous. That’s a very well-established psychological finding. Well, and I think the danger to our culture is substantive. I think the reason that perhaps the reason that everything started to go sideways pretty seriously around 2015 is because we invented these new modes of communication. We have no idea how to police them. And so the psychopathic manipulators, they have free reign. About 30% of the internet is pornography.
A huge amount of internet traffic is outright criminal. And there’s a penumbra around that’s psychopathic, narcissistic troublemaking trolls. And that might constitute the bulk of the interactions online. And it’s partly because people can’t be held responsible, so the free riders have free reign.
Lex Fridman
It’s a fascinating technical challenge of how to make our society resilient to the psychopaths on the left and the right.
It’s a fascinating technical challenge of how to make our society resilient to the psychopaths on the left and the right.
Jordan Peterson
It might be the fundamental problem of the age, given the amplification of communication by our social networks.
It might be the fundamental problem of the age, given the amplification of communication by our social networks.
Lex Fridman
And so to generalize across psychopaths, you could also think about bots which behave similar to psychopaths in their certainty and not caring. They’re maximizing some function. They’re not caring about anything else. Attention. Yeah.
And so to generalize across psychopaths, you could also think about bots which behave similar to psychopaths in their certainty and not caring. They’re maximizing some function. They’re not caring about anything else. Attention. Yeah.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Short-term attention, even worse. Yeah, because that’s another problem. If the algorithms are maximizing for the grip of short-term attention, they’re acting like immature agents of attention. Right? And so then imagine the worst-case scenario is negative emotion garners more attention and short-term gratification garners more attention. So then you’re maximizing for the grip of short-term attention by negative emotion. I mean, that’s not going to be a principle. We were talking earlier about unsustainable, unifying axioms, that’s definitely one of them. Maximize for the spread of negative attention, negative emotion that garners short-term attention. Jesus, brutal.
Yeah. Short-term attention, even worse. Yeah, because that’s another problem. If the algorithms are maximizing for the grip of short-term attention, they’re acting like immature agents of attention. Right? And so then imagine the worst-case scenario is negative emotion garners more attention and short-term gratification garners more attention. So then you’re maximizing for the grip of short-term attention by negative emotion. I mean, that’s not going to be a principle. We were talking earlier about unsustainable, unifying axioms, that’s definitely one of them. Maximize for the spread of negative attention, negative emotion that garners short-term attention. Jesus, brutal.
Lex Fridman
I tend to not think there’s that many psychopaths. So maybe to push back a little bit, it feels like there’s a small number of psychopaths.
I tend to not think there’s that many psychopaths. So maybe to push back a little bit, it feels like there’s a small number of psychopaths.
Jordan Peterson
Three to 5% is the estimate worldwide.
Three to 5% is the estimate worldwide.
Lex Fridman
In terms of humans, sure. But in terms of the pattern of stuff we see online, my hope is that a lot of people on the extreme left and extreme right, or just the trolls in general are just young people kind of going through the similar stuff that we’ve been talking about, trying on the cynicism and the resentment. There’s a drug aspect to it, there’s a pull to that to talk about shit somebody, to take somebody down. I mean, there is some pleasure in that. There’s a dark pull towards that. And I think-
In terms of humans, sure. But in terms of the pattern of stuff we see online, my hope is that a lot of people on the extreme left and extreme right, or just the trolls in general are just young people kind of going through the similar stuff that we’ve been talking about, trying on the cynicism and the resentment. There’s a drug aspect to it, there’s a pull to that to talk about shit somebody, to take somebody down. I mean, there is some pleasure in that. There’s a dark pull towards that. And I think-
Jordan Peterson
That’s the sadistic pull.
That’s the sadistic pull.
Lex Fridman
And I think a lot of people, I mean, you see, when you say sadistic, it makes it sound like some kind of, it’s a pathology.
And I think a lot of people, I mean, you see, when you say sadistic, it makes it sound like some kind of, it’s a pathology.
Jordan Peterson
It’s pleasure in the suffering of others.
It’s pleasure in the suffering of others.
Lex Fridman
Right. But I just think that all of us have the capacity for that. All humans have the capacity for that.
Right. But I just think that all of us have the capacity for that. All humans have the capacity for that.
Jordan Peterson
Some more than others, but everyone to some degree.
Some more than others, but everyone to some degree.
Lex Fridman
And when you’re young, you don’t understand the full implications of that on your own self. So if you participate in taking other people down, that’s going to have a cost on your own development as a human being. It’s going to take you towards a Dostoevsky’s, notes from underground in the basement, cynical, all that kind of stuff.
And when you’re young, you don’t understand the full implications of that on your own self. So if you participate in taking other people down, that’s going to have a cost on your own development as a human being. It’s going to take you towards a Dostoevsky’s, notes from underground in the basement, cynical, all that kind of stuff.
Jordan Peterson
Alone.
Alone.
Lex Fridman
Which is why a lot of young people try it out. The reason is, you get older and older, you realize that there’s a huge cost to that. So you don’t do it. But there’s young people that… So I would like to sort of believe and hope that a large number of people who are trolls are just trying out the derision.
Which is why a lot of young people try it out. The reason is, you get older and older, you realize that there’s a huge cost to that. So you don’t do it. But there’s young people that… So I would like to sort of believe and hope that a large number of people who are trolls are just trying out the derision.
Jordan Peterson
No doubt.
No doubt.
Lex Fridman
So they can be saved, they could be helped. They could be shown that there’s more growth, there’s more flourishing to celebrating other people and actually criticizing ideas, but not in the way of derision LOL, but by formulating your own self in the world by formulating your ideas in a strong, powerful way, and also removing the cloak of anonymity and just standing behind your ideas and carrying the responsibility of those ideas. Yeah.
So they can be saved, they could be helped. They could be shown that there’s more growth, there’s more flourishing to celebrating other people and actually criticizing ideas, but not in the way of derision LOL, but by formulating your own self in the world by formulating your ideas in a strong, powerful way, and also removing the cloak of anonymity and just standing behind your ideas and carrying the responsibility of those ideas. Yeah.
Jordan Peterson
I think all of that is right. I think the idea that that’s more likely to occur among young people, that’s clear. People as they mature, get more agreeable and conscientious. So we actually know that what you said is true technically. It’s definitely the case that there’s an innate tilt towards pleasure in that sort of behavior. And it is associated to some degree with dominance, striving. And I do think it’s true, as you pointed out, that many of the people who are toying with that pattern can be socialized out of it. In fact, maybe most people, even the repeat criminal types tend to desist in their late twenties. So 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes. Imagine that that 1% are the people that you’re really concerned with. They often have stable patterns of offending that emerged very, very young, like even in infancy and continued through adolescence and into adulthood.
I think all of that is right. I think the idea that that’s more likely to occur among young people, that’s clear. People as they mature, get more agreeable and conscientious. So we actually know that what you said is true technically. It’s definitely the case that there’s an innate tilt towards pleasure in that sort of behavior. And it is associated to some degree with dominance, striving. And I do think it’s true, as you pointed out, that many of the people who are toying with that pattern can be socialized out of it. In fact, maybe most people, even the repeat criminal types tend to desist in their late twenties. So 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes. Imagine that that 1% are the people that you’re really concerned with. They often have stable patterns of offending that emerged very, very young, like even in infancy and continued through adolescence and into adulthood.
If you keep them in prison until they’re in the middle of their late twenties, most of them stop. And the easiest way to understand that might just be delayed maturation. So are most people salvageable? Yes, definitely. Is everyone salvageable? Well, at some point it becomes, first of all, they have to want to be salvaged. That’s a problem. But then it also becomes something like, well, how much resources are you going to devote to that? The farther down the rabbit hole you’ve gone, the more energy it takes to haul you up. So there comes a point where the probability that you’ll be able to get enough resources devoted to you to rescue you from the pit of hell that you’ve dug is zero. And that’s a very sad thing. And it’s very hard to be around someone who’s in that situation, very, very hard.
Lex Fridman
And it seems that it’s more likely that the leaders of movements are going to be psychopaths, and the followers of movements are going to be the people that we’re mentioning that are kind of lost themselves to the ideology of the movement.
And it seems that it’s more likely that the leaders of movements are going to be psychopaths, and the followers of movements are going to be the people that we’re mentioning that are kind of lost themselves to the ideology of the movement.
Jordan Peterson
Well, we know that what you said is true even historically, to a large degree, because Germany was successfully de-Nazified. And it’s not like everybody who participated in every element of the Nazi movement was brought to justice. Not in the least. The same thing happened in Japan. So to some degree, the same thing happened in South Africa. Right? And it’s the case, for example, also in the stories that we were referring to earlier, the biblical stories that patriarchs of the Bible, most of them are pretty bad people when they first start out. Jacob is the one who becomes Israel. He’s a major player in the biblical narrative, and he’s a pretty bad actor when he first starts out. He’s a mama’s boy. He’s a liar. He steals from his own brother, and in a major way, he deceives his father. He’s a coward, and yet he turns his life around.
Well, we know that what you said is true even historically, to a large degree, because Germany was successfully de-Nazified. And it’s not like everybody who participated in every element of the Nazi movement was brought to justice. Not in the least. The same thing happened in Japan. So to some degree, the same thing happened in South Africa. Right? And it’s the case, for example, also in the stories that we were referring to earlier, the biblical stories that patriarchs of the Bible, most of them are pretty bad people when they first start out. Jacob is the one who becomes Israel. He’s a major player in the biblical narrative, and he’s a pretty bad actor when he first starts out. He’s a mama’s boy. He’s a liar. He steals from his own brother, and in a major way, he deceives his father. He’s a coward, and yet he turns his life around.
Lex Fridman
So be careful the leaders you idolize in worship, but then it’s not always clear to know who is the good and who’s the evil.
So be careful the leaders you idolize in worship, but then it’s not always clear to know who is the good and who’s the evil.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hardship
Lex Fridman
It’s hard. You have been through some dark places in your mind, over your life. What have been some of your darker hours, and how did you find the light?
It’s hard. You have been through some dark places in your mind, over your life. What have been some of your darker hours, and how did you find the light?
Jordan Peterson
Well, I would say I started contending with the problem of evil very young, 13 or 14. And that was my main motivation of study for 30 years, I guess, something like that. At the end of that 30 years, I became more and more interested in fleshing out the alternative. Once I became convinced that evil existed, and that was very young, I always believed that if you could understand something well enough that you could formulate a solution to it. But it turns out that seeing evil and understanding that it exists is less complicated than a technical description of its opposite, what is good. You can say, well, it’s not that for sure. It’s not Auschwitz. How about we start there? It’s as far from Auschwitz as you can get. It’s as far from enjoying being an Auschwitz camp guard as you can get.
Well, I would say I started contending with the problem of evil very young, 13 or 14. And that was my main motivation of study for 30 years, I guess, something like that. At the end of that 30 years, I became more and more interested in fleshing out the alternative. Once I became convinced that evil existed, and that was very young, I always believed that if you could understand something well enough that you could formulate a solution to it. But it turns out that seeing evil and understanding that it exists is less complicated than a technical description of its opposite, what is good. You can say, well, it’s not that for sure. It’s not Auschwitz. How about we start there? It’s as far from Auschwitz as you can get. It’s as far from enjoying being an Auschwitz camp guard as you can get.
Okay, well, where are you when you’re as far away from that as you could possibly get? What does that mean? And it does have something to do with play, as far as I’m concerned. I think the antithesis of tyranny is play. So that took me a long time to figure out that specifically. So that was very dark. I spent a lot of time studying the worst behaviors that I could discover abstractly in books, but also in my clinical practice and in my observations of people. And so that’s rough. More recently, I was very ill and in a tremendous amount of pain that lasted pretty much without any break for three years. And what was particularly useful to me then was the strength of my relationships, my immediate relationships, my friendships. Also, the relationships that I had established more broadly with people.
Because by the time I became ill, I was reasonably well known and people were very supportive when I was having trouble, and that was very helpful. But it’s certainly the case that it was the connections I had, particularly with my family, but also with my friends, that were the saving grace. And that’s something to know. I mean, it’s necessary to bear the burdens of the world on your own shoulders, that’s for sure, the burdens of your own existence and whatever other responsibilities you can mount. But that by no means, means that you can or should do it alone. And so you might say, well, welcoming the adversity of life as a redemptive challenge is a task that’s beyond the ability of the typical person or even maybe of anyone. But then when you think, well, you’re not alone, maybe you’re not alone socially, you’re not alone familial, maybe you’re not alone metaphysically as well, there’s an insistence.
And I think it’s true. There’s an insistence, for example, in the old and the new testament alike, that the more darkness you’re willing to voluntarily encounter, the more likely it is that the spirit of Abraham and the patriarchs will walk with you. And I think that’s right. I think it’s sort of technically true in that the best parts of yourself make themselves manifest. If you want to think about it that way, the best parts of yourself, whatever that means, make themselves manifest when you’re contending actively and voluntarily with the most difficult challenges. Why wouldn’t it be that way? And then you could think, well, that’s yourself. It’s like, well, are the best unrevealed parts of you yourself? Well, no, they’re a kind of metaphysical reality. They’re not yet manifest. They only exist in potential. They transcend anything you’re currently capable of, but they have an existence. You could call that yourself.
But it was Jung’s contention, for example, with regards to such terminology that the reason we use the term self instead of God is because when God was dispensed with, let’s say, by the processes Nietzsche described, we just found the same thing deep within the instinctive realm. Let’s say we found it at the bottom…
Jordan Peterson
Deep within the instinctive realm, let’s say, we found it at the bottom of the things instead of at the top. It’s like it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter fundamentally. What matters is whether or not that’s a reality. And I think it’s the fundamental reality because I do think that the deeper you delve into things… This is what happens to Moses when he encounters the burning bush. So Moses is just going about his life. He’s a shepherd, he’s an adult. He has wives, he has children, he has responsibilities. He’s left his home and he’s established himself. And so things are pretty good for Moses. And then he’s out by Mount Horeb in that story, but it’s the central mountain of the world. It’s the same mountain as Sinai, which is the place where heaven and earth touch. And he sees something that grabs his attention, right?
Deep within the instinctive realm, let’s say, we found it at the bottom of the things instead of at the top. It’s like it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter fundamentally. What matters is whether or not that’s a reality. And I think it’s the fundamental reality because I do think that the deeper you delve into things… This is what happens to Moses when he encounters the burning bush. So Moses is just going about his life. He’s a shepherd, he’s an adult. He has wives, he has children, he has responsibilities. He’s left his home and he’s established himself. And so things are pretty good for Moses. And then he’s out by Mount Horeb in that story, but it’s the central mountain of the world. It’s the same mountain as Sinai, which is the place where heaven and earth touch. And he sees something that grabs his attention, right?
That’s the burning bush. And bush is a tree. That’s life. That’s the tree of life. And the fact that it’s on fire is that’s life exaggerated because everything that’s alive is on fire. And so what calls to Moses is the spirit of being itself, and it tracks him off the beaten track, and he decides to go investigate. So Moses is everyone who goes off the beaten track to investigate. And so as he investigates, he delves more and more deeply until he starts to understand that he’s now walking on sacred ground. So he takes off his shoes, and that’s a symbolic reference of identity transformation. He’s no longer walking the same path. He no longer has the same identity. He’s in a state of flux. And that’s when what happens is that he continues to interact with this calling and Moses asks what it is that’s being revealed, and God says, I’m the spirit of being itself.
That’s basically the answer. I am what I am. It’s a more complex utterance than that. I am what I will be. I am what was becoming. It’s all of that at the same time, it’s the spirit of being that’s speaking to him, the spirit of being and becoming. And it tells Moses that he now, because he’s delved so deeply into something so compelling, his identity has transformed and he’s become the leader who can speak truth to power. And so he allies himself with his brother Aaron, who’s the political arm and who can communicate, and he goes back to Egypt to confront the tyrant. And that’s an indication of that idea that if you wrestle with life properly, that the spirit of being and becoming walks with you. And it’s like, how can that not be true? Because the contrary would be that there would be no growth in challenge. Well, you have to be infinitely nihilistic to believe that.
Lex Fridman
It’s obvious, but it’s also just fascinating that hardship is the thing that ends up being the catalyst for delving deeply.
It’s obvious, but it’s also just fascinating that hardship is the thing that ends up being the catalyst for delving deeply.
Jordan Peterson
It’s hardship voluntarily undertaken. And it’s crucially true. Look, if you bring someone into therapy, let’s say they’re afraid of elevators and you trick them into getting near an elevator, you’ll make them worse. But if you negotiate with them so that they voluntarily move towards the elevator on their own recognizance, they’ll overcome their fear and they become generally braver, but it has to be voluntary.
It’s hardship voluntarily undertaken. And it’s crucially true. Look, if you bring someone into therapy, let’s say they’re afraid of elevators and you trick them into getting near an elevator, you’ll make them worse. But if you negotiate with them so that they voluntarily move towards the elevator on their own recognizance, they’ll overcome their fear and they become generally braver, but it has to be voluntary.
Lex Fridman
See, I got to push back and explore with you the question of voluntarily. Let’s look at Nietzsche. He suffered through several health issues throughout his life, migraines, eyesight issues, digestive problems, depression with suicidal thoughts, and yet he is one of the greatest minds in the history of humanity. So were these problems that he was suffering, arguably involuntarily, a feature or a bug?
See, I got to push back and explore with you the question of voluntarily. Let’s look at Nietzsche. He suffered through several health issues throughout his life, migraines, eyesight issues, digestive problems, depression with suicidal thoughts, and yet he is one of the greatest minds in the history of humanity. So were these problems that he was suffering, arguably involuntarily, a feature or a bug?
Jordan Peterson
That’s a good question. The same thing happens in the story of Job. Because Job is a good man. God himself admits it. And Satan comes along and says to God, “I see you’re pretty proud of your man there, Job.” God says, “Yeah, he’s doing pretty well.” And Satan says, “I think it’s just because things are easy for him. Let me have a crack at him and see what happens.” And God says, “Yeah, I think you’re wrong. Do your worst.” Right? And that’s how people feel when those slings and arrows come at them, let’s say like Nietzsche. Well Job’s response to that… Now the story is set up so that what befalls Job is actually quite arbitrary, these catastrophes that you’re describing. The volunteerism in Job is his refusal to despair even in the face of that adversity. And that seems like something like an expression of voluntary free will.
That’s a good question. The same thing happens in the story of Job. Because Job is a good man. God himself admits it. And Satan comes along and says to God, “I see you’re pretty proud of your man there, Job.” God says, “Yeah, he’s doing pretty well.” And Satan says, “I think it’s just because things are easy for him. Let me have a crack at him and see what happens.” And God says, “Yeah, I think you’re wrong. Do your worst.” Right? And that’s how people feel when those slings and arrows come at them, let’s say like Nietzsche. Well Job’s response to that… Now the story is set up so that what befalls Job is actually quite arbitrary, these catastrophes that you’re describing. The volunteerism in Job is his refusal to despair even in the face of that adversity. And that seems like something like an expression of voluntary free will.
He refuses to lose faith. And the way the story ends is that Job gets everything back and more. So that’s a dissent and assent story. And a cynic might say, “Well, the ends don’t justify the means.” And I would say, “Fair enough.” But that’s a pretty shallow interpretation of the story. What it indicates instead is that if you’re fortunate, because let’s not forget that, and you optimize your attitude even in the face of adversity, that it’s not infrequently the case that your fortunes will reverse. And I’ve found that in many situations, the journalists whose goal was most malicious in relationship to me, who were most concerned with improving their own, what would you say? Fostering their own notoriety and gaining social status at my expense, were the ones who did me the greatest favor. Those were the interviews that went viral. And so that’s interesting because they were definitely the places where the most disaster was at hand. And I felt that in the aftermath every time that happened, my whole family was destabilized for two months because things… It wasn’t obvious at all which way the dice were going to roll.
Lex Fridman
But you leaned into that. So in a sense that there’s this kind of a transformation from the involuntary to the voluntary, basically saying, “Bring it on.” That act of bring it on turns the involuntary hardship into voluntary hardship.
But you leaned into that. So in a sense that there’s this kind of a transformation from the involuntary to the voluntary, basically saying, “Bring it on.” That act of bring it on turns the involuntary hardship into voluntary hardship.
Jordan Peterson
Well, not necessarily, let’s say, but you could say that’s your best bet. Well, I’m never going to say that you can transcend all catastrophe with the right attitude, because that’s just too much to say. But I could say that in a dire situation, there’s always an element of choice. And if you make the right choices, you improve the degree, you improve your chances of success to the maximal possible degree.
Well, not necessarily, let’s say, but you could say that’s your best bet. Well, I’m never going to say that you can transcend all catastrophe with the right attitude, because that’s just too much to say. But I could say that in a dire situation, there’s always an element of choice. And if you make the right choices, you improve the degree, you improve your chances of success to the maximal possible degree.
Lex Fridman
It might be too much to say, but nevertheless could be true. Viktor Frankl, Marcus Aurelius.
It might be too much to say, but nevertheless could be true. Viktor Frankl, Marcus Aurelius.
Jordan Peterson
Well, that’s what the resurrection story proclaims, is that even under the imaginable circumstances, the fundamental finale is the victory of the good. And that seems to me to be true.
Well, that’s what the resurrection story proclaims, is that even under the imaginable circumstances, the fundamental finale is the victory of the good. And that seems to me to be true.
Pain and gratitude
Lex Fridman
Do you have regrets when you look back at your life in the full analysis of it?
Do you have regrets when you look back at your life in the full analysis of it?
Jordan Peterson
Well, as I said, I was very ill for about three years, and it was seriously brutal. This is no lie. Every single minute of that three years was worse than any single time I’d ever experienced in my entire life up to that. So that was rough.
Well, as I said, I was very ill for about three years, and it was seriously brutal. This is no lie. Every single minute of that three years was worse than any single time I’d ever experienced in my entire life up to that. So that was rough.
Lex Fridman
Was the roughest the physical or the psychological?
Was the roughest the physical or the psychological?
Jordan Peterson
Pain.
Pain.
Lex Fridman
Just literal pain?
Just literal pain?
Jordan Peterson
Yep. Yeah, I was walking like 10 to 12 miles a day, rain or shine, winter, didn’t matter, not good. And it was worse than that because as the day progressed, my pain levels would fall until by 10, 11 at night when I was starting to get tired. I was approaching, what would you say? I was approaching something like an ordinary bad day, but as soon as I went to sleep, then the clock was reset and all the pain came back. And so it wasn’t just that I was in pain, it was that sleep itself became an enemy. And that’s really rough, man, because sleep is where you take refuge, you’re worn out, you’re tired, and you go to sleep and you wake up and it’s generally, it’s something approximating a new day.
Yep. Yeah, I was walking like 10 to 12 miles a day, rain or shine, winter, didn’t matter, not good. And it was worse than that because as the day progressed, my pain levels would fall until by 10, 11 at night when I was starting to get tired. I was approaching, what would you say? I was approaching something like an ordinary bad day, but as soon as I went to sleep, then the clock was reset and all the pain came back. And so it wasn’t just that I was in pain, it was that sleep itself became an enemy. And that’s really rough, man, because sleep is where you take refuge, you’re worn out, you’re tired, and you go to sleep and you wake up and it’s generally, it’s something approximating a new day.
This was Sisyphus on steroids. It was very difficult to maintain hope in that, because I would do what I could. There were times when it took me like an hour and a half in the morning to stand up. I’d do all that and more or less put myself back into something remotely resembling human by the end of the day. And then I knew perfectly well, exhausted, if I fell asleep that I was going to be right at the bottom of the bloody hill again. And so after a couple of years of that, it was definitely the fact that I had a family that carried me through that.
Lex Fridman
What did you learn about yourself, about yourself, and about the human mind from that, from all of those days?
What did you learn about yourself, about yourself, and about the human mind from that, from all of those days?
Jordan Peterson
Well, I think I learned more gratitude for the people I had around me. And I learned how fortunate I was to have that and how crucial that was. My wife learned something similar. She was diagnosed with a form of cancer that, as far as we know, killed every single person who ever had it except her. It’s quite rare. And her experience was that what really gave her hope and played at least a role in saving her was the realization of the depth of love that her son, in particular, had for her. And that says nothing about her relationship with Mikhaila, with her daughter. It just so happened that it was the revelation of that love, that it made Tammy understand the value of her life in a way that she wouldn’t have realized of her own accord.
Well, I think I learned more gratitude for the people I had around me. And I learned how fortunate I was to have that and how crucial that was. My wife learned something similar. She was diagnosed with a form of cancer that, as far as we know, killed every single person who ever had it except her. It’s quite rare. And her experience was that what really gave her hope and played at least a role in saving her was the realization of the depth of love that her son, in particular, had for her. And that says nothing about her relationship with Mikhaila, with her daughter. It just so happened that it was the revelation of that love, that it made Tammy understand the value of her life in a way that she wouldn’t have realized of her own accord.
We’re very, very… There’s no difference between ourselves and the people that we love. And there might be no difference between ourselves and everyone everywhere, but we can at least realize that, to begin with, in the form of the people that we love. And I hope I’m better at that than I was. I think I’m better at it than I was. I’m a lot more grateful for just ordinariness than I was because when I first recovered, I remember, I first started to recover I was standing in this pharmacy waiting for a prescription in a little town, and they weren’t being particularly efficient about it.
And so I was in that, standing in the aisle for 20 minutes, and I thought, “I’m not on fire. I could just stand here for the rest of my life, just not being in pain and enjoying that.” And that would have been something that before that would have been, I would have been impatient and raring to go because I didn’t have 20 minutes to stand in the middle of an aisle. And I thought, “Well, if you’re just standing there and you’re not on fire, things are a lot better than they might be.” And I certainly, I know that, and I think I remember it almost all the time.
Lex Fridman
You gain a greater ability to appreciate the mundane moments of life.
You gain a greater ability to appreciate the mundane moments of life.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, definitely. The miracle of the mundane, right?
Yeah, definitely. The miracle of the mundane, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jordan Peterson
I think Nietzsche had that because he was very ill. And so I suspect he had… And he was regarded by the inhabitants of the village that he lived in, near the end of his life, as something approximating a saint. He apparently conducted himself very admirably despite all his suffering.
I think Nietzsche had that because he was very ill. And so I suspect he had… And he was regarded by the inhabitants of the village that he lived in, near the end of his life, as something approximating a saint. He apparently conducted himself very admirably despite all his suffering.
Lex Fridman
But that still, there’s this tension, as there is in much of Nietzsche’s work, between the miracle of the mundane, appreciating the miracle of the mundane versus fearing the tyranny of the mediocre.
But that still, there’s this tension, as there is in much of Nietzsche’s work, between the miracle of the mundane, appreciating the miracle of the mundane versus fearing the tyranny of the mediocre.
Jordan Peterson
It’s more the mediocre and resentful.
It’s more the mediocre and resentful.
Lex Fridman
Yes, but that’s you giving him a pass or seeing the good.
Yes, but that’s you giving him a pass or seeing the good.
Jordan Peterson
Well, fair enough.
Well, fair enough.
Lex Fridman
There’s a kind of… I mean, the tyranny of the mediocre, I always hated this idea that some people are better than others, and I understand it, but it’s a dangerous idea.
There’s a kind of… I mean, the tyranny of the mediocre, I always hated this idea that some people are better than others, and I understand it, but it’s a dangerous idea.
Jordan Peterson
This is why I like the story of Cain and Abel, I would say. Because Cain is mediocre, but that’s because he refuses to do his best. It’s not something intrinsic to him. And I actually think that’s the right formulation because I had people in my clinical practice who were, they were lost in many dimensions from the perspective of comparison. One woman I remember in particular who, man, she had a lot to contend with, she was not educated, she was not intelligent. She had a brutal family, terrible history of psychiatric hospitalization. And when I met her at a hospital, she was an outpatient from the psychiatric ward, and she had been in there with people that she thought were worse off than her, and they were. And that was a long way down.
This is why I like the story of Cain and Abel, I would say. Because Cain is mediocre, but that’s because he refuses to do his best. It’s not something intrinsic to him. And I actually think that’s the right formulation because I had people in my clinical practice who were, they were lost in many dimensions from the perspective of comparison. One woman I remember in particular who, man, she had a lot to contend with, she was not educated, she was not intelligent. She had a brutal family, terrible history of psychiatric hospitalization. And when I met her at a hospital, she was an outpatient from the psychiatric ward, and she had been in there with people that she thought were worse off than her, and they were. And that was a long way down.
That was like Dante’s Inferno level down. It was a long-term, psychiatric inpatient ward. Some of the people had been there for 30 years. It made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look like a romantic comedy. And she had come back to see if she could take some of those people for a walk, and was trying to find out how to get permission to do it. Better than other people. Some people are more intelligent, some people are more beautiful, some people are more athletic. Maybe it’s possible for everyone at all levels of attainment to strive towards the good. And maybe those talents that are given to people unfairly don’t privilege them in relationship to their moral conduct. And I think that’s true. There’s no evidence, for example, that there’s any correlation whatsoever between intelligence and morality. You’re not better because you’re smart. And what that also implies is if you’re smart, you can be a lot better at being worse.
Lex Fridman
I think, for myself, I’m just afraid of dismissing people because of my perception of them.
I think, for myself, I’m just afraid of dismissing people because of my perception of them.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, that’s why we have that metaphysical presumption that everybody’s made in the image of God. Despite that immense diversity of apparent ability, there’s that underlying metaphysical assumption that, yeah, we all vary in our perceived and actual utility in relationship to any proximal goal, but all of that’s independent of the question of axiomatic worth. And preposterous as that notion appears to be, it seems to me that societies that accept it as a fundamental axiomatic presumption are always the societies that you’d want to live in if you had a choice. And that to me is an existence proof for the utility of the presumption. And also, if you treat people like that in your life, every encounter you have, you make the assumption that it’s a radical equality of worth despite individual variance in ability, something like that, man, your interactions go way better. I mean, everyone wants to be treated that way.
Yeah. Well, that’s why we have that metaphysical presumption that everybody’s made in the image of God. Despite that immense diversity of apparent ability, there’s that underlying metaphysical assumption that, yeah, we all vary in our perceived and actual utility in relationship to any proximal goal, but all of that’s independent of the question of axiomatic worth. And preposterous as that notion appears to be, it seems to me that societies that accept it as a fundamental axiomatic presumption are always the societies that you’d want to live in if you had a choice. And that to me is an existence proof for the utility of the presumption. And also, if you treat people like that in your life, every encounter you have, you make the assumption that it’s a radical equality of worth despite individual variance in ability, something like that, man, your interactions go way better. I mean, everyone wants to be treated that way.
Look, here’s a developmental sequence for you, naive and trusting, hurt and cynical. Okay, well, is hurt and cynical better than naive and trusting? It’s like, yeah, probably. Is that where it ends? How about cynical and trusting as step three? And then the trust becomes courage. It’s like, yeah, I’ll put my hand out for you, but it’s not because I’m a fool. And I think that’s right, because that’s the re-instantiation of that initial trust that makes childhood magical and paradisal. But it’s the admixture of that with wisdom. It’s like, yeah, we could walk together uphill, but that doesn’t mean, and I’ll presume that that’s your aim, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to watch.
Lex Fridman
What’s a better life, cynical and safe or hopeful and vulnerable to be hurt?
What’s a better life, cynical and safe or hopeful and vulnerable to be hurt?
Jordan Peterson
Oh, you can’t dispense with vulnerable to be hurt. That’s the other realization. It’s like you’re going to stake your life on something. You could stake your life on security, but it’s not going to help. You don’t have that option.
Oh, you can’t dispense with vulnerable to be hurt. That’s the other realization. It’s like you’re going to stake your life on something. You could stake your life on security, but it’s not going to help. You don’t have that option.
Lex Fridman
So what do you do when you’re betrayed ultimately by some people you come across.
So what do you do when you’re betrayed ultimately by some people you come across.
Jordan Peterson
Grieve and look elsewhere. Do what you can to forgive, and not least, so you lighten your own burden. Maybe do what you can to help the person who betrayed you. And if that all proves impossible, then wash your hands of it and move on to the next adventure.
Grieve and look elsewhere. Do what you can to forgive, and not least, so you lighten your own burden. Maybe do what you can to help the person who betrayed you. And if that all proves impossible, then wash your hands of it and move on to the next adventure.
Lex Fridman
And do it again.
And do it again.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Truth
Lex Fridman
Boy, this life, something else. So we’ve been talking about some heavy, difficult topics, and you’ve talked about truth in your Nietzsche lectures and elsewhere. When you think, when you write, when you speak, how do you find what is true? Hemingway said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” How do you do that?
Boy, this life, something else. So we’ve been talking about some heavy, difficult topics, and you’ve talked about truth in your Nietzsche lectures and elsewhere. When you think, when you write, when you speak, how do you find what is true? Hemingway said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” How do you do that?
Jordan Peterson
Well, I would say first that you practice that. It’s like that question is something. And Hemingway knew this at least to some degree, and he certainly wrote about it, is that you have to orient your life upward as completely as you can, because otherwise you can’t distinguish between truth and falsehood. It has to be a practice. Now and for me, I started to become serious about that practice when I realized that it was the immorality of the individual, the resentful, craven, deceitful immorality of the individual that led to the terrible atrocities that humans engage in that make us doubt even our own worth. I became completely convinced of that. That the fundamental root cause of evil, let’s say, wasn’t economic or sociological, that it was spiritual, just psychological, and that if that was the case, you had an existential responsibility to aim upward and to tell the truth, and that everything depends on that. And I became convinced of that. And so then… Look, you set your path with your orientation. That’s how your perceptions work. As soon as you have a goal, a pathway opens up to you and you can see it. And the world divides itself into obstacles and things that move you forward. And so the pathway that’s in front of you depends on your aim. The things you perceive are concretizations of your aim. If your aim is untrue, then you won’t be able to tell the difference between truth and falsehood. And you might say, “Well, how do you know your aim is true?” It’s like, well, you course correct continually, and you can aim towards the ultimate. Are you ever sure that your aim is the right direction? You become increasingly accurate in your apprehension.
Well, I would say first that you practice that. It’s like that question is something. And Hemingway knew this at least to some degree, and he certainly wrote about it, is that you have to orient your life upward as completely as you can, because otherwise you can’t distinguish between truth and falsehood. It has to be a practice. Now and for me, I started to become serious about that practice when I realized that it was the immorality of the individual, the resentful, craven, deceitful immorality of the individual that led to the terrible atrocities that humans engage in that make us doubt even our own worth. I became completely convinced of that. That the fundamental root cause of evil, let’s say, wasn’t economic or sociological, that it was spiritual, just psychological, and that if that was the case, you had an existential responsibility to aim upward and to tell the truth, and that everything depends on that. And I became convinced of that. And so then… Look, you set your path with your orientation. That’s how your perceptions work. As soon as you have a goal, a pathway opens up to you and you can see it. And the world divides itself into obstacles and things that move you forward. And so the pathway that’s in front of you depends on your aim. The things you perceive are concretizations of your aim. If your aim is untrue, then you won’t be able to tell the difference between truth and falsehood. And you might say, “Well, how do you know your aim is true?” It’s like, well, you course correct continually, and you can aim towards the ultimate. Are you ever sure that your aim is the right direction? You become increasingly accurate in your apprehension.
Lex Fridman
Is it part of the process to cross the line, to go outside the Overton Window, to dip a toe outside the Overton Window for a bit?
Is it part of the process to cross the line, to go outside the Overton Window, to dip a toe outside the Overton Window for a bit?
Jordan Peterson
Of course. That’s what you do in part in play. I was at the Comedy Mothership, and every single comedian was completely reprehensible. All they were doing was saying things that you can’t say. Well, but it was in play. What I’m trying to do in my lectures is I’m on the edge. I have a question I’m trying to address, and I’m trying to figure it out. I don’t know where the conversation is going. Truly, it’s an exploration, and I think the reason that the audiences respond is because they can feel that, it’s a high wire act, and I could fail. My lectures have degrees of success. Sometimes I get real fortunate and there’s a perfect narrative arc. I have a question, I’m investigating it. It comes to a punchline conclusion just at the right time, and it’s like the whole act is complete, and sometimes it’s more fragmented. But I can tell when the audience is engaged because everyone’s silent, except maybe when they’re laughing.
Of course. That’s what you do in part in play. I was at the Comedy Mothership, and every single comedian was completely reprehensible. All they were doing was saying things that you can’t say. Well, but it was in play. What I’m trying to do in my lectures is I’m on the edge. I have a question I’m trying to address, and I’m trying to figure it out. I don’t know where the conversation is going. Truly, it’s an exploration, and I think the reason that the audiences respond is because they can feel that, it’s a high wire act, and I could fail. My lectures have degrees of success. Sometimes I get real fortunate and there’s a perfect narrative arc. I have a question, I’m investigating it. It comes to a punchline conclusion just at the right time, and it’s like the whole act is complete, and sometimes it’s more fragmented. But I can tell when the audience is engaged because everyone’s silent, except maybe when they’re laughing.
Lex Fridman
There’s a sense that you’re arguing with yourself when you’re lecturing. It’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful and powerful to watch. Nietzsche does the same. There’s contradictions in what you’re saying. There’s a struggle, what you’re saying. But I do think that when you’re doing the same on the internet, you get punished for the deviations. You get punished for the exploration, especially when that explores outside the Overton Window.
There’s a sense that you’re arguing with yourself when you’re lecturing. It’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful and powerful to watch. Nietzsche does the same. There’s contradictions in what you’re saying. There’s a struggle, what you’re saying. But I do think that when you’re doing the same on the internet, you get punished for the deviations. You get punished for the exploration, especially when that explores outside the Overton Window.
Jordan Peterson
Look, if you’re going to play hard in a conversation to explore, you’re going to say things that are edgy, that are going to cause trouble, and they might be wrong. And that’s another reason why free speech protection is so important. You actually have to protect the right, let’s say, in the optimal circumstance, you have to protect the right of well-meaning people to be wrong. Now, you probably have to go beyond that to truly protect it, you have to even protect the right of people who aren’t meaning well to be wrong. And we also need that because we’re not always well-meaning. The alternative to that protection would be the insistence that people only say what was 100% right all the time.
Look, if you’re going to play hard in a conversation to explore, you’re going to say things that are edgy, that are going to cause trouble, and they might be wrong. And that’s another reason why free speech protection is so important. You actually have to protect the right, let’s say, in the optimal circumstance, you have to protect the right of well-meaning people to be wrong. Now, you probably have to go beyond that to truly protect it, you have to even protect the right of people who aren’t meaning well to be wrong. And we also need that because we’re not always well-meaning. The alternative to that protection would be the insistence that people only say what was 100% right all the time.
Lex Fridman
I’m also, I guess this is a call to our fellow humans not to reduce a person to a particular statement, which is what the internet tends to want to do.
I’m also, I guess this is a call to our fellow humans not to reduce a person to a particular statement, which is what the internet tends to want to do.
Jordan Peterson
Especially if it’s the worst thing they ever said.
Especially if it’s the worst thing they ever said.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Because God… Well, anyone judged by that standard is doomed unless they’re silent.
Yeah. Because God… Well, anyone judged by that standard is doomed unless they’re silent.
Lex Fridman
But it also just makes you not want to play.
But it also just makes you not want to play.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right?
Yeah, right?
Lex Fridman
Not want to take radical thought experiments and carry out to the natural that conclusion.
Not want to take radical thought experiments and carry out to the natural that conclusion.
Jordan Peterson
Well, that’s kind of the definition of a totalitarian state.
Well, that’s kind of the definition of a totalitarian state.
Lex Fridman
Yes.
Yes.
Jordan Peterson
No one’s playing in a totalitarian state, ever.
No one’s playing in a totalitarian state, ever.
Lex Fridman
But in this case, it’s an emergent one-
But in this case, it’s an emergent one-
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… with psychopaths roaming the landscape, the barbarians.
… with psychopaths roaming the landscape, the barbarians.
Jordan Peterson
That might be the general pattern of totalitarianism.
That might be the general pattern of totalitarianism.
Lex Fridman
Well, in totalitarianism, there’s usually one psychopath, not multiple.
Well, in totalitarianism, there’s usually one psychopath, not multiple.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, everyone else is complicit, at least in their silence.
Yeah. Well, everyone else is complicit, at least in their silence.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Does the study of the pathology of psychopaths online wear on you?
Yeah. Does the study of the pathology of psychopaths online wear on you?
Jordan Peterson
Yes, definitely.
Yes, definitely.
Lex Fridman
Do you ever consider doing less of that?
Do you ever consider doing less of that?
Jordan Peterson
Yes. Yes. Definitely. Probably I experienced most of that on X, but that’s also where I find most of my guests. That’s also where I get a sense of the zeitgeist, which is necessary. For example, if you’re going to be a podcast host, it’s necessary for me to make my lectures on point and up to date to get a sampling of the current moment. You have to be of the moment, in many ways, to function at a high level. There’s a price to be paid for that because you’re exposed to everything in a sense.
Yes. Yes. Definitely. Probably I experienced most of that on X, but that’s also where I find most of my guests. That’s also where I get a sense of the zeitgeist, which is necessary. For example, if you’re going to be a podcast host, it’s necessary for me to make my lectures on point and up to date to get a sampling of the current moment. You have to be of the moment, in many ways, to function at a high level. There’s a price to be paid for that because you’re exposed to everything in a sense.
Lex Fridman
You can also over sample the darkness.
You can also over sample the darkness.
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Lex Fridman
And it can make you more and more cynical. It’s a danger, right?
And it can make you more and more cynical. It’s a danger, right?
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Yeah. Well, luckily for me, I have many things that counterbalance that, the familial relationships we talked about, the friendships, and then also all of the public things I do are positive. The lecture tours, for example, which I’m on a lot, they’re basically 100% positive, so I’m very well buttressed against that-
Yeah. Yeah. Well, luckily for me, I have many things that counterbalance that, the familial relationships we talked about, the friendships, and then also all of the public things I do are positive. The lecture tours, for example, which I’m on a lot, they’re basically 100% positive, so I’m very well buttressed against that-
Lex Fridman
That’s great to hear.
That’s great to hear.
Jordan Peterson
… darker element.
… darker element.
Lex Fridman
As a fan in the arena, watching the gladiators fight, your mind is too important to be lost to the cynical, to the battles with the abyss.
As a fan in the arena, watching the gladiators fight, your mind is too important to be lost to the cynical, to the battles with the abyss.
Jordan Peterson
You have a moral obligation too, to maintain a positive orientation. It’s a moral obligation. The future is, of course, rife with contradictory possibilities, and I suppose in some ways, the more rapid the rate of transformation, the more possibility for good and for evil is making itself manifest at any moment. But it looks like the best way to ensure that the future is everything we wish it would be is to maintain faith that that is the direction that will prevail. And I think that’s a form of moral commitment, when it’s not just naive optimism.
You have a moral obligation too, to maintain a positive orientation. It’s a moral obligation. The future is, of course, rife with contradictory possibilities, and I suppose in some ways, the more rapid the rate of transformation, the more possibility for good and for evil is making itself manifest at any moment. But it looks like the best way to ensure that the future is everything we wish it would be is to maintain faith that that is the direction that will prevail. And I think that’s a form of moral commitment, when it’s not just naive optimism.
Lex Fridman
Well, Jordan, thank you for being courageous and being the light amid the darkness for many, many people. And thank you for once again talking today.
Well, Jordan, thank you for being courageous and being the light amid the darkness for many, many people. And thank you for once again talking today.
Jordan Peterson
Thanks very much for the invitation and for the conversation. It’s always a pleasure to see you. You’re doing a pretty decent job yourself about there, illuminating dark corners and bringing people upward. You’ve got a remarkable thing going with your podcast, and you’re very good at it.
Thanks very much for the invitation and for the conversation. It’s always a pleasure to see you. You’re doing a pretty decent job yourself about there, illuminating dark corners and bringing people upward. You’ve got a remarkable thing going with your podcast, and you’re very good at it.
Lex Fridman
Thank you, Jordan. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Peterson. To support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Friedrich Nietzsche. “I would like to learn more to see as beautiful, that which is necessary in things. Then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Thank you, Jordan. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Peterson. To support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Friedrich Nietzsche. “I would like to learn more to see as beautiful, that which is necessary in things. Then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #447 with Cursor Team.
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And so that’s everything from giving you visual differentiation of the actual tokens in the code so you can scan it quickly to letting you navigate around the code base, sort of like you’re navigating around the internet with hyperlinks, you’re going to definitions of things you’re using to error checking to catch rudimentary bugs. And so traditionally that’s what a code editor has meant. And I think that what a code editor is is going to change a lot over the next 10 years as what it means to build software maybe starts to look a bit different.
I think that the next big moment where everything kind of clicked together was actually getting early access to GPT-IV. So it was sort of end of 2022 was when we were tinkering with that model and the step-upping capabilities felt enormous. And previous to that, we had been working on a couple of different projects. Because of Copilot, because of scaling odds, because of our prior interest in the technology, we had been tinkering around with tools for programmers, but things that are very specific. So we were building tools for financial professionals who have to work within a Jupyter Notebook or playing around with can you do static analysis with these models?
And then the step-up in GPT- IV felt like, look, that really made concrete the theoretical gains that we had predicted before. It felt like you could build a lot more just immediately at that point in time. And also if we were being consistent, it really felt like this wasn’t just going to be a point solution thing. This was going to be all of programming was going to flow through these models and it felt like that demanded a different type of programming environment, a different type of programming. And so we set off to build that sort of larger vision around then.
When we started Cursor, you really felt this frustration that models… You could see models getting better, but the Copilot experience had not changed. It was like, man, these guys, the ceiling is getting higher, why are they not making new things? They should be making new things. Where’s all the alpha features? There were no alpha features. I’m sure it was selling well. I’m sure it was a great business, but it didn’t feel… I’m one of these people that really want to try and use new things and there was no new thing for a very long while.
And the second thing Cursor is pretty good at right now too is helping you sometimes jump ahead of the AI and tell it what to do and go from instructions to code. And on both of those we’ve done a lot of work on making the editing experience for those things ergonomic and also making those things smart and fast.
So the idea was you just press Tab, it would go 18 lines down and then show you the next edit and you would press Tab, so as long as you could keep pressing Tab. And so the internal competition was, how many Tabs can we make someone press? Once you have the idea, more abstractly, the thing to think about is how are the edits zero entropy? So once you’ve expressed your intent and the edit is… There’s no new bits of information to finish your thought, but you still have to type some characters to make the computer understand what you’re actually thinking, then maybe the model should just sort of read your mind and all the zero entropy bits should just be like tabbed away. That was sort of the abstract version.
Then the next iteration of it, which is sort of funny, you would hold the, on Mac, the option button. So it would sort of highlight a region of code to show you that there might be something coming. So maybe in this example, the input and the value would all get blue. And the blue was to highlight that the AI had a suggestion for you. So instead of directly showing you the thing, it would just hint that the AI had a suggestion and if you really wanted to see it, you would hold the option button and then you would see the new suggestion. And if you release the option button, you would then see your original code.
Or sometimes if you’re making a website for example, the easiest way to show to the AI what you want is not to tell it what to do but drag things around or draw things, and maybe eventually we will get to brain machine interfaces or whatever and you can understand what you’re thinking. And so I think natural language will have a place. I think it will definitely not be the way most people program most of the time.
So what we do is instead of using what speculative decoding normally does, which is using a really small model to predict these draft tokens that your larger model will then go in and verify, with code edits, we have a very strong prior of what the existing code will look like and that prior is literally the same exact code. So you can do is you can just feed chunks of the original code back into the model, and then the model will just pretty much agree most of the time that, “Okay, I’m just going to spit this code back out.” And so you can process all of those lines in parallel and you just do this with sufficiently many chunks. And then eventually you’ll reach a point of disagreement where the model will now predict text that is different from the ground truth original code. It’ll generate those tokens and then we will decide after enough tokens match the original code to re- start speculating in chunks of code.
What this actually ends up looking like is just a much faster version of normal editing code. So it looks like a much faster version of the model rewriting all the code. So we can use the same exact interface that we use for diffs, but it will just stream down a lot faster.
And so for instance, one of the most popular agent benchmarks, SWE-Bench, is really, really contaminated in the training data of these foundation models. And so if you ask these foundation models to do a SWE-Bench problem, but you actually don’t give them the context of a code base, they can hallucinate the right file pass, they can hallucinate the right function names. And so it’s also just the public aspect of these things is tricky.
And we have this one system internally that we call Preempt, which helps us with that a little bit. And I think it was built for the era before where we had 8,000 token contact windows. And it’s a little bit similar to when you’re making a website. You want it to work on mobile, you want it to work on a desktop screen, and you have this dynamic information which you don’t have. For example, if you’re designing a print magazine, you know exactly where you can put stuff. But when you have a website or when you have a prompt, you have these inputs and then you need to format them to always work, even if the input is really big, then you might have to cut something down. And so the idea was, okay, let’s take some inspiration. What’s the best way to design websites? Well, the thing that we really like is React and the declarative approach where you use JSX in JavaScript, and then you declare, “This is what I want and I think this has higher priority or this has higher Z index than something else.”
And then you have this rendering engine in web design. It’s like Chrome, and in our case it’s a preempt renderer, which then fits everything onto the page. And as you declare, decide what you want and then it figures out what you want. And so we have found that to be quite helpful and I think the role of it has shifted over time where initially it was to fit to these small context windows. Now it’s really useful because it helps us with splitting up the data that goes into the prompt and the actual rendering of it. And so it’s easier to debug because you can change the rendering of the prompt and then try it on old prompts because you have the raw data that went into the prompt, and then you can see, “Did my change actually improve it for this entire eval set?”
Because if maybe you’re making the API, you should also edit the client and the server that is using the API and the other one resolving the API. So that would be cool as both there’s the phase where you’re writing a prompt and there’s… Before you even click, “Enter,” maybe we can help resolve some of the uncertainty.
And so for a lot of programming, I think you actually want a system that’s instant, that gives you an initial version instantly back and then you can iterate super, super quickly.
Instead, if you have already done that and you stored the keys and values and you keep that in the GPU, then when I… Let’s say I have to sort it for the last N tokens. If I now want to compute the output token for the N+1nth token, I don’t need to pass those first N tokens through the entire model because I already have all those keys and values. And so you just need to do the forward pass through that last token. And then when you’re doing attention, you’re reusing those keys and values that have been computed, which is the only kind of sequential part or sequentially dependent part of the transformer.
And one way to think about this, the model knows internally has some uncertainty over which of the key things is correct or which of the key things does the human wants? When we RL our Cursor Tab model, one of the things we’re doing is we’re predicting which of the 100 different suggestions the model produces is more amenable for humans? Which of them do humans more like than other things? Maybe there’s something where the model can predict very far ahead versus a little bit, maybe somewhere in the middle. And then you can give a reward to the things that humans would like more and punish the things that it would like, and then train the model to output the suggestions that humans would like more. You have these RL loops that are very useful that exploit these passive K curves. Aman, maybe can go into even more detail.
And so then that’s memory bandwidth, and how can we make this faster? We can try to compress the size of these keys and values. So multi-query attention is the most aggressive of these. Where normally with multi-head attention, you have some number of, quote, unquote, “attention heads” and some number of query heads. Multi-query just preserves the query heads, gets rid of all the key value heads. So there’s only one kind of key value head, and there’s all the remaining query heads. With group query, you instead preserve all the query heads and then your keys and values are… There are fewer heads for the keys and values, but you’re not reducing it to just one. But anyways, the whole point here is you’re just reducing the size of your KV cache.
But another way you can improve performance is by letting the model iterate and get feedback. And so one very important piece of feedback when you’re a programmer is the language server, which is this thing, it exists for most different languages, and there’s a separate language server per language. And it can tell you, “You’re using the wrong type here,” and then gives you an error, or it can allow you to go to definition and sort of understands the structure of your code. So language servers are extensions developed by… There is a TypeScript language server developed by the TypeScript people, a Rust language server developed by the Rust people, and then they all interface over the language server protocol to VS Code. So that VS Code doesn’t need to have all of the different languages built into VS Code but rather you can use the existing compiler infrastructure.
And so when you try to push one of these things that really don’t exist very much online, like for example, the Cursor Tab objective of predicting the next edit given the edits done so far, the brittleness kind of shows. And then bug detection is another great example, where there aren’t really that many examples of actually detecting real bugs and then proposing fixes and the models just kind of really struggle at it. But I think it’s a question of transferring the model in the same way that you get this fantastic transfer from pre-trained models just on code in general to the Cursor Tab objective. You’ll see a very, very similar thing with generalized models that are really good at code to bug detection. It just takes a little bit of kind nudging in that direction.
Part of it is maybe the cultural knowledge of why is a staff engineer is good because they know that three years ago someone wrote a really sketchy piece of code that took the server down and as opposed to maybe you just… This thing is an experiment. So a few bugs are fine, you’re just trying to experiment and get the feel of the thing. And so if the model gets really annoying when you’re writing an experiment, that’s really bad, but if you’re writing something for super production, you’re writing a database. You’re writing code in Postgres or Linux or whatever. You’re Linus Torvalds. It’s sort of unacceptable to have even an edge case and just having the calibration of how paranoid is the user and like-
It could also be that there are two different product form factors here. It could be that you have a really specialty model that’s quite fast that’s running in the background and trying to spot bugs. And it might be that sometimes sort of to Arvid’s earlier example about some nefarious input box bug. It might be that sometimes you want to like… You know there’s a bug, you’re not just checking hypothesis free, you’re like, “This is a problem, I really want to solve it,” and you zap that with tons and tons and tons of compute, and you’re willing to put in $50 to solve that bug or something even more.
I just sit back, I read the code, I was like, “This is correct. I tested it, it’s correct.” I was like, “I want to tip.” I want a button that goes, “Here’s $5.” One that’s really good just to support the company and support what the interface is. And the other is that probably sends a strong signal like good job. So there’s this much stronger signal than just accepting the code. You just actually send a strong good job. That and for bug finding, obviously, there’s a lot of people that would pay a huge amount of money for a bug bounty thing, right? You guys think about that?
So one of the technical challenges is always making sure that the local index, the local code base state is the same as the state that is on the server. The way, technically, we ended up doing that is, for every single file you can keep this hash, and then for every folder you can keep a hash, which is the hash of all of its children. You can recursively do that until the top. Why do something complicated? One thing you could do is you could keep a hash for every file and every minute, you could try to download the hashes that are on the server, figure out what are the files that don’t exist on the server. Maybe you just created a new file, maybe you just deleted a file, maybe you checked out a new branch, and try to reconcile the state between the client and the server.
But that introduces absolutely ginormous network overhead both on the client side. Nobody really wants us to hammer their WiFi all the time if you’re using Cursor. But also, it would introduce ginormous overhead on the database. It would be reading these tens of terabytes database, approaching 20 terabytes or something data base every second. That’s just crazy. You definitely don’t want to do that. So what you do, you just try to reconcile the single hash, which is at the root of the project. And then if something mismatches, then you go, you find where all the things disagree. Maybe you look at the children and see if the hashes match. If the hashes don’t match, go look at their children and so on. But you only do that in the scenario where things don’t match. For most people, most of the time, the hashes match.
So more and more of the world’s information and data will flow through one or two centralized actors. And then there are worries about, there can be traditional hacker attempts, but it also creates this scary part where if all of the world’s information is flowing through one node in plaintext, you can have surveillance in very bad ways. Sometimes that will happen for… Initially, will be good reasons. People will want to try to protect against bad actors using AI models in bad ways, and then you will add in some surveillance code. And then someone else will come in and you’re on a slippery slope, and then you start doing bad things with a lot of the world’s data. So I am very hopeful that we can solve homomorphic encryption for-
I think that there are also cool academic ideas, stuff we’ve tried out internally, but also the field is grappling with writ large about, can you get language models to a place where you can actually just have the model itself understand a new corpus of information? The most popular talked about version of this is can you make the context windows infinite? Then if you make the context windows infinite, can you make the model actually pay attention to the infinite context? And then after you can make it pay attention to the infinite context to make it somewhat feasible to actually do it, can you then do caching for that infinite context? You don’t have to recompute that all the time. But there are other cool ideas that are being tried, that are a little bit more analogous to fine-tuning of actually learning this information in the weights of the model. It might be that you actually get a qualitative lead different type of understanding if you do it more at the weight level than if you do it at the in-context learning level.
I think the jury’s still a little bit out on how this is all going to work in the end? But in the interim, us as a company, we are really excited about better retrieval systems and picking the parts of the code base that are most relevant to what you’re doing, and we could do that a lot better.
It’s an open research question, one that we’re quite interested in. And then there’s also uncertainty of, do you want the model to be the thing that end-to-end is doing everything, i.e. it’s doing the retrieval in its internals and then answering a question, creating the code, or do you want to separate the retrieval from the frontier model, where maybe you’ll get some really capable models that are much better than the best open source ones in a handful of months? And then you’ll want to separately train a really good open source model to be the retriever, to be the thing that feeds in the context to these larger models.
So you could either get ground truth ones, which might be difficult or you could do what you hinted at or suggested using synthetic data, i.e. having the model ask questions about various recent pieces of the code. So you take the pieces of the code, then prompt the model or have a model propose a question for that piece of code, and then add those as instruction fine-tuning data points. And then in theory, this might unlock the model’s ability to answer questions about that code base.
So the really interesting thing I like about this is there are some problems that perhaps require 100 trillion parameter model intelligence trained on 100 trillion tokens. But that’s maybe 1%, maybe 0.1% of all queries. So are you going to spend all of this effort, all of this compute training a model that costs that much and then run it so infrequently? It feels completely wasteful when instead you get the model that can… You train the model that is capable of doing the 99.9% of queries, then you have a way of inference time running it longer for those few people that really, really want max intelligence.
So what people do in all these papers is they sample a bunch of outputs from the language model, and then use the process reward models to grade all those generations alongside maybe some other heuristics and then use that to choose the best answer. The really interesting thing that people think might work and people want to work is tree search with these process reward models. Because if you really can grade every single step of the chain of thought, then you can branch out and explore multiple paths of this chain of thought and then use these process reward models to evaluate how good is this branch that you’re taking.
o1 is not part of the default Cursor experience in any way up, and we still haven’t found a way to yet integrate it into the editor in a way that we reach for every hour, maybe even every day. So I think that the jury’s still out on how to use the model, and we haven’t seen examples yet of people releasing things where it seems really clear like, oh, that’s now the use case. The obvious one to turn to is maybe this can make it easier for you to have these background things running, to have these models and loops, to have these models be agentic. But we’re still discovering,
This approach is not going to get you a more capable model than the original one that has produced the tokens, but it’s really useful for if there’s some capability you want to elicit from some really expensive high-latency model. You can then distill that down into some smaller task-specific model.
The second kind is when one direction of the problem is easier than the reverse. So a great example of this is bug detection, like we mentioned earlier, where it’s a lot easier to introduce reasonable-looking bugs than it is to actually detect them. And this is probably the case for humans too. And so what you can do, is you can get a model that’s not trained in that much data, that’s not that smart, to introduce a bunch of bugs and code. And then you can use that to then train… Use the synthetic data to train a model that can be really good at detecting bugs.
The last category I think is, I guess the main one that it feels like the big labs are doing for synthetic data, which is producing text with language models that can then be verified easily. So extreme example of this is if you have a verification system that can detect if language is Shakespeare level, and then you have a bunch of monkeys typing and typewriters. You can eventually get enough training data to train a Shakespeare-level language model.
And I mean this is very much the case for math where verification is actually really, really easy for formal languages. And then what you can do, is you can have an okay model, generate a ton of rollouts, and then choose the ones that you know have actually proved the ground truth theorems, and train that further.
There’s similar things you can do for code with lead code like problems, where if you have some set of tests that you know correspond to if something passes these tests, it actually solved problem. You could do the same thing where you verify that it’s passed the test and then train the model in the outputs that have passed the tests.
I think it’s going to be a little tricky getting this to work in all domains, or just in general. Having the perfect verifier feels really, really hard to do with just open-ended miscellaneous tasks. You give the model or more long horizon tasks, even in coding.
RLAIF is interesting because you’re depending on… This is actually, it’s depending on the constraint that verification is actually a decent bit easier than generation. Because it feels like, okay, what are you doing? Are you using this language model to look at the language model outputs and then prove the language model? But no, it actually may work if the language model has a much easier time verifying some solution than it does generating it. Then you actually could perhaps get this kind of recursive loop. But I don’t think it’s going to look exactly like that.
The other thing you could do, that we kind of do, is a little bit of a mix of RLAIF and RLHF, where usually the model is actually quite correct and this is the case of precursor tap picking between two possible generations of what is the better one. And then it just needs a little bit of human nudging with only on the order 50, 100 examples to align that prior the model has with exactly with what you want.
It looks different than I think normal RLHF where you’re usually training these reward models in tons of examples.
Speaking of how fast things have been going, let’s talk about scaling laws. So for people who don’t know, maybe it’s good to talk about this whole idea of scaling laws. What are they, where’d you think stand, and where do you think things are going?
And I think there are a lot more dimensions to these curves than what we originally used, of just compute number of parameters and data. Like inference compute is the obvious one. I think context length is another obvious one. So let’s say you care about the two things of inference compute and then context window, maybe the thing you want to train, is some kind of SSM. Because they’re much, much cheaper and faster at super, super long context. And even if, maybe it was 10 X more scaling properties during training, meaning you spend 10 X more compute to train the thing to get the same level of capabilities, it’s worth it. Because you care most about that inference budget for really long context windows. So it’ll be interesting to see how people play with all these dimensions.
But if you really care about it, maybe the thing to do is what Gamma did, which is let’s not just train on tokens, let’s literally train on minimizing the KL divergence with the distribution of gemma 27B, right? So knowledge distillation there. And you’re spending the compute of literally training this 27 billion parameter model on all these tokens, just to get out this, I don’t know, smaller model.
Or maybe going a step further, like the next generation of models, having these things… Like getting model parallelism to work, and scaling it on thousands of, or maybe tens of thousands of V100s, which I think GBDE-III may have been. There’s just so much engineering effort that has to go into all of these things to make it work. If you really brought that cost down to maybe not zero, but just made it 10 X easier, made it super easy for someone with really fantastic ideas, to immediately get to the version of the new architecture they dreamed up, that is getting 50, 40% utilization on their GPUs, I think that would just speed up research by a ton.
It’s much harder to be really specific when you’re talking in the text box. And if you’re necessarily just going to communicate with a thing like you would be communicating with an engineering department, you’re actually advocating tons of really important decisions to this bot. And this kind of gets at, fundamentally, what engineering is. I think that some people who are a little bit more removed from engineering might think of it as the spec is completely written out and then the engineers just come and they just implement. And it’s just about making the thing happen in code and making the thing exist. But I think a lot of the best engineering, the engineering we enjoy, involves tons of tiny micro decisions about what exactly you’re building, and about really hard trade-offs between speed and cost and just all the other things involved in a system. As long as humans are actually the ones designing the software and the ones specifying what they want to be built, and it’s not just like company run by all AIs, we think you’ll really want the human in a driver’s seat dictating these decisions.
And so the jury’s still out on what that looks like. I think that one weird idea for what that could look like, is it could look like you can control the level of abstraction you view a code base at. And you can point at specific parts of a code base that… Like, maybe you digest a code base by looking at it in the form of pseudocode. And you can actually edit that pseudocode too, and then have changes get made down at the sort of formal programming level. And you can gesture at any piece of logic in your software component of programming. You keep the inflow text editing component of programming, you keep the control of, you can even go down into the code, you can go at higher levels of abstraction, while also giving you these big productivity gains.
And so I think it’s going to be a really, really fun time for people who build software. I think that the skills will probably change too. I think that people’s taste and creative ideas will be magnified. And it will be maybe less, a little bit, about boilerplate text editing. Maybe even a little bit less about carefulness, which I think is really important today if you’re a programmer. I think it’ll be a lot more fun.
“To start, we’re building the engineer of the future, a human AI programmer that’s an order of magnitude more effective than any one engineer. This hybrid engineer will have effortless control over their code base and no low entropy keystrokes. They will iterate at the speed of their judgment, even in the most complex systems. Using a combination of AI and human ingenuity they will outsmart and out engineer the best pure AI systems. We are a group of researchers and engineers.
We build software and models to invent at the edge of what’s useful and what’s possible. Our work has already improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of programmers.”
And on the way to that, we’ll at least make programming more fun. So thank you for talking today.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 0:59 – Code editor basics
- 3:09 – GitHub Copilot
- 10:27 – Cursor
- 16:54 – Cursor Tab
- 23:08 – Code diff
- 31:20 – ML details
- 36:54 – GPT vs Claude
- 43:28 – Prompt engineering
- 50:54 – AI agents
- 1:04:51 – Running code in background
- 1:09:31 – Debugging
- 1:14:58 – Dangerous code
- 1:26:09 – Branching file systems
- 1:29:20 – Scaling challenges
- 1:43:32 – Context
- 1:48:39 – OpenAI o1
- 2:00:01 – Synthetic data
- 2:03:48 – RLHF vs RLAIF
- 2:05:34 – Fields Medal for AI
- 2:08:17 – Scaling laws
- 2:17:06 – The future of programming
Introduction
Lex
The following is a conversation with the founding members of the Cursor team, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. Cursor is a code editor based on VS Code that adds a lot of powerful features for AI-assisted coding. It has captivated the attention and excitement of the programming and AI communities. So I thought this is an excellent opportunity to dive deep into the role of AI in programming. This is a super technical conversation that is bigger than just about one code editor. It’s about the future of programming and in general, the future of human AI collaboration in designing and engineering complicated and powerful systems. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Michael, Sualeh, Arvid and Aman.
The following is a conversation with the founding members of the Cursor team, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. Cursor is a code editor based on VS Code that adds a lot of powerful features for AI-assisted coding. It has captivated the attention and excitement of the programming and AI communities. So I thought this is an excellent opportunity to dive deep into the role of AI in programming. This is a super technical conversation that is bigger than just about one code editor. It’s about the future of programming and in general, the future of human AI collaboration in designing and engineering complicated and powerful systems. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Michael, Sualeh, Arvid and Aman.
Code editor basics
Lex
All right, this is awesome. We have Michael, Aman, Sualeh, Arvid here from the Cursor team. First up, big ridiculous question. What’s the point of a code editor?
All right, this is awesome. We have Michael, Aman, Sualeh, Arvid here from the Cursor team. First up, big ridiculous question. What’s the point of a code editor?
Michael
So the code editor is largely the place where you build software and today or for a long time, that’s meant the place where you text edit a formal programming language. And for people who aren’t programmers, the way to think of a code editor is a really souped up word processor for programmers, where the reason it’s souped up is code has a lot of structure. And so the “word processor,” the code editor can actually do a lot for you that word processors sort of in the writing space haven’t been able to do for people editing texts there.
So the code editor is largely the place where you build software and today or for a long time, that’s meant the place where you text edit a formal programming language. And for people who aren’t programmers, the way to think of a code editor is a really souped up word processor for programmers, where the reason it’s souped up is code has a lot of structure. And so the “word processor,” the code editor can actually do a lot for you that word processors sort of in the writing space haven’t been able to do for people editing texts there.
And so that’s everything from giving you visual differentiation of the actual tokens in the code so you can scan it quickly to letting you navigate around the code base, sort of like you’re navigating around the internet with hyperlinks, you’re going to definitions of things you’re using to error checking to catch rudimentary bugs. And so traditionally that’s what a code editor has meant. And I think that what a code editor is is going to change a lot over the next 10 years as what it means to build software maybe starts to look a bit different.
Lex
I think also a code editor should just be fun.
I think also a code editor should just be fun.
Arvid
Yes, that is very important. That is very important. And it’s actually sort of an underrated aspect of how we decide what to build. A lot of the things that we build and then we try them out, we do an experiment and then we actually throw them out because they’re not fun. And so a big part of being fun is being fast a lot of the time. Fast is fun.
Yes, that is very important. That is very important. And it’s actually sort of an underrated aspect of how we decide what to build. A lot of the things that we build and then we try them out, we do an experiment and then we actually throw them out because they’re not fun. And so a big part of being fun is being fast a lot of the time. Fast is fun.
Lex
Yeah, fast is… That should be a T-shirt.
Yeah, fast is… That should be a T-shirt.
Michael
Fundamentally, I think one of the things that draws a lot of people to building stuff on computers is this insane iteration speed, where in other disciplines you might be sort of gate capped by resources or the ability… Even the ability to get a large group together and coding is this amazing thing where it’s you and the computer and that alone, you can build really cool stuff really quickly.
Fundamentally, I think one of the things that draws a lot of people to building stuff on computers is this insane iteration speed, where in other disciplines you might be sort of gate capped by resources or the ability… Even the ability to get a large group together and coding is this amazing thing where it’s you and the computer and that alone, you can build really cool stuff really quickly.
GitHub Copilot
Lex
So for people who don’t know, Cursor is this super cool new editor that’s a fork of VS Code. It would be interesting to get your explanation of your own journey of editors. I think all of you were big fans of VS Code with Copilot. How did you arrive to VS Code and how did that lead to your journey with Cursor?
So for people who don’t know, Cursor is this super cool new editor that’s a fork of VS Code. It would be interesting to get your explanation of your own journey of editors. I think all of you were big fans of VS Code with Copilot. How did you arrive to VS Code and how did that lead to your journey with Cursor?
Aman
Yeah, so I think a lot of us… Well, all of us were originally [inaudible 00:03:39] users.
Yeah, so I think a lot of us… Well, all of us were originally [inaudible 00:03:39] users.
Sualeh
Pure Vim.
Pure Vim.
Aman
Pure Vim. Yeah. No Neovim, just Pure Vim and a terminal. And at least for myself, it was around the time that Copilot came out, so 2021 that I really wanted to try it. So I went into VS Code, the only code editor in which it was available, and even though I really enjoyed using Vim, just the experience of Copilot with VS Code was more than good enough to convince me to switch. And so that kind of was the default until we started working on Cursor.
Pure Vim. Yeah. No Neovim, just Pure Vim and a terminal. And at least for myself, it was around the time that Copilot came out, so 2021 that I really wanted to try it. So I went into VS Code, the only code editor in which it was available, and even though I really enjoyed using Vim, just the experience of Copilot with VS Code was more than good enough to convince me to switch. And so that kind of was the default until we started working on Cursor.
Lex
And maybe we should explain what Copilot does. It’s a really nice auto complete. As you start writing a thing, it suggests one or two or three lines how to complete the thing. And there’s a fun experience in that. You know like when you have a close friendship and your friend completes your sentences? When it’s done well, there’s an intimate feeling. There’s probably a better word than intimate, but there’s a cool feeling of holy shit, it gets me. And then there’s an unpleasant feeling when it doesn’t get you. And so there’s that kind of friction. But I would say for a lot of people, the feeling that it gets me overpowers that it doesn’t.
And maybe we should explain what Copilot does. It’s a really nice auto complete. As you start writing a thing, it suggests one or two or three lines how to complete the thing. And there’s a fun experience in that. You know like when you have a close friendship and your friend completes your sentences? When it’s done well, there’s an intimate feeling. There’s probably a better word than intimate, but there’s a cool feeling of holy shit, it gets me. And then there’s an unpleasant feeling when it doesn’t get you. And so there’s that kind of friction. But I would say for a lot of people, the feeling that it gets me overpowers that it doesn’t.
Arvid
And I think actually one of the underrated aspects of Github Copilot is that even when it’s wrong, it’s a little bit annoying, but it’s not that bad because you just type another character and then maybe then it gets you, or you type another character and then it gets you. So even when it’s wrong, it’s not that bad.
And I think actually one of the underrated aspects of Github Copilot is that even when it’s wrong, it’s a little bit annoying, but it’s not that bad because you just type another character and then maybe then it gets you, or you type another character and then it gets you. So even when it’s wrong, it’s not that bad.
Sualeh
You can sort of iterate and fix it. I mean, the other underrated part of Copilot for me was just the first real AI product. So the first language model consumer product.
You can sort of iterate and fix it. I mean, the other underrated part of Copilot for me was just the first real AI product. So the first language model consumer product.
Lex
So Copilot was kind of like the first killer app for LMs.
So Copilot was kind of like the first killer app for LMs.
Michael
Yeah. And the beta was out in 2021.
Yeah. And the beta was out in 2021.
Lex
Right. Okay. So what’s the origin story of Cursor?
Right. Okay. So what’s the origin story of Cursor?
Michael
So around 2020, the scaling loss papers came out from OpenAI and that was a moment where this looked like clear predictable progress for the field where even if we didn’t have any more ideas, it looked like you could make these models a lot better if you had more compute and more data.
So around 2020, the scaling loss papers came out from OpenAI and that was a moment where this looked like clear predictable progress for the field where even if we didn’t have any more ideas, it looked like you could make these models a lot better if you had more compute and more data.
Lex
By the way, we’ll probably talk for three to four hours on the topic of scaling loss. But just to summarize, it’s a paper in a set of papers in a set of ideas that say bigger might be better for model size and data size in the realm of machine learning.
By the way, we’ll probably talk for three to four hours on the topic of scaling loss. But just to summarize, it’s a paper in a set of papers in a set of ideas that say bigger might be better for model size and data size in the realm of machine learning.
Sualeh
It’s bigger and better, but predictably better.
It’s bigger and better, but predictably better.
Lex
Okay, that’s another topic of conversation.
Okay, that’s another topic of conversation.
Arvid
Yes. Yeah.
Yes. Yeah.
Michael
So around that time for some of us, there were a lot of conceptual conversations about what’s this going to look like? What’s the story going to be for all these different knowledge worker fields about how they’re going to be made better by this technology getting better? And then I think there were a couple of moments where the theoretical gains predicted in that paper started to feel really concrete and it started to feel like a moment where you could actually go and not do a PhD if you wanted to do useful work in AI. It actually felt like now there was this whole set of systems one could build that were really useful. And I think that the first moment we already talked about a little bit, which was playing with the early beta of Copilot, that was awesome and magical.
So around that time for some of us, there were a lot of conceptual conversations about what’s this going to look like? What’s the story going to be for all these different knowledge worker fields about how they’re going to be made better by this technology getting better? And then I think there were a couple of moments where the theoretical gains predicted in that paper started to feel really concrete and it started to feel like a moment where you could actually go and not do a PhD if you wanted to do useful work in AI. It actually felt like now there was this whole set of systems one could build that were really useful. And I think that the first moment we already talked about a little bit, which was playing with the early beta of Copilot, that was awesome and magical.
I think that the next big moment where everything kind of clicked together was actually getting early access to GPT-IV. So it was sort of end of 2022 was when we were tinkering with that model and the step-upping capabilities felt enormous. And previous to that, we had been working on a couple of different projects. Because of Copilot, because of scaling odds, because of our prior interest in the technology, we had been tinkering around with tools for programmers, but things that are very specific. So we were building tools for financial professionals who have to work within a Jupyter Notebook or playing around with can you do static analysis with these models?
And then the step-up in GPT- IV felt like, look, that really made concrete the theoretical gains that we had predicted before. It felt like you could build a lot more just immediately at that point in time. And also if we were being consistent, it really felt like this wasn’t just going to be a point solution thing. This was going to be all of programming was going to flow through these models and it felt like that demanded a different type of programming environment, a different type of programming. And so we set off to build that sort of larger vision around then.
Sualeh
There’s one that I distinctly remember. So my roommate is an IMO Gold winner and there’s a competition in the US called the PUTNAM, which is sort of the IMO for college people and it’s this math competition. It’s exceptionally good. So Shengtong and Aman I remember, sort of June of 2022, had this bet on whether the 2024 June or July you were going to win a gold medal in the IMO with models.
There’s one that I distinctly remember. So my roommate is an IMO Gold winner and there’s a competition in the US called the PUTNAM, which is sort of the IMO for college people and it’s this math competition. It’s exceptionally good. So Shengtong and Aman I remember, sort of June of 2022, had this bet on whether the 2024 June or July you were going to win a gold medal in the IMO with models.
Lex
IMO is the International Math Olympiad.
IMO is the International Math Olympiad.
Sualeh
Yeah, IMO is International Math Olympiad. And so Arvid and I are both also competing in it. So it was sort of personal and I remember thinking, Matt, this is not going to happen. Even though I sort of believed in progress, I thought IMO Gold, Aman is delusional. And to be honest, I mean, I was, to be clear, very wrong. But that was maybe the most prescient bet in the group.
Yeah, IMO is International Math Olympiad. And so Arvid and I are both also competing in it. So it was sort of personal and I remember thinking, Matt, this is not going to happen. Even though I sort of believed in progress, I thought IMO Gold, Aman is delusional. And to be honest, I mean, I was, to be clear, very wrong. But that was maybe the most prescient bet in the group.
Lex
So the new results from DeepMind, it turned out that you were correct.
So the new results from DeepMind, it turned out that you were correct.
Arvid
Technically not.
Technically not.
Aman
Technically incorrect but one point away.
Technically incorrect but one point away.
Michael
Aman was very enthusiastic about this stuff back then and before, Aman had this scaling loss T-shirt that he would wear around where it had the charts and the formulas on it.
Aman was very enthusiastic about this stuff back then and before, Aman had this scaling loss T-shirt that he would wear around where it had the charts and the formulas on it.
Lex
So you felt the AGI or you felt the scaling loss.
So you felt the AGI or you felt the scaling loss.
Aman
Yeah, I distinctly remember there was this one conversation I had with Michael before I hadn’t thought super deeply and critically about scaling laws and he kind of posed the question, why isn’t scaling all you need or why isn’t scaling going to result in massive gains in progress? And I think I went through the stages of grief. There is anger, denial, and then finally at the end just thinking about it, acceptance. And I think I’ve been quite hopeful and optimistic about progress since. I think one thing I’ll caveat is I think it also depends on which domains you’re going to see progress. Math is a great domain especially formal theorem proving because you get this fantastic signal of actually verifying if the thing was correct. And so this means something like RL can work really, really well and I think you could have systems that are perhaps very superhuman in math and still not technically have AGI.
Yeah, I distinctly remember there was this one conversation I had with Michael before I hadn’t thought super deeply and critically about scaling laws and he kind of posed the question, why isn’t scaling all you need or why isn’t scaling going to result in massive gains in progress? And I think I went through the stages of grief. There is anger, denial, and then finally at the end just thinking about it, acceptance. And I think I’ve been quite hopeful and optimistic about progress since. I think one thing I’ll caveat is I think it also depends on which domains you’re going to see progress. Math is a great domain especially formal theorem proving because you get this fantastic signal of actually verifying if the thing was correct. And so this means something like RL can work really, really well and I think you could have systems that are perhaps very superhuman in math and still not technically have AGI.
Cursor
Lex
Okay, so can we take it all the way to Cursor. And what is Cursor? It’s a fork of VS Code and VS Code is one of the most popular editors for a long time. Everybody fell in love with it. Everybody left Vim, I left DMAX for it. Sorry. So unified in some fundamental way the developer community. And then you look at the space of things, you look at the scaling laws, AI is becoming amazing and you decided okay, it’s not enough to just write an extension via VS Code because there’s a lot of limitations to that. If AI is going to keep getting better and better and better, we need to really rethink how the AI is going to be part of the editing process. And so you decided to fork VS Code and start to build a lot of the amazing features we’ll be able to talk about. But what was that decision like? Because there’s a lot of extensions, including Copilot, of VS Code that are doing sort of AI type stuff. What was the decision like to just fork VS Code?
Okay, so can we take it all the way to Cursor. And what is Cursor? It’s a fork of VS Code and VS Code is one of the most popular editors for a long time. Everybody fell in love with it. Everybody left Vim, I left DMAX for it. Sorry. So unified in some fundamental way the developer community. And then you look at the space of things, you look at the scaling laws, AI is becoming amazing and you decided okay, it’s not enough to just write an extension via VS Code because there’s a lot of limitations to that. If AI is going to keep getting better and better and better, we need to really rethink how the AI is going to be part of the editing process. And so you decided to fork VS Code and start to build a lot of the amazing features we’ll be able to talk about. But what was that decision like? Because there’s a lot of extensions, including Copilot, of VS Code that are doing sort of AI type stuff. What was the decision like to just fork VS Code?
Michael
So the decision to do an editor seemed kind of self-evident to us for at least what we wanted to do and achieve because when we started working on the editor, the idea was these models are going to get much better, their capabilities are going to improve and it’s going to entirely change how you build software, both in a you will have big productivity gains but also radical and now the active building software is going to change a lot. And so you’re very limited in the control you have over a code editor if you’re a plugin to an existing coding environment and we didn’t want to get locked in by those limitations. We wanted to be able to just build the most useful stuff.
So the decision to do an editor seemed kind of self-evident to us for at least what we wanted to do and achieve because when we started working on the editor, the idea was these models are going to get much better, their capabilities are going to improve and it’s going to entirely change how you build software, both in a you will have big productivity gains but also radical and now the active building software is going to change a lot. And so you’re very limited in the control you have over a code editor if you’re a plugin to an existing coding environment and we didn’t want to get locked in by those limitations. We wanted to be able to just build the most useful stuff.
Lex
Okay. Well then the natural question is, VS Code is kind of with Copilot a competitor, so how do you win? Is it basically just the speed and the quality of the features?
Okay. Well then the natural question is, VS Code is kind of with Copilot a competitor, so how do you win? Is it basically just the speed and the quality of the features?
Aman
Yeah, I mean I think this is a space that is quite interesting, perhaps quite unique where if you look at previous tech waves, maybe there’s kind of one major thing that happened and it unlocked a new wave of companies, but every single year, every single model capability or jump you get in model capabilities, you now unlock this new wave of features, things that are possible, especially in programming. And so I think in AI programming, being even just a few months ahead, let alone a year ahead makes your product much, much, much more useful. I think the Cursor a year from now will need to make the Cursor of today look obsolete. And I think Microsoft has done a number of fantastic things, but I don’t think they’re in a great place to really keep innovating and pushing on this in the way that a startup can.
Yeah, I mean I think this is a space that is quite interesting, perhaps quite unique where if you look at previous tech waves, maybe there’s kind of one major thing that happened and it unlocked a new wave of companies, but every single year, every single model capability or jump you get in model capabilities, you now unlock this new wave of features, things that are possible, especially in programming. And so I think in AI programming, being even just a few months ahead, let alone a year ahead makes your product much, much, much more useful. I think the Cursor a year from now will need to make the Cursor of today look obsolete. And I think Microsoft has done a number of fantastic things, but I don’t think they’re in a great place to really keep innovating and pushing on this in the way that a startup can.
Lex
Just rapidly implementing features.
Just rapidly implementing features.
Aman
Yeah. And kind of doing the research experimentation necessary to really push the ceiling.
Yeah. And kind of doing the research experimentation necessary to really push the ceiling.
Sualeh
I don’t know if I think of it in terms of features as I think of it in terms of capabilities for programmers. As the new O1 model came out, and I’m sure there are going to be more models of different types, like longer context and maybe faster, there’s all these crazy ideas that you can try and hopefully 10% of the crazy ideas will make it into something kind of cool and useful and we want people to have that sooner. To rephrase, an underrated fact is we’re making it for ourself.
I don’t know if I think of it in terms of features as I think of it in terms of capabilities for programmers. As the new O1 model came out, and I’m sure there are going to be more models of different types, like longer context and maybe faster, there’s all these crazy ideas that you can try and hopefully 10% of the crazy ideas will make it into something kind of cool and useful and we want people to have that sooner. To rephrase, an underrated fact is we’re making it for ourself.
When we started Cursor, you really felt this frustration that models… You could see models getting better, but the Copilot experience had not changed. It was like, man, these guys, the ceiling is getting higher, why are they not making new things? They should be making new things. Where’s all the alpha features? There were no alpha features. I’m sure it was selling well. I’m sure it was a great business, but it didn’t feel… I’m one of these people that really want to try and use new things and there was no new thing for a very long while.
Lex
Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know how you put that into words, but when you compare a Cursor with Copilot, Copilot pretty quickly started to feel stale for some reason.
Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know how you put that into words, but when you compare a Cursor with Copilot, Copilot pretty quickly started to feel stale for some reason.
Arvid
Yeah, I think one thing that I think helps us is that we’re sort of doing it all in one where we’re developing the UX and the way you interact with the model at the same time as we’re developing how we actually make the model give better answers. So how you build up the prompt or how do you find the context and for a Cursor Tab, how do you train the model? So I think that helps us to have all of it the same people working on the entire experience [inaudible 00:15:17] .
Yeah, I think one thing that I think helps us is that we’re sort of doing it all in one where we’re developing the UX and the way you interact with the model at the same time as we’re developing how we actually make the model give better answers. So how you build up the prompt or how do you find the context and for a Cursor Tab, how do you train the model? So I think that helps us to have all of it the same people working on the entire experience [inaudible 00:15:17] .
Sualeh
Yeah, it’s like the person making the UI and the person training the model sit like 18 feet away-
Yeah, it’s like the person making the UI and the person training the model sit like 18 feet away-
Aman
Often the same person even.
Often the same person even.
Sualeh
Yeah, often even the same person. You can create things that are sort of not possible if you’re not talking, you’re not experimenting.
Yeah, often even the same person. You can create things that are sort of not possible if you’re not talking, you’re not experimenting.
Lex
And you’re using, like you said, Cursor to write Cursor?
And you’re using, like you said, Cursor to write Cursor?
Arvid
Of course.
Of course.
Michael
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
Lex
Well let’s talk about some of these features. Let’s talk about the all-knowing the all-powerful praise be to the Tab, auto complete on steroids basically. So how does Tab work? What is Tab?
Well let’s talk about some of these features. Let’s talk about the all-knowing the all-powerful praise be to the Tab, auto complete on steroids basically. So how does Tab work? What is Tab?
Michael
To highlight and summarize at a high level, I’d say that there are two things that Cursor is pretty good at right now. There are other things that it does, but two things that it helps programmers with. One is this idea of looking over your shoulder and being a really fast colleague who can kind of jump ahead of you and type and figure out what you’re going to do next. And that was the original idea behind… That was kind of the kernel of the idea behind a good auto complete was predicting what you’re going to do next, but you can make that concept even more ambitious by not just predicting the characters after your Cursor but actually predicting the next entire change you’re going to make, the next diff, next place you’re going to jump to.
To highlight and summarize at a high level, I’d say that there are two things that Cursor is pretty good at right now. There are other things that it does, but two things that it helps programmers with. One is this idea of looking over your shoulder and being a really fast colleague who can kind of jump ahead of you and type and figure out what you’re going to do next. And that was the original idea behind… That was kind of the kernel of the idea behind a good auto complete was predicting what you’re going to do next, but you can make that concept even more ambitious by not just predicting the characters after your Cursor but actually predicting the next entire change you’re going to make, the next diff, next place you’re going to jump to.
And the second thing Cursor is pretty good at right now too is helping you sometimes jump ahead of the AI and tell it what to do and go from instructions to code. And on both of those we’ve done a lot of work on making the editing experience for those things ergonomic and also making those things smart and fast.
Cursor Tab
Sualeh
One of the things we really wanted was we wanted the model to be able to edit code for us. That was kind of a wish and we had multiple attempts at it before we had a good model that could edit code for you. Then after we had a good model, I think there’ve been a lot of effort to make the inference fast for having a good experience, and we’ve been starting to incorporate… I mean, Michael sort of mentioned this ability to jump to different places and that jump to different places I think came from a feeling of once you accept an edit, it’s like man, it should be just really obvious where to go next. It’s like I’d made this change, the model should just know that the next place to go to is 18 lines down. If you’re a WIM user, you could press 18JJ or whatever, but why am I doing this? The model should just know it.
One of the things we really wanted was we wanted the model to be able to edit code for us. That was kind of a wish and we had multiple attempts at it before we had a good model that could edit code for you. Then after we had a good model, I think there’ve been a lot of effort to make the inference fast for having a good experience, and we’ve been starting to incorporate… I mean, Michael sort of mentioned this ability to jump to different places and that jump to different places I think came from a feeling of once you accept an edit, it’s like man, it should be just really obvious where to go next. It’s like I’d made this change, the model should just know that the next place to go to is 18 lines down. If you’re a WIM user, you could press 18JJ or whatever, but why am I doing this? The model should just know it.
So the idea was you just press Tab, it would go 18 lines down and then show you the next edit and you would press Tab, so as long as you could keep pressing Tab. And so the internal competition was, how many Tabs can we make someone press? Once you have the idea, more abstractly, the thing to think about is how are the edits zero entropy? So once you’ve expressed your intent and the edit is… There’s no new bits of information to finish your thought, but you still have to type some characters to make the computer understand what you’re actually thinking, then maybe the model should just sort of read your mind and all the zero entropy bits should just be like tabbed away. That was sort of the abstract version.
Aman
There’s this interesting thing where if you look at language model loss on different domains, I believe the bits per byte, which is a kind of character normalize loss for code is lower than language, which means in general there are a lot of tokens in code that are super predictable, a lot of characters that are super predictable. And this is I think even magnified when you’re not just trying to auto complete code, but predicting what the user’s going to do next in their editing of existing code. And so the goal of Cursor Tab is let’s eliminate all the low entropy actions you take inside of the editor. When the intent is effectively determined, let’s just jump you forward in time, skip you forward.
There’s this interesting thing where if you look at language model loss on different domains, I believe the bits per byte, which is a kind of character normalize loss for code is lower than language, which means in general there are a lot of tokens in code that are super predictable, a lot of characters that are super predictable. And this is I think even magnified when you’re not just trying to auto complete code, but predicting what the user’s going to do next in their editing of existing code. And so the goal of Cursor Tab is let’s eliminate all the low entropy actions you take inside of the editor. When the intent is effectively determined, let’s just jump you forward in time, skip you forward.
Lex
Well, what’s the intuition and what’s the technical details of how to do next Cursor prediction? That jump, that’s not so intuitive I think to people.
Well, what’s the intuition and what’s the technical details of how to do next Cursor prediction? That jump, that’s not so intuitive I think to people.
Aman
Yeah. I think I can speak to a few of the details on how to make these things work. They’re incredibly low latency, so you need to train small models on this task. In particular, they’re incredibly pre-fill token hungry. What that means is they have these really, really long prompts where they see a lot of your code and they’re not actually generating that many tokens. And so the perfect fit for that is using a sparse model, meaning an MOE model. So that was one breakthrough we made that substantially improved its performance at longer context. The other being a variant of speculative decoding that we built out called speculative edits. These are two, I think, important pieces of what make it quite high quality and very fast.
Yeah. I think I can speak to a few of the details on how to make these things work. They’re incredibly low latency, so you need to train small models on this task. In particular, they’re incredibly pre-fill token hungry. What that means is they have these really, really long prompts where they see a lot of your code and they’re not actually generating that many tokens. And so the perfect fit for that is using a sparse model, meaning an MOE model. So that was one breakthrough we made that substantially improved its performance at longer context. The other being a variant of speculative decoding that we built out called speculative edits. These are two, I think, important pieces of what make it quite high quality and very fast.
Lex
Okay, so MOE [inaudible 00:20:22], the input is huge, the output is small.
Okay, so MOE [inaudible 00:20:22], the input is huge, the output is small.
Aman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex
Okay. So what else can you say about how to make… Does caching play a role-
Okay. So what else can you say about how to make… Does caching play a role-
Aman
Oh, caching plays a huge role. Because you’re dealing with this many input tokens, if every single keystroke that you’re typing in a given line you had to rerun the model on all of those tokens passed in, you’re just going to one, significantly degrade latency, two, you’re going to kill your GPUs with load. So you need to design the actual prompts you use for the model such that they’re caching aware. And then yeah, you need to reuse the KV cache across requests just so that you’re spending less work, less compute.
Oh, caching plays a huge role. Because you’re dealing with this many input tokens, if every single keystroke that you’re typing in a given line you had to rerun the model on all of those tokens passed in, you’re just going to one, significantly degrade latency, two, you’re going to kill your GPUs with load. So you need to design the actual prompts you use for the model such that they’re caching aware. And then yeah, you need to reuse the KV cache across requests just so that you’re spending less work, less compute.
Lex
Again, what are the things that Tab is supposed to be able to do in the near term, just to linger on that? Generate code, fill empty space, also edit code across multiple lines and then jump to different locations inside the same file and then-
Again, what are the things that Tab is supposed to be able to do in the near term, just to linger on that? Generate code, fill empty space, also edit code across multiple lines and then jump to different locations inside the same file and then-
Sualeh
Hopefully jump to different files also. So if you make an edit in one file and maybe you have to go to another file to finish your thought, it should go to the second file also.
Hopefully jump to different files also. So if you make an edit in one file and maybe you have to go to another file to finish your thought, it should go to the second file also.
Arvid
The full generalization is next action prediction. Sometimes you need to run a command in the terminal and it should be able to suggest the command based on the code that you wrote too, or sometimes you actually need to… It suggests something, but it’s hard for you to know if it’s correct because you actually need some more information to learn. You need to know the type to be able to verify that it’s correct. And so maybe it should actually take you to a place that’s the definition of something and then take you back so that you have all the requisite knowledge to be able to accept the next completion.
The full generalization is next action prediction. Sometimes you need to run a command in the terminal and it should be able to suggest the command based on the code that you wrote too, or sometimes you actually need to… It suggests something, but it’s hard for you to know if it’s correct because you actually need some more information to learn. You need to know the type to be able to verify that it’s correct. And so maybe it should actually take you to a place that’s the definition of something and then take you back so that you have all the requisite knowledge to be able to accept the next completion.
Lex
So providing the human the knowledge.
So providing the human the knowledge.
Arvid
Yes.
Yes.
Lex
Right.
Right.
Arvid
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex
I just gotten to know a guy named Primeagen who I believe has an… You can order coffee via SSH.
I just gotten to know a guy named Primeagen who I believe has an… You can order coffee via SSH.
Aman
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
Arvid
We did that.
We did that.
Sualeh
We did that.
We did that.
Lex
So can also the model do that and provide you with caffeine? Okay. So that’s the general framework.
So can also the model do that and provide you with caffeine? Okay. So that’s the general framework.
Michael
Yeah. And the magic moment would be if… Programming is this weird discipline where sometimes the next five minutes, not always, but sometimes the next five minutes of what you’re going to do is actually predictable from the stuff you’ve done recently. And so can you get to a world where that next five minutes either happens by you disengaging and it taking you through? Or maybe a little bit more of just you seeing next step what it’s going to do and you’re like, okay, that’s good, that’s good, that’s good, that’s good, and you can just sort of tap, tap through these big changes.
Yeah. And the magic moment would be if… Programming is this weird discipline where sometimes the next five minutes, not always, but sometimes the next five minutes of what you’re going to do is actually predictable from the stuff you’ve done recently. And so can you get to a world where that next five minutes either happens by you disengaging and it taking you through? Or maybe a little bit more of just you seeing next step what it’s going to do and you’re like, okay, that’s good, that’s good, that’s good, that’s good, and you can just sort of tap, tap through these big changes.
Code diff
Lex
As we’re talking about this, I should mention one of the really cool and noticeable things about Cursor is that there’s this whole diff interface situation going on. So the model suggests with the red and the green of here’s how we’re going to modify the code, and in the chat window you can apply and it shows you the diff and you can accept the diff. So maybe can you speak to whatever direction of that?
As we’re talking about this, I should mention one of the really cool and noticeable things about Cursor is that there’s this whole diff interface situation going on. So the model suggests with the red and the green of here’s how we’re going to modify the code, and in the chat window you can apply and it shows you the diff and you can accept the diff. So maybe can you speak to whatever direction of that?
Sualeh
We’ll probably have four or five different kinds of diffs. So we have optimized the diff for the auto complete, so that has a different diff interface than when you’re reviewing larger blocks of code. And then we’re trying to optimize another diff thing for when you’re doing multiple different files. And at a high level, the difference is for when you’re doing auto- complete, it should be really, really fast to read. Actually it should be really fast to read in all situations, but in auto-complete your eyes are focused in one area, you can’t be in too many… The humans can’t look in too many different places.
We’ll probably have four or five different kinds of diffs. So we have optimized the diff for the auto complete, so that has a different diff interface than when you’re reviewing larger blocks of code. And then we’re trying to optimize another diff thing for when you’re doing multiple different files. And at a high level, the difference is for when you’re doing auto- complete, it should be really, really fast to read. Actually it should be really fast to read in all situations, but in auto-complete your eyes are focused in one area, you can’t be in too many… The humans can’t look in too many different places.
Lex
So you’re talking about on the interface side?
So you’re talking about on the interface side?
Sualeh
On the interface side. So it currently has this box on this side. So we have the current box, and it you tries to delete code in some place and tries to add other code, it tries to show you a box on the side.
On the interface side. So it currently has this box on this side. So we have the current box, and it you tries to delete code in some place and tries to add other code, it tries to show you a box on the side.
Aman
You can maybe show it if we pull it up in Cursor.com. This is what we’re talking.
You can maybe show it if we pull it up in Cursor.com. This is what we’re talking.
Sualeh
So that box-
So that box-
Aman
Exactly here.
Exactly here.
Sualeh
It was like three or four different attempts at trying to make this thing work where first the attempt was this blue crossed out line. So before it was a box on the side, it used to show you the code to delete by showing you Google Docs style, you would see a line through it and then you would see the new code. That was super distracting. And then we tried many different… There was deletions, there was trying the red highlight.
It was like three or four different attempts at trying to make this thing work where first the attempt was this blue crossed out line. So before it was a box on the side, it used to show you the code to delete by showing you Google Docs style, you would see a line through it and then you would see the new code. That was super distracting. And then we tried many different… There was deletions, there was trying the red highlight.
Then the next iteration of it, which is sort of funny, you would hold the, on Mac, the option button. So it would sort of highlight a region of code to show you that there might be something coming. So maybe in this example, the input and the value would all get blue. And the blue was to highlight that the AI had a suggestion for you. So instead of directly showing you the thing, it would just hint that the AI had a suggestion and if you really wanted to see it, you would hold the option button and then you would see the new suggestion. And if you release the option button, you would then see your original code.
Lex
So by the way, that’s pretty nice, but you have to know to hold the option button.
So by the way, that’s pretty nice, but you have to know to hold the option button.
Aman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex
And by the way, I’m not a Mac user, but I got it. Option. It’s a button I guess you people have.
And by the way, I’m not a Mac user, but I got it. Option. It’s a button I guess you people have.
Sualeh
Again, it’s just not intuitive. I think that’s the key thing.
Again, it’s just not intuitive. I think that’s the key thing.
Aman
And there’s a chance this is also not the final version of it.
And there’s a chance this is also not the final version of it.
Arvid
I am personally very excited for making a lot of improvements in this area. We often talk about it as the verification problem where these diffs are great for small edits. For large edits or when it’s multiple files or something, it’s actually a little bit prohibitive to review these diffs. So there are a couple of different ideas here. One idea that we have is, okay, parts of the diffs are important. They have a lot of information. And then parts of the diff are just very low entropy. They’re the same thing over and over again. And so maybe you can highlight the important pieces and then gray out the not so important pieces. Or maybe you can have a model that looks at the diff and sees, oh, there’s a likely bug here. I will mark this with a little red squiggly and say, you should probably review this part of the diff. Ideas in that vein I think are exciting.
I am personally very excited for making a lot of improvements in this area. We often talk about it as the verification problem where these diffs are great for small edits. For large edits or when it’s multiple files or something, it’s actually a little bit prohibitive to review these diffs. So there are a couple of different ideas here. One idea that we have is, okay, parts of the diffs are important. They have a lot of information. And then parts of the diff are just very low entropy. They’re the same thing over and over again. And so maybe you can highlight the important pieces and then gray out the not so important pieces. Or maybe you can have a model that looks at the diff and sees, oh, there’s a likely bug here. I will mark this with a little red squiggly and say, you should probably review this part of the diff. Ideas in that vein I think are exciting.
Lex
Yeah, that’s a really fascinating space of UX design engineering. So you’re basically trying to guide the human programmer through all the things they need to read and nothing more, optimally.
Yeah, that’s a really fascinating space of UX design engineering. So you’re basically trying to guide the human programmer through all the things they need to read and nothing more, optimally.
Arvid
And you want an intelligent model to do it. Currently, diff algorithms, they’re just like normal algorithms. There’s no intelligence. There’s intelligence that went into designing the algorithm, but then you don’t care if it’s about this thing or this thing as you want the model to do this.
And you want an intelligent model to do it. Currently, diff algorithms, they’re just like normal algorithms. There’s no intelligence. There’s intelligence that went into designing the algorithm, but then you don’t care if it’s about this thing or this thing as you want the model to do this.
Sualeh
So I think the general question is like, man, these models are going to get much smarter. As the models get much smarter, changes they will be able to propose are much bigger. So as the changes gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the humans have to do more and more and more verification work. It gets more and more and more… You need to help them out. I don’t want to spend all my time reviewing code.
So I think the general question is like, man, these models are going to get much smarter. As the models get much smarter, changes they will be able to propose are much bigger. So as the changes gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the humans have to do more and more and more verification work. It gets more and more and more… You need to help them out. I don’t want to spend all my time reviewing code.
Lex
Can you say a little more across multiple files [inaudible 00:28:19]?
Can you say a little more across multiple files [inaudible 00:28:19]?
Aman
Yeah. I mean, so GitHub tries to solve this with code review. When you’re doing code review, you’re reviewing multiple diffs across multiple files. But like Arvid said earlier, I think you can do much better than code review. Code review kind of sucks. You spend a lot of time trying to grok this code that’s often quite unfamiliar to you and it often doesn’t even actually catch that many bugs. And I think you can significantly improve that review experience using language models, for example, using the kinds of tricks that Arvid had described of maybe pointing you towards the regions that actually matter. I think also if the code is produced by these language models and it’s not produced by someone else… The code review experience is design for both the reviewer and the person that produced the code. In the case where the person that produced the code is a language model, you don’t have to care that much about their experience and you can design the entire thing around the reviewer such that the reviewer’s job is as fun, as easy, as productive as possible. I think that feels like the issue with just naively trying to make these things look like code review. I think you can be a lot more creative and push the boundary on what’s possible.
Yeah. I mean, so GitHub tries to solve this with code review. When you’re doing code review, you’re reviewing multiple diffs across multiple files. But like Arvid said earlier, I think you can do much better than code review. Code review kind of sucks. You spend a lot of time trying to grok this code that’s often quite unfamiliar to you and it often doesn’t even actually catch that many bugs. And I think you can significantly improve that review experience using language models, for example, using the kinds of tricks that Arvid had described of maybe pointing you towards the regions that actually matter. I think also if the code is produced by these language models and it’s not produced by someone else… The code review experience is design for both the reviewer and the person that produced the code. In the case where the person that produced the code is a language model, you don’t have to care that much about their experience and you can design the entire thing around the reviewer such that the reviewer’s job is as fun, as easy, as productive as possible. I think that feels like the issue with just naively trying to make these things look like code review. I think you can be a lot more creative and push the boundary on what’s possible.
Arvid
And just one idea there is, I think ordering matters. Generally, when you review a PR, you have this list of files and you’re reviewing them from top to bottom, but actually, you actually want to understand this part first because that came logically first, and then you want to understand the next part and you don’t want to have to figure out that yourself, you want a model to.
And just one idea there is, I think ordering matters. Generally, when you review a PR, you have this list of files and you’re reviewing them from top to bottom, but actually, you actually want to understand this part first because that came logically first, and then you want to understand the next part and you don’t want to have to figure out that yourself, you want a model to.
Arvid
And you don’t want to have to figure out that yourself. You want a model to guide you through the thing.
And you don’t want to have to figure out that yourself. You want a model to guide you through the thing.
Lex
And is the step of creation going to be more and more natural language, is the goal versus with actual writing the book?
And is the step of creation going to be more and more natural language, is the goal versus with actual writing the book?
Arvid
I think sometimes. I don’t think it’s going to be the case that all of programming will be natural language, and the reason for that is if I’m pair programming with Sualeh and Sualeh is at the computer and the keyboard, and sometimes if I’m driving, I want to say to Sualeh, “Hey, implement this function,” and that works. And then sometimes it’s just so annoying to explain to Sualeh what I want him to do, and so I actually take over the keyboard and I show him. I write part of the example and then it makes sense and that’s the easiest way to communicate. And so I think that’s also the case for AI. Sometimes the easiest way to communicate with the AI will be to show an example and then it goes and does the thing everywhere else.
I think sometimes. I don’t think it’s going to be the case that all of programming will be natural language, and the reason for that is if I’m pair programming with Sualeh and Sualeh is at the computer and the keyboard, and sometimes if I’m driving, I want to say to Sualeh, “Hey, implement this function,” and that works. And then sometimes it’s just so annoying to explain to Sualeh what I want him to do, and so I actually take over the keyboard and I show him. I write part of the example and then it makes sense and that’s the easiest way to communicate. And so I think that’s also the case for AI. Sometimes the easiest way to communicate with the AI will be to show an example and then it goes and does the thing everywhere else.
Or sometimes if you’re making a website for example, the easiest way to show to the AI what you want is not to tell it what to do but drag things around or draw things, and maybe eventually we will get to brain machine interfaces or whatever and you can understand what you’re thinking. And so I think natural language will have a place. I think it will definitely not be the way most people program most of the time.
ML details
Lex
I’m really feeling the AGI with this editor. It feels like there’s a lot of machine learning going on underneath. Tell me about some of the ML stuff that makes it all work?
I’m really feeling the AGI with this editor. It feels like there’s a lot of machine learning going on underneath. Tell me about some of the ML stuff that makes it all work?
Aman
Where Cursor really works via this ensemble of custom models that we’ve trained alongside the frontier models that are fantastic at the reasoning intense things. And so Cursor Tab for example, is a great example of where you can specialize this model to be, even better than even frontier models if you look at evals on the task we set it at. The other domain, which it’s surprising that it requires custom models but it’s necessary and works quite well, is in Apply. So I think these models are… The frontier models are quite good at sketching out plans for code and generating rough sketches of the change, but actually, creating diffs is quite hard for frontier models, for your training models. You try to do this with Sonnet, with o1, any frontier model and it really messes up stupid things like counting line numbers, especially in super, super large files. And so what we’ve done to alleviate this is we let the model sketch out this rough code block that indicates what the change will be and we train a model to then Apply that change to the file.
Where Cursor really works via this ensemble of custom models that we’ve trained alongside the frontier models that are fantastic at the reasoning intense things. And so Cursor Tab for example, is a great example of where you can specialize this model to be, even better than even frontier models if you look at evals on the task we set it at. The other domain, which it’s surprising that it requires custom models but it’s necessary and works quite well, is in Apply. So I think these models are… The frontier models are quite good at sketching out plans for code and generating rough sketches of the change, but actually, creating diffs is quite hard for frontier models, for your training models. You try to do this with Sonnet, with o1, any frontier model and it really messes up stupid things like counting line numbers, especially in super, super large files. And so what we’ve done to alleviate this is we let the model sketch out this rough code block that indicates what the change will be and we train a model to then Apply that change to the file.
Lex
And we should say that Apply is the model looks at your code, it gives you a really damn good suggestion of what new things to do. And the seemingly for humans trivial step of combining the two, you’re saying is not so trivial.
And we should say that Apply is the model looks at your code, it gives you a really damn good suggestion of what new things to do. And the seemingly for humans trivial step of combining the two, you’re saying is not so trivial.
Sualeh
Contrary to popular perception, it is not a deterministic algorithm.
Contrary to popular perception, it is not a deterministic algorithm.
Aman
Yeah, I think you see shallow copies of apply elsewhere and it just breaks most of the time because you think you can try to do some deterministic matching and then it fails at least 40% of the time and that just results in a terrible product experience. I think in general, this regime of you are going to get smarter and smarter models. So one other thing that Apply lets you do is it lets you use fewer tokens with the most intelligent models. This is both expensive in terms of latency for generating all these tokens and cost. So you can give this very, very rough sketch and then have your model models go and implement it because it’s a much easier task to implement this very, very sketched out code. And I think that this regime will continue where you can use smarter and smarter models to do the planning and then maybe the implementation details can be handled by the less intelligent ones. Perhaps you’ll have maybe o1, maybe it’ll be even more capable models given an even higher level plan that is recursively applied by sauna and then the apply model.
Yeah, I think you see shallow copies of apply elsewhere and it just breaks most of the time because you think you can try to do some deterministic matching and then it fails at least 40% of the time and that just results in a terrible product experience. I think in general, this regime of you are going to get smarter and smarter models. So one other thing that Apply lets you do is it lets you use fewer tokens with the most intelligent models. This is both expensive in terms of latency for generating all these tokens and cost. So you can give this very, very rough sketch and then have your model models go and implement it because it’s a much easier task to implement this very, very sketched out code. And I think that this regime will continue where you can use smarter and smarter models to do the planning and then maybe the implementation details can be handled by the less intelligent ones. Perhaps you’ll have maybe o1, maybe it’ll be even more capable models given an even higher level plan that is recursively applied by sauna and then the apply model.
Sualeh
Maybe we should talk about how to make it fast if you like. Fast is always an interesting detail.
Maybe we should talk about how to make it fast if you like. Fast is always an interesting detail.
Arvid
Fast is good.
Fast is good.
Lex
Yeah, how do you make it fast?
Yeah, how do you make it fast?
Aman
Yeah, so one big component of making it fast is speculative edits. So speculative edits are a variant of speculative decoding, and maybe it’d be helpful to briefly describe speculative decoding. With speculative decoding, what you do is you can take advantage of the fact that most of the time, and I’ll add the caveat that it would be when you’re memory bound in language model generation, if you process multiple tokens at once, it is faster than generating one token at a time. So this is the same reason why if you look at tokens per second with prompt tokens versus generated tokens, it’s much much faster for prompt tokens.
Yeah, so one big component of making it fast is speculative edits. So speculative edits are a variant of speculative decoding, and maybe it’d be helpful to briefly describe speculative decoding. With speculative decoding, what you do is you can take advantage of the fact that most of the time, and I’ll add the caveat that it would be when you’re memory bound in language model generation, if you process multiple tokens at once, it is faster than generating one token at a time. So this is the same reason why if you look at tokens per second with prompt tokens versus generated tokens, it’s much much faster for prompt tokens.
So what we do is instead of using what speculative decoding normally does, which is using a really small model to predict these draft tokens that your larger model will then go in and verify, with code edits, we have a very strong prior of what the existing code will look like and that prior is literally the same exact code. So you can do is you can just feed chunks of the original code back into the model, and then the model will just pretty much agree most of the time that, “Okay, I’m just going to spit this code back out.” And so you can process all of those lines in parallel and you just do this with sufficiently many chunks. And then eventually you’ll reach a point of disagreement where the model will now predict text that is different from the ground truth original code. It’ll generate those tokens and then we will decide after enough tokens match the original code to re- start speculating in chunks of code.
What this actually ends up looking like is just a much faster version of normal editing code. So it looks like a much faster version of the model rewriting all the code. So we can use the same exact interface that we use for diffs, but it will just stream down a lot faster.
Sualeh
And then the advantage is that while it’s streaming, you can just also start reviewing the code before it’s done so there’s no big loading screen. Maybe that is part of the advantage.
And then the advantage is that while it’s streaming, you can just also start reviewing the code before it’s done so there’s no big loading screen. Maybe that is part of the advantage.
Lex
So the human can start reading before the thing is done.
So the human can start reading before the thing is done.
Sualeh
I think the interesting riff here is something like… I feel like speculation is a fairly common idea nowadays. It’s not only in language models. There’s obviously speculation in CPUs and there’s speculation for databases and there’s speculation all over the place.
I think the interesting riff here is something like… I feel like speculation is a fairly common idea nowadays. It’s not only in language models. There’s obviously speculation in CPUs and there’s speculation for databases and there’s speculation all over the place.
GPT vs Claude
Lex
Well, let me ask the ridiculous question of which LLM is better at coding? GPT, Claude, who wins in the context of programming? And I’m sure the answer is much more nuanced because it sounds like every single part of this involves a different model.
Well, let me ask the ridiculous question of which LLM is better at coding? GPT, Claude, who wins in the context of programming? And I’m sure the answer is much more nuanced because it sounds like every single part of this involves a different model.
Aman
I think there’s no model that Pareto dominates others, meaning it is better in all categories that we think matter, the categories being speed, ability to edit code, ability to process lots of code, long context, a couple of other things and coding capabilities. The one that I’d say right now is just net best is Sonnet. I think this is a consensus opinion. o1’s really interesting and it’s really good at reasoning. So if you give it really hard programming interview style problems or lead code problems, it can do quite well on them, but it doesn’t feel like it understands your rough intent as well as Sonnet does. If you look at a lot of the other frontier models, one qualm I have is it feels like they’re not necessarily over… I’m not saying they train on benchmarks, but they perform really well in benchmarks relative to everything that’s in the middle. So if you tried on all these benchmarks and things that are in the distribution of the benchmarks they’re evaluated on, they’ll do really well. But when you push them a little bit outside of that, Sonnet is I think the one that does best at maintaining that same capability. You have the same capability in the benchmark as when you try to instruct it to do anything with coding.
I think there’s no model that Pareto dominates others, meaning it is better in all categories that we think matter, the categories being speed, ability to edit code, ability to process lots of code, long context, a couple of other things and coding capabilities. The one that I’d say right now is just net best is Sonnet. I think this is a consensus opinion. o1’s really interesting and it’s really good at reasoning. So if you give it really hard programming interview style problems or lead code problems, it can do quite well on them, but it doesn’t feel like it understands your rough intent as well as Sonnet does. If you look at a lot of the other frontier models, one qualm I have is it feels like they’re not necessarily over… I’m not saying they train on benchmarks, but they perform really well in benchmarks relative to everything that’s in the middle. So if you tried on all these benchmarks and things that are in the distribution of the benchmarks they’re evaluated on, they’ll do really well. But when you push them a little bit outside of that, Sonnet is I think the one that does best at maintaining that same capability. You have the same capability in the benchmark as when you try to instruct it to do anything with coding.
Lex
Another ridiculous question is the difference between the normal programming experience versus what benchmarks represent? Where do benchmarks fall short, do you think, when we’re evaluating these models?
Another ridiculous question is the difference between the normal programming experience versus what benchmarks represent? Where do benchmarks fall short, do you think, when we’re evaluating these models?
Sualeh
By the way, that’s a really, really hard, critically important detail of how different benchmarks are versus real coding, where real coding, it’s not interview style coding. Humans are saying half-broken English sometimes and sometimes you’re saying, “Oh, do what I did before.” Sometimes you’re saying, “Go add this thing and then do this other thing for me and then make this UI element.” And then it’s just a lot of things are context dependent. You really want to understand the human and then do what the human wants, as opposed to this… Maybe the way to put it abstractly is the interview problems are very well specified. They lean a lot on specification while the human stuff is less specified.
By the way, that’s a really, really hard, critically important detail of how different benchmarks are versus real coding, where real coding, it’s not interview style coding. Humans are saying half-broken English sometimes and sometimes you’re saying, “Oh, do what I did before.” Sometimes you’re saying, “Go add this thing and then do this other thing for me and then make this UI element.” And then it’s just a lot of things are context dependent. You really want to understand the human and then do what the human wants, as opposed to this… Maybe the way to put it abstractly is the interview problems are very well specified. They lean a lot on specification while the human stuff is less specified.
Michael
I think that this benchmark question is both complicated by what Sualeh just mentioned, and then also what Aman was getting into is that even if you… There’s this problem of the skew between what can you actually model in a benchmark versus real programming, and that can be sometimes hard to encapsulate because it’s real programming’s very messy and sometimes things aren’t super well specified what’s correct or what isn’t. But then it’s also doubly hard because of this public benchmark problem. And that’s both because public benchmarks are sometimes hill climbed on, then it’s really, really hard to also get the data from the public benchmarks out of the models.
I think that this benchmark question is both complicated by what Sualeh just mentioned, and then also what Aman was getting into is that even if you… There’s this problem of the skew between what can you actually model in a benchmark versus real programming, and that can be sometimes hard to encapsulate because it’s real programming’s very messy and sometimes things aren’t super well specified what’s correct or what isn’t. But then it’s also doubly hard because of this public benchmark problem. And that’s both because public benchmarks are sometimes hill climbed on, then it’s really, really hard to also get the data from the public benchmarks out of the models.
And so for instance, one of the most popular agent benchmarks, SWE-Bench, is really, really contaminated in the training data of these foundation models. And so if you ask these foundation models to do a SWE-Bench problem, but you actually don’t give them the context of a code base, they can hallucinate the right file pass, they can hallucinate the right function names. And so it’s also just the public aspect of these things is tricky.
Aman
In that case, it could be trained on the literal issues or pull requests themselves, and maybe the labs will start to do a better job or they’ve already done a good job at decontaminating those things, but they’re not going to omit the actual training data of the repository itself. These are all some of the most popular Python repositories. SimPy is one example. I don’t think they’re going to handicap their models on SimPy and all these popular Python repositories in order to get true evaluation scores in these benchmarks.
In that case, it could be trained on the literal issues or pull requests themselves, and maybe the labs will start to do a better job or they’ve already done a good job at decontaminating those things, but they’re not going to omit the actual training data of the repository itself. These are all some of the most popular Python repositories. SimPy is one example. I don’t think they’re going to handicap their models on SimPy and all these popular Python repositories in order to get true evaluation scores in these benchmarks.
Michael
I think that given the dirts in benchmarks, there have been a few interesting crutches that places that build systems with these models or build these models actually use to get a sense of are they going the right direction or not. And in a lot of places, people will actually just have humans play with the things and give qualitative feedback on these. One or two of the foundation model companies, they have people who that’s a big part of their role. And internally, we also qualitatively assess these models and actually lean on that a lot in addition to private emails that we have.
I think that given the dirts in benchmarks, there have been a few interesting crutches that places that build systems with these models or build these models actually use to get a sense of are they going the right direction or not. And in a lot of places, people will actually just have humans play with the things and give qualitative feedback on these. One or two of the foundation model companies, they have people who that’s a big part of their role. And internally, we also qualitatively assess these models and actually lean on that a lot in addition to private emails that we have.
Arvid
It’s like the vibe.
It’s like the vibe.
Lex
The vibe, yeah, the vibe.
The vibe, yeah, the vibe.
Arvid
It’s like the vibe.
It’s like the vibe.
Lex
The vibe benchmark, human benchmark, the humans. You pull in the humans to do a vibe check.
The vibe benchmark, human benchmark, the humans. You pull in the humans to do a vibe check.
Arvid
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex
Okay. That’s what I do. Just reading online forums and Reddit and X. Well, I don’t know how to properly load in people’s opinions because they’ll say things like, “I feel like Claude or GPT has gotten dumber,” or something. They’ll say, “I feel like…” And then I sometimes feel like that too, but I wonder if it’s the model’s problem or mine.
Okay. That’s what I do. Just reading online forums and Reddit and X. Well, I don’t know how to properly load in people’s opinions because they’ll say things like, “I feel like Claude or GPT has gotten dumber,” or something. They’ll say, “I feel like…” And then I sometimes feel like that too, but I wonder if it’s the model’s problem or mine.
Aman
With Claude, there’s an interesting take I heard where I think AWS has different chips and I suspect they have slightly different numerics than Nvidia GPUs, and someone speculated that Claude’s degraded performance had to do with maybe using the quantized version that existed on AWS Bedrock versus whatever was running on Anthropics GPUs.
With Claude, there’s an interesting take I heard where I think AWS has different chips and I suspect they have slightly different numerics than Nvidia GPUs, and someone speculated that Claude’s degraded performance had to do with maybe using the quantized version that existed on AWS Bedrock versus whatever was running on Anthropics GPUs.
Lex
I interview a bunch of people that have conspiracy theories. I’m glad you spoke to this conspiracy.
I interview a bunch of people that have conspiracy theories. I’m glad you spoke to this conspiracy.
Sualeh
Well, it’s not like conspiracy theory as much as humans. Humans are humans and there’s these details-
Well, it’s not like conspiracy theory as much as humans. Humans are humans and there’s these details-
Lex
Yes.
Yes.
Sualeh
And you’re doing this queasy amount of flops and chips are messy and man, you can just have bugs. It’s hard to overstate how hard bugs are to avoid.
And you’re doing this queasy amount of flops and chips are messy and man, you can just have bugs. It’s hard to overstate how hard bugs are to avoid.
Prompt engineering
Lex
What’s the role of a good prompt in all of this? We mentioned that benchmarks have really structured, well-formulated prompts. What should a human be doing to maximize success and what’s the importance of what the humans… You wrote a blog post on… You called it Prompt Design.
What’s the role of a good prompt in all of this? We mentioned that benchmarks have really structured, well-formulated prompts. What should a human be doing to maximize success and what’s the importance of what the humans… You wrote a blog post on… You called it Prompt Design.
Arvid
Yeah, I think it depends on which model you’re using, and all of them are slightly different and they respond differently to different prompts, but I think the original GPT-4 and the original [inaudible 00:44:07] models last year, they were quite sensitive to the prompts, and they also had a very small context window. And so we have all of these pieces of information around the code base that would maybe be relevant in the prompt. You have the docs, you have the files that you add, you have the conversation history, and then there’s a problem like how do you decide what you actually put in the prompt and when you have a limited space? And even for today’s models, even when you have long context, filling out the entire context window means that it’s slower. It means that sometimes the model actually gets confused and some models get more confused than others.
Yeah, I think it depends on which model you’re using, and all of them are slightly different and they respond differently to different prompts, but I think the original GPT-4 and the original [inaudible 00:44:07] models last year, they were quite sensitive to the prompts, and they also had a very small context window. And so we have all of these pieces of information around the code base that would maybe be relevant in the prompt. You have the docs, you have the files that you add, you have the conversation history, and then there’s a problem like how do you decide what you actually put in the prompt and when you have a limited space? And even for today’s models, even when you have long context, filling out the entire context window means that it’s slower. It means that sometimes the model actually gets confused and some models get more confused than others.
And we have this one system internally that we call Preempt, which helps us with that a little bit. And I think it was built for the era before where we had 8,000 token contact windows. And it’s a little bit similar to when you’re making a website. You want it to work on mobile, you want it to work on a desktop screen, and you have this dynamic information which you don’t have. For example, if you’re designing a print magazine, you know exactly where you can put stuff. But when you have a website or when you have a prompt, you have these inputs and then you need to format them to always work, even if the input is really big, then you might have to cut something down. And so the idea was, okay, let’s take some inspiration. What’s the best way to design websites? Well, the thing that we really like is React and the declarative approach where you use JSX in JavaScript, and then you declare, “This is what I want and I think this has higher priority or this has higher Z index than something else.”
And then you have this rendering engine in web design. It’s like Chrome, and in our case it’s a preempt renderer, which then fits everything onto the page. And as you declare, decide what you want and then it figures out what you want. And so we have found that to be quite helpful and I think the role of it has shifted over time where initially it was to fit to these small context windows. Now it’s really useful because it helps us with splitting up the data that goes into the prompt and the actual rendering of it. And so it’s easier to debug because you can change the rendering of the prompt and then try it on old prompts because you have the raw data that went into the prompt, and then you can see, “Did my change actually improve it for this entire eval set?”
Lex
So do you literally prompt with JSX?
So do you literally prompt with JSX?
Aman
Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes.
Arvid
Yeah. So it looks like react. There are components. We have one component that’s a file component and it takes in the cursor. Usually there’s one line where the cursor is in your file and that’s probably the most important line because that’s the one you’re looking at. And so then you can give priorities. So that line has the highest priority, and then you subtract one for every line that is farther away. And then eventually when it’s rendered, it figures out how many lines can actually fit and it centers around that thing.
Yeah. So it looks like react. There are components. We have one component that’s a file component and it takes in the cursor. Usually there’s one line where the cursor is in your file and that’s probably the most important line because that’s the one you’re looking at. And so then you can give priorities. So that line has the highest priority, and then you subtract one for every line that is farther away. And then eventually when it’s rendered, it figures out how many lines can actually fit and it centers around that thing.
Lex
That’s amazing.
That’s amazing.
Aman
And you can do other fancy things where if you have lots of code blocks from the entire code base, you could use retrieval and things like embedding and re-ranking scores to add priorities for you through these components.
And you can do other fancy things where if you have lots of code blocks from the entire code base, you could use retrieval and things like embedding and re-ranking scores to add priorities for you through these components.
Lex
So should humans when they ask questions, also try to use something like that? Would it be beneficial to write JSX in the problem or the whole idea is this should be loose and messy?
So should humans when they ask questions, also try to use something like that? Would it be beneficial to write JSX in the problem or the whole idea is this should be loose and messy?
Arvid
I think our goal is that you should just do whatever is the most natural thing for you, and then our job is to figure out how do we actually retrieve the relative event things so that your thinking actually makes sense?
I think our goal is that you should just do whatever is the most natural thing for you, and then our job is to figure out how do we actually retrieve the relative event things so that your thinking actually makes sense?
Lex
Well, this is the discussion I had with Aravind of Perplexity is his whole idea is you should let the person be as lazy as he wants. That’s a beautiful thing, but I feel like you’re allowed to ask more of programmers, right?
Well, this is the discussion I had with Aravind of Perplexity is his whole idea is you should let the person be as lazy as he wants. That’s a beautiful thing, but I feel like you’re allowed to ask more of programmers, right?
Arvid
Yes.
Yes.
Lex
So if you say, “Just do what you want,” humans are lazy. There’s a tension between just being lazy versus provide more as be prompted… Almost like the system pressuring you or inspiring you to be articulate. Not in terms of the grammar of the sentences, but in terms of the depth of thoughts that you convey inside the prompts.
So if you say, “Just do what you want,” humans are lazy. There’s a tension between just being lazy versus provide more as be prompted… Almost like the system pressuring you or inspiring you to be articulate. Not in terms of the grammar of the sentences, but in terms of the depth of thoughts that you convey inside the prompts.
Aman
I think even as a system gets closer to some level of perfection, often when you ask the model for something, not enough intent is conveyed to know what to do. And there are a few ways to resolve that intent. One is the simple thing of having the model just ask you, “I’m not sure how to do these parts based on your query. Could you clarify that?” I think the other could be maybe if there are five or six possible generations, “Given the uncertainty present in your query so far, why don’t we just actually show you all of those and let you pick them?”
I think even as a system gets closer to some level of perfection, often when you ask the model for something, not enough intent is conveyed to know what to do. And there are a few ways to resolve that intent. One is the simple thing of having the model just ask you, “I’m not sure how to do these parts based on your query. Could you clarify that?” I think the other could be maybe if there are five or six possible generations, “Given the uncertainty present in your query so far, why don’t we just actually show you all of those and let you pick them?”
Lex
How hard is it for the model to choose to talk back versus generally… It’s hard, how deal with the uncertainty. Do I choose to ask for more information to reduce the ambiguity?
How hard is it for the model to choose to talk back versus generally… It’s hard, how deal with the uncertainty. Do I choose to ask for more information to reduce the ambiguity?
Sualeh
So one of the things we do, it’s like a recent addition, is try to suggest files that you can add. And while you’re typing, one can guess what the uncertainty is and maybe suggest that maybe you’re writing your API and we can guess using the commits that you’ve made previously in the same file that the client and the server is super useful and there’s a hard technical problem of how do you resolve it across all commits? Which files are the most important given your current prompt? And we’re still initial version is ruled out and I’m sure we can make it much more accurate. It’s very experimental, but then the idea is we show you, do you just want to add this file, this file, this file also to tell the model to edit those files for you?
So one of the things we do, it’s like a recent addition, is try to suggest files that you can add. And while you’re typing, one can guess what the uncertainty is and maybe suggest that maybe you’re writing your API and we can guess using the commits that you’ve made previously in the same file that the client and the server is super useful and there’s a hard technical problem of how do you resolve it across all commits? Which files are the most important given your current prompt? And we’re still initial version is ruled out and I’m sure we can make it much more accurate. It’s very experimental, but then the idea is we show you, do you just want to add this file, this file, this file also to tell the model to edit those files for you?
Because if maybe you’re making the API, you should also edit the client and the server that is using the API and the other one resolving the API. So that would be cool as both there’s the phase where you’re writing a prompt and there’s… Before you even click, “Enter,” maybe we can help resolve some of the uncertainty.
AI agents
Lex
To what degree do you use agentic approaches? How useful are agents?
To what degree do you use agentic approaches? How useful are agents?
Arvid
We think agents are really, really cool.
We think agents are really, really cool.
Lex
Okay.
Okay.
Arvid
I think agents, it’s like resembles like a human… You can feel that you’re getting closer to AGI because you see a demo where it acts as a human would and it’s really, really cool. I think agents are not yet super useful for many things. I think we’re getting close to where they will actually be useful. And so I think there are certain types of tasks where having an agent would be really nice. I would love to have an agent. For example, if we have a bug where you sometimes can’t Command+C and Command+V inside our chat input box, and that’s a task that’s super well specified. I just want to say in two sentences, “This does not work, please fix it.” And then I would love to have an agent that just goes off, does it, and then a day later, I come back and I review the thing.
I think agents, it’s like resembles like a human… You can feel that you’re getting closer to AGI because you see a demo where it acts as a human would and it’s really, really cool. I think agents are not yet super useful for many things. I think we’re getting close to where they will actually be useful. And so I think there are certain types of tasks where having an agent would be really nice. I would love to have an agent. For example, if we have a bug where you sometimes can’t Command+C and Command+V inside our chat input box, and that’s a task that’s super well specified. I just want to say in two sentences, “This does not work, please fix it.” And then I would love to have an agent that just goes off, does it, and then a day later, I come back and I review the thing.
Lex
You mean it goes, finds the right file?
You mean it goes, finds the right file?
Arvid
Yeah, it finds the right files, it tries to reproduce the bug, it fixes the bug and then it verifies that it’s correct. And this could be a process that takes a long time. And so I think I would love to have that. And then I think a lot of programming, there is often this belief that agents will take over all of programming. I don’t think we think that that’s the case because a lot of programming, a lot of the value is in iterating, or you don’t actually want to specify something upfront because you don’t really know what you want until you have seen an initial version and then you want to iterate on that and then you provide more information.
Yeah, it finds the right files, it tries to reproduce the bug, it fixes the bug and then it verifies that it’s correct. And this could be a process that takes a long time. And so I think I would love to have that. And then I think a lot of programming, there is often this belief that agents will take over all of programming. I don’t think we think that that’s the case because a lot of programming, a lot of the value is in iterating, or you don’t actually want to specify something upfront because you don’t really know what you want until you have seen an initial version and then you want to iterate on that and then you provide more information.
And so for a lot of programming, I think you actually want a system that’s instant, that gives you an initial version instantly back and then you can iterate super, super quickly.
Lex
What about something like that recently came out, replica agent, that does also setting up the development environment and solving software packages, configuring everything, configuring the databases and actually deploying the app. Is that also in the set of things you dream about?
What about something like that recently came out, replica agent, that does also setting up the development environment and solving software packages, configuring everything, configuring the databases and actually deploying the app. Is that also in the set of things you dream about?
Arvid
I think so. I think that would be really cool. For certain types of programming, it would be really cool.
I think so. I think that would be really cool. For certain types of programming, it would be really cool.
Lex
Is that within scope of Cursor?
Is that within scope of Cursor?
Arvid
Yeah, we aren’t actively working on it right now, but it’s definitely… We want to make the programmer’s life easier and more fun and some things are just really tedious and you need to go through a bunch of steps and you want to delegate that to an agent. And then some things you can actually have an agent in the background while you’re working. Let’s say you have a PR that’s both backend and frontend, and you’re working in the frontend and then you can have a background agent that doesn’t work and figure out what you’re doing. And then when you get to the backend part of your PR, then you have some initial piece of code that you can iterate on. And so that would also be really cool.
Yeah, we aren’t actively working on it right now, but it’s definitely… We want to make the programmer’s life easier and more fun and some things are just really tedious and you need to go through a bunch of steps and you want to delegate that to an agent. And then some things you can actually have an agent in the background while you’re working. Let’s say you have a PR that’s both backend and frontend, and you’re working in the frontend and then you can have a background agent that doesn’t work and figure out what you’re doing. And then when you get to the backend part of your PR, then you have some initial piece of code that you can iterate on. And so that would also be really cool.
Lex
One of the things we already talked about is speed, but I wonder if we can just linger on that some more in the various places that the technical details involved in making this thing really fast. So every single aspect of Cursor, most aspects of Cursor feel really fast. Like I mentioned, the Apply is probably the slowest thing. And for me from… I’m sorry, the pain on Arvid’s face as I say that.
One of the things we already talked about is speed, but I wonder if we can just linger on that some more in the various places that the technical details involved in making this thing really fast. So every single aspect of Cursor, most aspects of Cursor feel really fast. Like I mentioned, the Apply is probably the slowest thing. And for me from… I’m sorry, the pain on Arvid’s face as I say that.
Arvid
I know. It’s a pain. It’s a pain that we’re feeling and we’re working on fixing it.
I know. It’s a pain. It’s a pain that we’re feeling and we’re working on fixing it.
Lex
Yeah, it says something that feels… I don’t know what it is, like one second or two seconds, that feels slow. That means that actually shows that everything else is just really, really fast. So is there some technical details about how to make some of these models, how to make the chat fast, how to make the diffs fast? Is there something that just jumps to mind?
Yeah, it says something that feels… I don’t know what it is, like one second or two seconds, that feels slow. That means that actually shows that everything else is just really, really fast. So is there some technical details about how to make some of these models, how to make the chat fast, how to make the diffs fast? Is there something that just jumps to mind?
Aman
Yeah. So we can go over a lot of the strategies that we use. One interesting thing is cache warming. And so what you can do is if as the user’s typing, you can have… You’re probably going to use some piece of context and you can know that before the user’s done typing. So as we discussed before, reusing the KV cache results in lower latency, lower costs, cross requests. So as the user starts typing, you can immediately warm the cache with let’s say the current file contents, and then when they press enter, there’s very few tokens it actually has to pre-fill and compute before starting the generation. This will significantly lower TTFT.
Yeah. So we can go over a lot of the strategies that we use. One interesting thing is cache warming. And so what you can do is if as the user’s typing, you can have… You’re probably going to use some piece of context and you can know that before the user’s done typing. So as we discussed before, reusing the KV cache results in lower latency, lower costs, cross requests. So as the user starts typing, you can immediately warm the cache with let’s say the current file contents, and then when they press enter, there’s very few tokens it actually has to pre-fill and compute before starting the generation. This will significantly lower TTFT.
Lex
Can you explain how KV cache works?
Can you explain how KV cache works?
Aman
Yeah, so the way transformers work.
Yeah, so the way transformers work.
Lex
I like it.
I like it.
Aman
One of the mechanisms that allow transformers to not just independently… The mechanism that allows transformers to not just independently look at each token, but see previous tokens are the keys and values to attention. And generally, the way attention works is you have at your current token some query, and then you’ve all the keys and values of all your previous tokens, which are some kind of representation that the model stores internally of all the previous tokens in the prompt. And by default, when you’re doing a chat, the model has to, for every single token, do this forward pass through the entire model. That’s a lot of matrix multiplies that happen, and that is really, really slow.
One of the mechanisms that allow transformers to not just independently… The mechanism that allows transformers to not just independently look at each token, but see previous tokens are the keys and values to attention. And generally, the way attention works is you have at your current token some query, and then you’ve all the keys and values of all your previous tokens, which are some kind of representation that the model stores internally of all the previous tokens in the prompt. And by default, when you’re doing a chat, the model has to, for every single token, do this forward pass through the entire model. That’s a lot of matrix multiplies that happen, and that is really, really slow.
Instead, if you have already done that and you stored the keys and values and you keep that in the GPU, then when I… Let’s say I have to sort it for the last N tokens. If I now want to compute the output token for the N+1nth token, I don’t need to pass those first N tokens through the entire model because I already have all those keys and values. And so you just need to do the forward pass through that last token. And then when you’re doing attention, you’re reusing those keys and values that have been computed, which is the only kind of sequential part or sequentially dependent part of the transformer.
Lex
Is there higher level caching of caching of the prompts or that kind of stuff that could help?
Is there higher level caching of caching of the prompts or that kind of stuff that could help?
Aman
I see. Yeah. There’s other types of caching you can do. One interesting thing that you can do for Cursor Tab is you can basically predict ahead as if the user would’ve accepted the suggestion and then trigger another request. And so then you’ve cached, you’ve done the speculative. It’s a mix of speculation and caching, right? Because speculating what would happen if they accepted it. And then you have this value that is cached this suggestion. And then when they press tab, the next one would be waiting for them immediately. It’s a clever heuristic/trick that uses a higher level caching and can give the… It feels fast despite there not actually being any changes in the model.
I see. Yeah. There’s other types of caching you can do. One interesting thing that you can do for Cursor Tab is you can basically predict ahead as if the user would’ve accepted the suggestion and then trigger another request. And so then you’ve cached, you’ve done the speculative. It’s a mix of speculation and caching, right? Because speculating what would happen if they accepted it. And then you have this value that is cached this suggestion. And then when they press tab, the next one would be waiting for them immediately. It’s a clever heuristic/trick that uses a higher level caching and can give the… It feels fast despite there not actually being any changes in the model.
Sualeh
And if you can make the KV cache smaller, one of the advantages you get is like maybe you can speculate even more. Maybe you can guess, “Here’s the 10 things that could be useful, predict the next 10,” and then it’s possible the user hits the one of the 10. It’s much higher chance than the user hits the exact one that you showed them. Maybe they type in other character and hit something else in the cache. So there’s all these tricks where… The general phenomena here is, I think it’s also super useful for RL is maybe a single sample from the model isn’t very good, but if you predict 10 different things, turns out that one of the 10 that’s right is the probability is much higher. There’s these passive K curves and part of RL, what RL does is you can exploit this passive K phenomena to make many different predictions.
And if you can make the KV cache smaller, one of the advantages you get is like maybe you can speculate even more. Maybe you can guess, “Here’s the 10 things that could be useful, predict the next 10,” and then it’s possible the user hits the one of the 10. It’s much higher chance than the user hits the exact one that you showed them. Maybe they type in other character and hit something else in the cache. So there’s all these tricks where… The general phenomena here is, I think it’s also super useful for RL is maybe a single sample from the model isn’t very good, but if you predict 10 different things, turns out that one of the 10 that’s right is the probability is much higher. There’s these passive K curves and part of RL, what RL does is you can exploit this passive K phenomena to make many different predictions.
And one way to think about this, the model knows internally has some uncertainty over which of the key things is correct or which of the key things does the human wants? When we RL our Cursor Tab model, one of the things we’re doing is we’re predicting which of the 100 different suggestions the model produces is more amenable for humans? Which of them do humans more like than other things? Maybe there’s something where the model can predict very far ahead versus a little bit, maybe somewhere in the middle. And then you can give a reward to the things that humans would like more and punish the things that it would like, and then train the model to output the suggestions that humans would like more. You have these RL loops that are very useful that exploit these passive K curves. Aman, maybe can go into even more detail.
Aman
Yeah, it is a little different than speed, but technically, you tie it back in because you can get away with the smaller model if you RL your smaller model and it gets the same performance as the bigger one.
Yeah, it is a little different than speed, but technically, you tie it back in because you can get away with the smaller model if you RL your smaller model and it gets the same performance as the bigger one.
Aman
… as the bigger one. So while I was mentioning stuff about KV, about reducing the size of your KV cache, there are other techniques there as well that are really helpful for speed. So kind of back in the day, all the way two years ago, people mainly use multi-head attention, and I think there’s been a migration towards more efficient attention schemes like group query or multi-query attention, and this is really helpful for then with larger batch sizes being able to generate the tokens much faster. The interesting thing here is this now has no effect on that time to first token pre-fill speed. The thing this matters for is now generating tokens. And why is that? Because when you’re generating tokens, instead of being bottlenecked by doing these super parallelizable matrix multiplies across all your tokens, you’re bottlenecked by how quickly… For a long context with large batch sizes, by how quickly you can read those cache, keys, and values.
… as the bigger one. So while I was mentioning stuff about KV, about reducing the size of your KV cache, there are other techniques there as well that are really helpful for speed. So kind of back in the day, all the way two years ago, people mainly use multi-head attention, and I think there’s been a migration towards more efficient attention schemes like group query or multi-query attention, and this is really helpful for then with larger batch sizes being able to generate the tokens much faster. The interesting thing here is this now has no effect on that time to first token pre-fill speed. The thing this matters for is now generating tokens. And why is that? Because when you’re generating tokens, instead of being bottlenecked by doing these super parallelizable matrix multiplies across all your tokens, you’re bottlenecked by how quickly… For a long context with large batch sizes, by how quickly you can read those cache, keys, and values.
And so then that’s memory bandwidth, and how can we make this faster? We can try to compress the size of these keys and values. So multi-query attention is the most aggressive of these. Where normally with multi-head attention, you have some number of, quote, unquote, “attention heads” and some number of query heads. Multi-query just preserves the query heads, gets rid of all the key value heads. So there’s only one kind of key value head, and there’s all the remaining query heads. With group query, you instead preserve all the query heads and then your keys and values are… There are fewer heads for the keys and values, but you’re not reducing it to just one. But anyways, the whole point here is you’re just reducing the size of your KV cache.
Arvid
And then there is MLA.
And then there is MLA.
Aman
Yeah, multi-latent. That’s a little more complicated. And the way that this works is it kind of turns the entirety of your keys and values across all your heads into this one latent vector that has then kind of expanded in for its time.
Yeah, multi-latent. That’s a little more complicated. And the way that this works is it kind of turns the entirety of your keys and values across all your heads into this one latent vector that has then kind of expanded in for its time.
Sualeh
But MLA is from this company called DeepSeek. It’s quite an interesting algorithm. Maybe the key idea is in both MQA and in other places, what you’re doing is you’re reducing the number of KV heads. And the advantage you get from that is there’s less of them, but maybe the theory is that you actually want a lot of different… You want each of the keys and values to actually be different. So one way to reduce the size is you keep one big shared vector for all the keys and values and then you have smaller vectors for every single token. So that you can store the only the smaller thing as some sort of low-rank reduction, and the low-rank reduction, well, that… At the end of the time, when you eventually want to compute the final thing, remember that your memory band, which means that you still have some compute left that you can use for these things. And if you can expand the latent vector back out and somehow this is far more efficient because you’re reducing… For example, maybe you’re reducing vec 32 or something like the size of the vector that you’re keeping.
But MLA is from this company called DeepSeek. It’s quite an interesting algorithm. Maybe the key idea is in both MQA and in other places, what you’re doing is you’re reducing the number of KV heads. And the advantage you get from that is there’s less of them, but maybe the theory is that you actually want a lot of different… You want each of the keys and values to actually be different. So one way to reduce the size is you keep one big shared vector for all the keys and values and then you have smaller vectors for every single token. So that you can store the only the smaller thing as some sort of low-rank reduction, and the low-rank reduction, well, that… At the end of the time, when you eventually want to compute the final thing, remember that your memory band, which means that you still have some compute left that you can use for these things. And if you can expand the latent vector back out and somehow this is far more efficient because you’re reducing… For example, maybe you’re reducing vec 32 or something like the size of the vector that you’re keeping.
Aman
Yeah, there’s perhaps some richness in having a separate set of keys and values and query that kind of pairwise match up versus compressing that all into one in that interaction at least.
Yeah, there’s perhaps some richness in having a separate set of keys and values and query that kind of pairwise match up versus compressing that all into one in that interaction at least.
Lex
Okay, and all of that is dealing with being memory bound. I mean, ultimately, how does that map to the user experience? Trying to get the-
Okay, and all of that is dealing with being memory bound. I mean, ultimately, how does that map to the user experience? Trying to get the-
Aman
Yeah. The two things that it maps to is you can now make your cache a lot larger because you’ve less space allocated for the KV cache. You can maybe cache a lot more aggressively in a lot more things, so you get more cache hits, which are helpful for reducing the time to first token for the reasons that were kind of described earlier. And then the second being, when you start doing inference with more and more requests and larger and larger batch sizes, you don’t see much of a slowdown as it’s generating the tokens at the speed of that.
Yeah. The two things that it maps to is you can now make your cache a lot larger because you’ve less space allocated for the KV cache. You can maybe cache a lot more aggressively in a lot more things, so you get more cache hits, which are helpful for reducing the time to first token for the reasons that were kind of described earlier. And then the second being, when you start doing inference with more and more requests and larger and larger batch sizes, you don’t see much of a slowdown as it’s generating the tokens at the speed of that.
Sualeh
Well, it also allows you to make your prompt bigger for certain-
Well, it also allows you to make your prompt bigger for certain-
Aman
Yeah. Yeah, so the size of your KV cache is both the size of all your prompts multiplied by the number of prompts being processed in parallel. So you could increase either those dimensions, right? The batch size or the size of your prompts without degrading the latency of generating tokens.
Yeah. Yeah, so the size of your KV cache is both the size of all your prompts multiplied by the number of prompts being processed in parallel. So you could increase either those dimensions, right? The batch size or the size of your prompts without degrading the latency of generating tokens.
Running code in background
Lex
Arvid, you wrote a blog post Shadow Workspace: Iterating on Code in the Background. So what’s going on [inaudible 01:04:59]?
Arvid, you wrote a blog post Shadow Workspace: Iterating on Code in the Background. So what’s going on [inaudible 01:04:59]?
Arvid
So to be clear, we want there to be a lot of stuff happening in the background, and we’re experimenting with a lot of things. Right now, we don’t have much stuff happening other than the cache warming or figuring out the right context that goes into your command key prompts for example. But the idea is if you can actually spend computation in the background, then you can help the user maybe at a slightly longer time horizon than just predicting the next few lines that you’re going to make. But actually in the next 10 minutes, what are you going to make? And by doing it in background, you can spend more computation doing that. And so the idea of the Shadow Workspace that we implemented, and we use it internally for experiments is that to actually get advantage of doing stuff in the background, you want some kind of feedback signal to give back to the model because otherwise you can get higher performance by just letting the model think for longer, and so o1 is a good example of that.
So to be clear, we want there to be a lot of stuff happening in the background, and we’re experimenting with a lot of things. Right now, we don’t have much stuff happening other than the cache warming or figuring out the right context that goes into your command key prompts for example. But the idea is if you can actually spend computation in the background, then you can help the user maybe at a slightly longer time horizon than just predicting the next few lines that you’re going to make. But actually in the next 10 minutes, what are you going to make? And by doing it in background, you can spend more computation doing that. And so the idea of the Shadow Workspace that we implemented, and we use it internally for experiments is that to actually get advantage of doing stuff in the background, you want some kind of feedback signal to give back to the model because otherwise you can get higher performance by just letting the model think for longer, and so o1 is a good example of that.
But another way you can improve performance is by letting the model iterate and get feedback. And so one very important piece of feedback when you’re a programmer is the language server, which is this thing, it exists for most different languages, and there’s a separate language server per language. And it can tell you, “You’re using the wrong type here,” and then gives you an error, or it can allow you to go to definition and sort of understands the structure of your code. So language servers are extensions developed by… There is a TypeScript language server developed by the TypeScript people, a Rust language server developed by the Rust people, and then they all interface over the language server protocol to VS Code. So that VS Code doesn’t need to have all of the different languages built into VS Code but rather you can use the existing compiler infrastructure.
Lex
For linting purposes, what-
For linting purposes, what-
Arvid
It’s for linting. It’s for going to definition and for seeing the right types that you’re using.
It’s for linting. It’s for going to definition and for seeing the right types that you’re using.
Lex
So it’s doing type checking also.
So it’s doing type checking also.
Arvid
Yes, type checking and going to references. And that’s like when you’re working in a big project, you kind of need that. If you don’t have that, it’s really hard to code in a big project.
Yes, type checking and going to references. And that’s like when you’re working in a big project, you kind of need that. If you don’t have that, it’s really hard to code in a big project.
Lex
Can you say, again, how that’s being used inside Cursor, the language server protocol communication thing?
Can you say, again, how that’s being used inside Cursor, the language server protocol communication thing?
Arvid
So it’s being used in Cursor to show to the programmer just like in VS Code, but then the idea is you want to show that same information to the models, the IM models, and you want to do that in a way that doesn’t affect the user because you want to do it in background. And so the idea behind the Shadow Workspace was, okay, one way we can do this is we spawn a separate window of Cursor that’s hidden, and so you can set this flag in it and like turn it’s hidden. There is a window but you don’t actually see it. And inside of this window, the AI agents can modify code however they want as long as they don’t save it because it’s still the same folder and then can get feedback from the linters and go to definition and iterate on their code.
So it’s being used in Cursor to show to the programmer just like in VS Code, but then the idea is you want to show that same information to the models, the IM models, and you want to do that in a way that doesn’t affect the user because you want to do it in background. And so the idea behind the Shadow Workspace was, okay, one way we can do this is we spawn a separate window of Cursor that’s hidden, and so you can set this flag in it and like turn it’s hidden. There is a window but you don’t actually see it. And inside of this window, the AI agents can modify code however they want as long as they don’t save it because it’s still the same folder and then can get feedback from the linters and go to definition and iterate on their code.
Lex
So literally run everything in the background as if… Right, maybe even run the code.
So literally run everything in the background as if… Right, maybe even run the code.
Arvid
So that’s the eventual version and that’s what you want. And a lot of the blog post is actually about how do you make that happen because it’s a little bit tricky. You want it to be on the user’s machine so that it exactly mirrors the user’s environment. And then on Linux, you can do this cool thing where you can actually mirror the file system and have the AI make changes to the files, and it thinks that it’s operating on the file level, but actually, that’s stored in memory and you can create this kernel-like extension to make it work. Whereas on Mac and Windows, it’s a little bit more difficult, but it’s a fun technical problem, so that’s why.
So that’s the eventual version and that’s what you want. And a lot of the blog post is actually about how do you make that happen because it’s a little bit tricky. You want it to be on the user’s machine so that it exactly mirrors the user’s environment. And then on Linux, you can do this cool thing where you can actually mirror the file system and have the AI make changes to the files, and it thinks that it’s operating on the file level, but actually, that’s stored in memory and you can create this kernel-like extension to make it work. Whereas on Mac and Windows, it’s a little bit more difficult, but it’s a fun technical problem, so that’s why.
Aman
One may be hacky but interesting idea that I like is holding a lock on saving. And so basically, you can then have the language model kind of hold the lock on saving to disk and then instead of you operating in the ground truth version of the files that are saved to disk, you actually are operating what was the Shadow Workspace before and these unsaved things that only exist in memory that you still get linter errors for, and you can code in. And then when you try to maybe run code, it’s just like there’s a small warning that there’s a lock, and then you kind of will take back the lock from the language server if you’re trying to do things concurrently or from the Shadow Workspace if you’re trying to do things concurrently.
One may be hacky but interesting idea that I like is holding a lock on saving. And so basically, you can then have the language model kind of hold the lock on saving to disk and then instead of you operating in the ground truth version of the files that are saved to disk, you actually are operating what was the Shadow Workspace before and these unsaved things that only exist in memory that you still get linter errors for, and you can code in. And then when you try to maybe run code, it’s just like there’s a small warning that there’s a lock, and then you kind of will take back the lock from the language server if you’re trying to do things concurrently or from the Shadow Workspace if you’re trying to do things concurrently.
Debugging
Lex
That’s such an exciting future by the way. It’s a bit of a tangent, but to allow a model to change files, it’s scary for people but it’s really cool, to be able to just let the agent do a set of tasks and you come back the next day and kind of observe like it’s a colleague or something like that.
That’s such an exciting future by the way. It’s a bit of a tangent, but to allow a model to change files, it’s scary for people but it’s really cool, to be able to just let the agent do a set of tasks and you come back the next day and kind of observe like it’s a colleague or something like that.
Aman
And I think there may be different versions of runability where, for the simple things where you’re doing things in the span of a few minutes on behalf of the user as they’re programming, it makes sense to make something work locally in their machine. I think for the more aggressive things where you’re making larger changes that take longer periods of time, you’ll probably want to do this in some sandbox remote environment and that’s another incredibly tricky problem of how do you exactly reproduce or mostly reproduce to the point of it being effectively equivalent for running code the user’s environment with this remote sandbox.
And I think there may be different versions of runability where, for the simple things where you’re doing things in the span of a few minutes on behalf of the user as they’re programming, it makes sense to make something work locally in their machine. I think for the more aggressive things where you’re making larger changes that take longer periods of time, you’ll probably want to do this in some sandbox remote environment and that’s another incredibly tricky problem of how do you exactly reproduce or mostly reproduce to the point of it being effectively equivalent for running code the user’s environment with this remote sandbox.
Sualeh
I’m curious what kind of agents you want for coding? Do you want them to find bugs? Do you want them to implement new features? What agents do you want?
I’m curious what kind of agents you want for coding? Do you want them to find bugs? Do you want them to implement new features? What agents do you want?
Lex
So by the way, when I think about agents, I don’t think just about coding. I think so for this particular podcast, there’s video editing and a lot of… If you look in Adobe, a lot… There’s code behind. It’s very poorly documented code, but you can interact with Premiere, for example, using code, and basically all the uploading, everything I do on YouTube, everything as you could probably imagine, I do all of that through code and including translation and overdubbing, all of this. So I envision all of those kinds of tasks. So automating many of the tasks that don’t have to do directly with the editing, so that. Okay, that’s what I was thinking about. But in terms of coding, I would be fundamentally thinking about bug finding, many levels of kind of bug finding and also bug finding like logical bugs, not logical like spiritual bugs or something. Ones like big directions of implementation, that kind of stuff.
So by the way, when I think about agents, I don’t think just about coding. I think so for this particular podcast, there’s video editing and a lot of… If you look in Adobe, a lot… There’s code behind. It’s very poorly documented code, but you can interact with Premiere, for example, using code, and basically all the uploading, everything I do on YouTube, everything as you could probably imagine, I do all of that through code and including translation and overdubbing, all of this. So I envision all of those kinds of tasks. So automating many of the tasks that don’t have to do directly with the editing, so that. Okay, that’s what I was thinking about. But in terms of coding, I would be fundamentally thinking about bug finding, many levels of kind of bug finding and also bug finding like logical bugs, not logical like spiritual bugs or something. Ones like big directions of implementation, that kind of stuff.
Sualeh
Magical [inaudible 01:11:39] and bug finding.
Magical [inaudible 01:11:39] and bug finding.
Aman
Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting that these models are so bad at bug finding when just naively prompted to find a bug. They’re incredibly poorly calibrated.
Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting that these models are so bad at bug finding when just naively prompted to find a bug. They’re incredibly poorly calibrated.
Arvid
Even the smartest models.
Even the smartest models.
Aman
Exactly, even o1.
Exactly, even o1.
Lex
How do you explain that? Is there a good intuition?
How do you explain that? Is there a good intuition?
Aman
I think these models are really strong reflection of the pre-training distribution, and I do think they generalize as the loss gets lower and lower, but I don’t think the loss and the scale is quite… The loss is low enough such that they’re really fully generalizing on code. The things that we use these things for, the frontier models that they’re quite good at, are really code generation and question answering. And these things exist in massive quantities in pre-training with all of the code in GitHub on the scale of many, many trillions of tokens and questions and answers on things like stack overflow and maybe GitHub issues.
I think these models are really strong reflection of the pre-training distribution, and I do think they generalize as the loss gets lower and lower, but I don’t think the loss and the scale is quite… The loss is low enough such that they’re really fully generalizing on code. The things that we use these things for, the frontier models that they’re quite good at, are really code generation and question answering. And these things exist in massive quantities in pre-training with all of the code in GitHub on the scale of many, many trillions of tokens and questions and answers on things like stack overflow and maybe GitHub issues.
And so when you try to push one of these things that really don’t exist very much online, like for example, the Cursor Tab objective of predicting the next edit given the edits done so far, the brittleness kind of shows. And then bug detection is another great example, where there aren’t really that many examples of actually detecting real bugs and then proposing fixes and the models just kind of really struggle at it. But I think it’s a question of transferring the model in the same way that you get this fantastic transfer from pre-trained models just on code in general to the Cursor Tab objective. You’ll see a very, very similar thing with generalized models that are really good at code to bug detection. It just takes a little bit of kind nudging in that direction.
Sualeh
Look to be clear, I think they sort of understand code really well. While they’re being pre-trained, the representation that’s being built up almost certainly like somewhere in the stream, the model knows that maybe there’s something sketchy going on. It sort of has some sketchiness but actually eliciting the sketchiness to actually… Part of it is that humans are really calibrated on which bugs are really important. It’s not just actually saying there’s something sketchy. It’s like it’s this sketchy trivial, it’s this sketchy like you’re going to take the server down.
Look to be clear, I think they sort of understand code really well. While they’re being pre-trained, the representation that’s being built up almost certainly like somewhere in the stream, the model knows that maybe there’s something sketchy going on. It sort of has some sketchiness but actually eliciting the sketchiness to actually… Part of it is that humans are really calibrated on which bugs are really important. It’s not just actually saying there’s something sketchy. It’s like it’s this sketchy trivial, it’s this sketchy like you’re going to take the server down.
Part of it is maybe the cultural knowledge of why is a staff engineer is good because they know that three years ago someone wrote a really sketchy piece of code that took the server down and as opposed to maybe you just… This thing is an experiment. So a few bugs are fine, you’re just trying to experiment and get the feel of the thing. And so if the model gets really annoying when you’re writing an experiment, that’s really bad, but if you’re writing something for super production, you’re writing a database. You’re writing code in Postgres or Linux or whatever. You’re Linus Torvalds. It’s sort of unacceptable to have even an edge case and just having the calibration of how paranoid is the user and like-
Aman
But even then if you’re putting in a maximum paranoia, it still just doesn’t quite get it.
But even then if you’re putting in a maximum paranoia, it still just doesn’t quite get it.
Sualeh
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Dangerous code
Lex
I mean, but this is hard for humans too to understand which line of code is important, which is not. I think one of your principles on a website says if a code can do a lot of damage, one should add a comment that say, “This line of code is dangerous.”
I mean, but this is hard for humans too to understand which line of code is important, which is not. I think one of your principles on a website says if a code can do a lot of damage, one should add a comment that say, “This line of code is dangerous.”
Arvid
And all caps, repeated 10 times.
And all caps, repeated 10 times.
Lex
No, you say for every single line of code inside the function you have to… And that’s quite profound, that says something about human beings because the engineers move on, even the same person might just forget how it can sink the Titanic a single function. You might not intuit that quite clearly by looking at the single piece of code.
No, you say for every single line of code inside the function you have to… And that’s quite profound, that says something about human beings because the engineers move on, even the same person might just forget how it can sink the Titanic a single function. You might not intuit that quite clearly by looking at the single piece of code.
Arvid
Yeah. And I think that one is partially also for today’s AI models where if you actually write dangerous, dangerous, dangerous in every single line, the models will pay more attention to that and will be more likely to find bugs in that region.
Yeah. And I think that one is partially also for today’s AI models where if you actually write dangerous, dangerous, dangerous in every single line, the models will pay more attention to that and will be more likely to find bugs in that region.
Lex
That’s actually just straight up a really good practice of labeling code of how much damages can do.
That’s actually just straight up a really good practice of labeling code of how much damages can do.
Arvid
Yeah. I mean, it’s controversial. Some people think it’s ugly. Sualeh does not like it.
Yeah. I mean, it’s controversial. Some people think it’s ugly. Sualeh does not like it.
Sualeh
Well, I think it’s… In fact, I actually think this is one of the things I learned from Arvid is sort of aesthetically I don’t like it, but I think there’s certainly something where it’s useful for the models and humans just forget a lot, and it’s really easy to make a small mistake and cause… Just bring down the server. Of course, we test a lot and whatever, but there’s always these things that you have to be very careful.
Well, I think it’s… In fact, I actually think this is one of the things I learned from Arvid is sort of aesthetically I don’t like it, but I think there’s certainly something where it’s useful for the models and humans just forget a lot, and it’s really easy to make a small mistake and cause… Just bring down the server. Of course, we test a lot and whatever, but there’s always these things that you have to be very careful.
Aman
Yeah, like with just normal docstrings, I think people will often just skim it when making a change and think, “Oh, I know how to do this,” and you really need to point it out to them so that doesn’t slip through.
Yeah, like with just normal docstrings, I think people will often just skim it when making a change and think, “Oh, I know how to do this,” and you really need to point it out to them so that doesn’t slip through.
Lex
Yeah. You have to be reminded that you could do a lot of damage that’s like we don’t really think about that. You think about, “Okay, how do I figure out how this works so I can improve it?” You don’t think about the other direction that it could-
Yeah. You have to be reminded that you could do a lot of damage that’s like we don’t really think about that. You think about, “Okay, how do I figure out how this works so I can improve it?” You don’t think about the other direction that it could-
Arvid
Until we have formal verification for everything, then you can do whatever you want and you know for certain that you have not introduced a bug if the proof pass.
Until we have formal verification for everything, then you can do whatever you want and you know for certain that you have not introduced a bug if the proof pass.
Aman
Well, concretely, what do you think that future would look like?
Well, concretely, what do you think that future would look like?
Arvid
I think people will just not write to tests anymore, and the model will suggest… You write a function, the model will suggest a spec, and you review the spec. And in the meantime, smart reasoning model computes a proof that the implementation follows the spec, and I think that happens for most functions.
I think people will just not write to tests anymore, and the model will suggest… You write a function, the model will suggest a spec, and you review the spec. And in the meantime, smart reasoning model computes a proof that the implementation follows the spec, and I think that happens for most functions.
Michael
Do you think this gets at a little bit some of the stuff you were talking about earlier with the difficulty of specifying intent for what you want with software, where sometimes it might be because the intent is really hard to specify, it’s also then going to be really hard to prove that it’s actually matching whatever your intent is?
Do you think this gets at a little bit some of the stuff you were talking about earlier with the difficulty of specifying intent for what you want with software, where sometimes it might be because the intent is really hard to specify, it’s also then going to be really hard to prove that it’s actually matching whatever your intent is?
Arvid
You think that spec is hard to generate?
You think that spec is hard to generate?
Michael
Yeah, or just for a given spec, maybe you can… I think there is a question of, can you actually do the formal verification? Is that possible? I think that there’s more to dig into there, but then also-
Yeah, or just for a given spec, maybe you can… I think there is a question of, can you actually do the formal verification? Is that possible? I think that there’s more to dig into there, but then also-
Arvid
Even if you have the spec?
Even if you have the spec?
Sualeh
If you have the spec-
If you have the spec-
Michael
Even if you have the spec, is the spec written in natural language? Or is it-
Even if you have the spec, is the spec written in natural language? Or is it-
Arvid
No, [inaudible 01:18:21] the spec would be formal.
No, [inaudible 01:18:21] the spec would be formal.
Aman
But how easier would that be [inaudible 01:18:26]?
But how easier would that be [inaudible 01:18:26]?
Michael
Okay. So then I think that you care about things that are not going to be easily well specified in the spec language.
Okay. So then I think that you care about things that are not going to be easily well specified in the spec language.
Arvid
I see, I see.
I see, I see.
Michael
Would be maybe an argument against formal verification is all you need.
Would be maybe an argument against formal verification is all you need.
Aman
The worry is there’s this massive document-
The worry is there’s this massive document-
Michael
[inaudible 01:18:39] replacing something like unit tests, sure.
[inaudible 01:18:39] replacing something like unit tests, sure.
Arvid
Yeah, yeah. I think you can probably also evolve the spec languages to capture some of the things that they don’t really capture right now. I don’t know. I think it’s very exciting.
Yeah, yeah. I think you can probably also evolve the spec languages to capture some of the things that they don’t really capture right now. I don’t know. I think it’s very exciting.
Lex
And you’re speaking not just about single functions, you’re speaking about entire code bases.
And you’re speaking not just about single functions, you’re speaking about entire code bases.
Arvid
I think entire code bases is harder, but that is what I would love to have and I think it should be possible. And because you can even… There’s a lot of work recently where you can prove formally verified down to the hardware, so through the… You formally verify the C code and then you formally verify through the GCC compiler and then through the Verilog down to the hardware. And that’s incredibly big system, but it actually works. And I think big code bases are sort of similar in that and they’re like multi-layered system. And if you can decompose it and formally verify each part, then I think it should be possible. I think this specification problem is a real problem, but…
I think entire code bases is harder, but that is what I would love to have and I think it should be possible. And because you can even… There’s a lot of work recently where you can prove formally verified down to the hardware, so through the… You formally verify the C code and then you formally verify through the GCC compiler and then through the Verilog down to the hardware. And that’s incredibly big system, but it actually works. And I think big code bases are sort of similar in that and they’re like multi-layered system. And if you can decompose it and formally verify each part, then I think it should be possible. I think this specification problem is a real problem, but…
Aman
How do you handle side effects or how do you handle, I guess, external dependencies like calling the Stripe API?
How do you handle side effects or how do you handle, I guess, external dependencies like calling the Stripe API?
Sualeh
Maybe Stripe would write a spec for their API.
Maybe Stripe would write a spec for their API.
Aman
But you can’t do this for everything. Can you do this for everything you use? How do you do it for… If there’s a language… Maybe people will use language models as primitives in the programs they write, and there’s a dependence on it and how do you now include that?
But you can’t do this for everything. Can you do this for everything you use? How do you do it for… If there’s a language… Maybe people will use language models as primitives in the programs they write, and there’s a dependence on it and how do you now include that?
Arvid
I think you might be able to prove that still.
I think you might be able to prove that still.
Aman
Prove what about language models?
Prove what about language models?
Arvid
I think it feels possible that you could actually prove that a language model is aligned for example, or you can prove that it actually gives the right answer.
I think it feels possible that you could actually prove that a language model is aligned for example, or you can prove that it actually gives the right answer.
Sualeh
That’s the dream.
That’s the dream.
Lex
Yeah, that is… I mean, if it’s possible. That’s your I have a dream speech. If it’s possible, that will certainly help with making sure your code doesn’t have bugs and making sure AI doesn’t destroy all human civilization. So the full spectrum of AI safety to just bug finding. So you said the models struggle with bug finding. What’s the hope?
Yeah, that is… I mean, if it’s possible. That’s your I have a dream speech. If it’s possible, that will certainly help with making sure your code doesn’t have bugs and making sure AI doesn’t destroy all human civilization. So the full spectrum of AI safety to just bug finding. So you said the models struggle with bug finding. What’s the hope?
Sualeh
My hope initially is, and I can let Michael chime in too, but it was like it should first help with the stupid bugs. It should query quickly, catch the stupid bugs off by one error is like… Sometimes you write something in a comment and do the other way. It’s very common. I do this. I write less than in a comment and I maybe write the greater than or something like that. And the model is like, “Yeah, you looks sketchy. You sure you want to do that?” But eventually, it should be able to catch harder bugs too.
My hope initially is, and I can let Michael chime in too, but it was like it should first help with the stupid bugs. It should query quickly, catch the stupid bugs off by one error is like… Sometimes you write something in a comment and do the other way. It’s very common. I do this. I write less than in a comment and I maybe write the greater than or something like that. And the model is like, “Yeah, you looks sketchy. You sure you want to do that?” But eventually, it should be able to catch harder bugs too.
Michael
Yeah. And I think that it’s also important to note that this is… Having good bug, finding models feels necessary to get to the highest reaches of having AI do more and more programming for you, where you’re going to… If AI is building more and more of the system for you, you need to not just generate but also verify. And without that, some of the problems that we’ve talked about before with programming, with these models will just become untenable. So it’s not just for humans like you write a bug, I write a bug, find the bug for me, but it’s also being able to verify the AI’s code and check it is really important.
Yeah. And I think that it’s also important to note that this is… Having good bug, finding models feels necessary to get to the highest reaches of having AI do more and more programming for you, where you’re going to… If AI is building more and more of the system for you, you need to not just generate but also verify. And without that, some of the problems that we’ve talked about before with programming, with these models will just become untenable. So it’s not just for humans like you write a bug, I write a bug, find the bug for me, but it’s also being able to verify the AI’s code and check it is really important.
Arvid
Yeah. And then how do you actually do this? We have had a lot of contentious dinner discussions of how do you actually train a bug model, but one very popular idea is it’s kind of potentially easy to introduce a bug than actually finding the bug. And so you can train a model to introduce bugs in existing code and then you can train a reverse bug model then that can find bugs using this synthetic data. So that’s one example, but there are lots of ideas for how to [inaudible 01:22:22].
Yeah. And then how do you actually do this? We have had a lot of contentious dinner discussions of how do you actually train a bug model, but one very popular idea is it’s kind of potentially easy to introduce a bug than actually finding the bug. And so you can train a model to introduce bugs in existing code and then you can train a reverse bug model then that can find bugs using this synthetic data. So that’s one example, but there are lots of ideas for how to [inaudible 01:22:22].
Michael
You can also do a bunch of work not even at the model level of taking the biggest models and then maybe giving them access to a lot of information that’s not just the code. It’s kind of a hard problem to stare at a file and be like, “Where’s the bug?” And that’s hard for humans often, right? And so often you have to run the code and being able to see things like traces and step through a debugger, there’s another whole other direction where it tends toward that.
You can also do a bunch of work not even at the model level of taking the biggest models and then maybe giving them access to a lot of information that’s not just the code. It’s kind of a hard problem to stare at a file and be like, “Where’s the bug?” And that’s hard for humans often, right? And so often you have to run the code and being able to see things like traces and step through a debugger, there’s another whole other direction where it tends toward that.
It could also be that there are two different product form factors here. It could be that you have a really specialty model that’s quite fast that’s running in the background and trying to spot bugs. And it might be that sometimes sort of to Arvid’s earlier example about some nefarious input box bug. It might be that sometimes you want to like… You know there’s a bug, you’re not just checking hypothesis free, you’re like, “This is a problem, I really want to solve it,” and you zap that with tons and tons and tons of compute, and you’re willing to put in $50 to solve that bug or something even more.
Lex
Have you thought about integrating money into this whole thing? I would pay probably a large amount of money if you found a bug or even generated code that I really appreciated. I had a moment a few days ago when I started using Cursor where it generated perfect three functions for interacting with the YouTube API to update captions for localization in different languages. The API documentation is not very good and the code across, if I… I googled it for a while. I couldn’t find exactly, there’s a lot of confusing information, and Cursor generated perfectly.
Have you thought about integrating money into this whole thing? I would pay probably a large amount of money if you found a bug or even generated code that I really appreciated. I had a moment a few days ago when I started using Cursor where it generated perfect three functions for interacting with the YouTube API to update captions for localization in different languages. The API documentation is not very good and the code across, if I… I googled it for a while. I couldn’t find exactly, there’s a lot of confusing information, and Cursor generated perfectly.
I just sit back, I read the code, I was like, “This is correct. I tested it, it’s correct.” I was like, “I want to tip.” I want a button that goes, “Here’s $5.” One that’s really good just to support the company and support what the interface is. And the other is that probably sends a strong signal like good job. So there’s this much stronger signal than just accepting the code. You just actually send a strong good job. That and for bug finding, obviously, there’s a lot of people that would pay a huge amount of money for a bug bounty thing, right? You guys think about that?
Arvid
Yeah, it’s a controversial idea inside the company. I think it sort of depends on how much you believe in humanity almost. I think it would be really cool if you spend nothing to try to find a bug. And if it doesn’t find a bug, you spend $0. And then if it does find a bug and you click accept, then it also shows in parentheses like $1. And so you spend $1 to accept the bug. And then of course, there’s a worry like okay, “We spent a lot of computation, maybe people will just copy paste.” I think that’s a worry. Then there is also the worry that introducing money into the product makes it… It doesn’t feel as fun anymore. You have to think about money. And all you want to think about is the code, and so maybe it actually makes more sense to separate it out, and you pay some fee every month, and then you get all of these things for free.
Yeah, it’s a controversial idea inside the company. I think it sort of depends on how much you believe in humanity almost. I think it would be really cool if you spend nothing to try to find a bug. And if it doesn’t find a bug, you spend $0. And then if it does find a bug and you click accept, then it also shows in parentheses like $1. And so you spend $1 to accept the bug. And then of course, there’s a worry like okay, “We spent a lot of computation, maybe people will just copy paste.” I think that’s a worry. Then there is also the worry that introducing money into the product makes it… It doesn’t feel as fun anymore. You have to think about money. And all you want to think about is the code, and so maybe it actually makes more sense to separate it out, and you pay some fee every month, and then you get all of these things for free.
Lex
But there could be a tipping component which is not like it cost this-
But there could be a tipping component which is not like it cost this-
Arvid
Yes, but it still has that dollar symbol. I think it’s fine, but I also see the point where maybe you don’t want to introduce it.
Yes, but it still has that dollar symbol. I think it’s fine, but I also see the point where maybe you don’t want to introduce it.
Aman
Yeah, I was going to say the moment that feels like people do this is when they share it. When they have this fantastic example, they just share it with their friends.
Yeah, I was going to say the moment that feels like people do this is when they share it. When they have this fantastic example, they just share it with their friends.
Michael
There is also a potential world where there’s a technical solution to this like honor system problem too, where if we can get to a place where we understand the output of the system more, I mean, to the stuff we were talking about with error checking with the LSP and then also running the code. But if you could get to a place where you could actually somehow verify, “Oh, I have fixed the bug,” maybe then the bounty system doesn’t need to rely on the honor system too.
There is also a potential world where there’s a technical solution to this like honor system problem too, where if we can get to a place where we understand the output of the system more, I mean, to the stuff we were talking about with error checking with the LSP and then also running the code. But if you could get to a place where you could actually somehow verify, “Oh, I have fixed the bug,” maybe then the bounty system doesn’t need to rely on the honor system too.
Branching file systems
Lex
How much interaction is there between the terminal and the code? How much information is gained from if you run the code in the terminal? Can you do a loop where it runs the code and suggests how to change the code? If the code and runtime gets an error? Is right now there’s separate worlds completely? I know you can do control K inside the terminal to help you write the code.
How much interaction is there between the terminal and the code? How much information is gained from if you run the code in the terminal? Can you do a loop where it runs the code and suggests how to change the code? If the code and runtime gets an error? Is right now there’s separate worlds completely? I know you can do control K inside the terminal to help you write the code.
Aman
You can use terminal context as well inside of check command K kind of everything. We don’t have the looping part yet, so we suspect something like this could make a lot of sense. There’s a question of whether it happens in the foreground too or if it happens in the background like what we’ve been discussing.
You can use terminal context as well inside of check command K kind of everything. We don’t have the looping part yet, so we suspect something like this could make a lot of sense. There’s a question of whether it happens in the foreground too or if it happens in the background like what we’ve been discussing.
Lex
Sure. The background’s pretty cool. I could be running the code in different ways. Plus there’s a database side to this, which how do you protect it from not modifying the database, but okay.
Sure. The background’s pretty cool. I could be running the code in different ways. Plus there’s a database side to this, which how do you protect it from not modifying the database, but okay.
Sualeh
I mean, there’s certainly cool solutions there. There’s this new API that is being developed for… It’s not in AWS, but it certainly… I think it’s in PlanetScale. I don’t know if PlanetScale was the first one to you add it. It’s this ability sort of add branches to a database, which is like if you’re working on a feature and you want to test against the broad database, but you don’t actually want to test against the broad database, you could sort of add a branch to the database. And the way they do that is they add a branch to the write-ahead log. And there’s obviously a lot of technical complexity in doing it correctly. I guess database companies need new things to do. They have good databases now. And I think turbopuffer, which is one of the databases we use, is going to add maybe branching to the write-ahead log. So maybe the AI agents will use branching, they’ll test against some branch, and it’s sort of going to be a requirement for the database to support branching or something.
I mean, there’s certainly cool solutions there. There’s this new API that is being developed for… It’s not in AWS, but it certainly… I think it’s in PlanetScale. I don’t know if PlanetScale was the first one to you add it. It’s this ability sort of add branches to a database, which is like if you’re working on a feature and you want to test against the broad database, but you don’t actually want to test against the broad database, you could sort of add a branch to the database. And the way they do that is they add a branch to the write-ahead log. And there’s obviously a lot of technical complexity in doing it correctly. I guess database companies need new things to do. They have good databases now. And I think turbopuffer, which is one of the databases we use, is going to add maybe branching to the write-ahead log. So maybe the AI agents will use branching, they’ll test against some branch, and it’s sort of going to be a requirement for the database to support branching or something.
Aman
It would be really interesting if you could branch a file system, right?
It would be really interesting if you could branch a file system, right?
Sualeh
Yeah. I feel like everything needs branching. It’s like-
Yeah. I feel like everything needs branching. It’s like-
Aman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex
Yeah. The problem with the multiverse, right? If you branch on everything that’s like a lot.
Yeah. The problem with the multiverse, right? If you branch on everything that’s like a lot.
Sualeh
There’s obviously these super clever algorithms to make sure that you don’t actually use a lot of space or CPU or whatever.
There’s obviously these super clever algorithms to make sure that you don’t actually use a lot of space or CPU or whatever.
Lex
Okay. This is a good place to ask about infrastructure. So you guys mostly use AWS, what are some interesting details? What are some interesting challenges? Why’d you choose AWS? Why is AWS still winning? Hashtag.
Okay. This is a good place to ask about infrastructure. So you guys mostly use AWS, what are some interesting details? What are some interesting challenges? Why’d you choose AWS? Why is AWS still winning? Hashtag.
Arvid
AWS is just really, really good. It is really good. Whenever you use an AWS product, you just know that it’s going to work. It might be absolute hell to go through the steps to set it up.
AWS is just really, really good. It is really good. Whenever you use an AWS product, you just know that it’s going to work. It might be absolute hell to go through the steps to set it up.
Lex
Why is the interface so horrible?
Why is the interface so horrible?
Sualeh
Because it’s-
Because it’s-
Arvid
It’s just so good. It doesn’t need to-
It’s just so good. It doesn’t need to-
Lex
It’s the nature of winning.
It’s the nature of winning.
Sualeh
I think it’s exactly. It’s just nature they’re winning.
I think it’s exactly. It’s just nature they’re winning.
Arvid
Yeah, yeah. But AWS we can always trust, it will always work. And if there is a problem, it’s probably your problem. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. But AWS we can always trust, it will always work. And if there is a problem, it’s probably your problem. Yeah.
Scaling challenges
Lex
Okay. Is there some interesting challenges to… You guys are pretty new startup to scaling, to so many people and-
Okay. Is there some interesting challenges to… You guys are pretty new startup to scaling, to so many people and-
Michael
Yeah, I think that it has been an interesting journey adding each extra zero to the request per second. You run into all of these with the general components you’re using for caching and databases, run into issues as you make things bigger and bigger, and now we’re at the scale where we get into overflows on our tables and things like that. And then also there have been some custom systems that we’ve built. For instance, our retrieval system for computing, a semantic index of your code base and answering questions about a code base that have, continually, I feel like been one of the trickier things to scale.
Yeah, I think that it has been an interesting journey adding each extra zero to the request per second. You run into all of these with the general components you’re using for caching and databases, run into issues as you make things bigger and bigger, and now we’re at the scale where we get into overflows on our tables and things like that. And then also there have been some custom systems that we’ve built. For instance, our retrieval system for computing, a semantic index of your code base and answering questions about a code base that have, continually, I feel like been one of the trickier things to scale.
Michael
… that have continually, I feel like, been one of the trickier things to scale.
… that have continually, I feel like, been one of the trickier things to scale.
Sualeh
I have a few friends who are super senior engineers and one of their lines is, it’s very hard to predict where systems will break when you scale them. You can try to predict in advance, but there’s always something weird that’s going to happen when you add these extras here. You thought through everything, which you didn’t actually think through everything. But I think for that particular system, we’ve… So for concrete details, the thing we do is obviously we upload when… We chunk up all of your code, and then we send up the code for embedding and we embed the code. And then we store the embeddings in a database, but we don’t actually store any of the code. And then there’s reasons around making sure that we don’t introduce client bugs because we’re very, very paranoid about client bugs. We store much of the details on the server. Everything is encrypted.
I have a few friends who are super senior engineers and one of their lines is, it’s very hard to predict where systems will break when you scale them. You can try to predict in advance, but there’s always something weird that’s going to happen when you add these extras here. You thought through everything, which you didn’t actually think through everything. But I think for that particular system, we’ve… So for concrete details, the thing we do is obviously we upload when… We chunk up all of your code, and then we send up the code for embedding and we embed the code. And then we store the embeddings in a database, but we don’t actually store any of the code. And then there’s reasons around making sure that we don’t introduce client bugs because we’re very, very paranoid about client bugs. We store much of the details on the server. Everything is encrypted.
So one of the technical challenges is always making sure that the local index, the local code base state is the same as the state that is on the server. The way, technically, we ended up doing that is, for every single file you can keep this hash, and then for every folder you can keep a hash, which is the hash of all of its children. You can recursively do that until the top. Why do something complicated? One thing you could do is you could keep a hash for every file and every minute, you could try to download the hashes that are on the server, figure out what are the files that don’t exist on the server. Maybe you just created a new file, maybe you just deleted a file, maybe you checked out a new branch, and try to reconcile the state between the client and the server.
But that introduces absolutely ginormous network overhead both on the client side. Nobody really wants us to hammer their WiFi all the time if you’re using Cursor. But also, it would introduce ginormous overhead on the database. It would be reading these tens of terabytes database, approaching 20 terabytes or something data base every second. That’s just crazy. You definitely don’t want to do that. So what you do, you just try to reconcile the single hash, which is at the root of the project. And then if something mismatches, then you go, you find where all the things disagree. Maybe you look at the children and see if the hashes match. If the hashes don’t match, go look at their children and so on. But you only do that in the scenario where things don’t match. For most people, most of the time, the hashes match.
Lex
So it’s like a hierarchical reconciliation-
So it’s like a hierarchical reconciliation-
Sualeh
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex
… of hashes-
… of hashes-
Sualeh
Something like that.
Something like that.
Aman
Yeah, it’s called a Merkle tree.
Yeah, it’s called a Merkle tree.
Lex
Yeah, Merkle. Yeah. Yeah, this is cool to see that you have to think through all these problems.
Yeah, Merkle. Yeah. Yeah, this is cool to see that you have to think through all these problems.
Sualeh
The reason it’s gotten hard is just because the number of people using it and some of your customers have really, really large code bases to the point where… We originally reordered dark code base, which is big, but it’s just not the size of some company that’s been there for 20 years and has a ginormous number of files and you want to scale that across programmers. There’s all these details where building the simple thing is easy, but scaling it to a lot of people, a lot of companies is obviously a difficult problem, which is independent of, actually… so that there’s part of this scaling. Our current solution is also coming up with new ideas that, obviously, we’re working on, but then scaling all of that in the last few weeks, months.
The reason it’s gotten hard is just because the number of people using it and some of your customers have really, really large code bases to the point where… We originally reordered dark code base, which is big, but it’s just not the size of some company that’s been there for 20 years and has a ginormous number of files and you want to scale that across programmers. There’s all these details where building the simple thing is easy, but scaling it to a lot of people, a lot of companies is obviously a difficult problem, which is independent of, actually… so that there’s part of this scaling. Our current solution is also coming up with new ideas that, obviously, we’re working on, but then scaling all of that in the last few weeks, months.
Aman
Yeah. There are a lot of clever things, additional things that go into this indexing system. For example, the bottleneck in terms of costs is not soaring things in the vector database or the database. It’s actually embedding the code. You don’t want to re-embed the code base for every single person in a company that is using the same exact code except for maybe they’re a different branch with a few different files or they’ve made a few local changes. Because again, embeddings are the bottleneck, you can do this one clever trick and not have to worry about the complexity of dealing with branches and the other databases where you just have some cash on the actual vectors computed from the hash of a given chunk. So this means that when the nth person at a company goes and embed their code base, it’s really, really fast. You do all this without actually storing any code on our servers at all. No code data is stored. We just store the vectors in the vector database and the vector cache.
Yeah. There are a lot of clever things, additional things that go into this indexing system. For example, the bottleneck in terms of costs is not soaring things in the vector database or the database. It’s actually embedding the code. You don’t want to re-embed the code base for every single person in a company that is using the same exact code except for maybe they’re a different branch with a few different files or they’ve made a few local changes. Because again, embeddings are the bottleneck, you can do this one clever trick and not have to worry about the complexity of dealing with branches and the other databases where you just have some cash on the actual vectors computed from the hash of a given chunk. So this means that when the nth person at a company goes and embed their code base, it’s really, really fast. You do all this without actually storing any code on our servers at all. No code data is stored. We just store the vectors in the vector database and the vector cache.
Lex
What’s the biggest gains at this time you get from indexing the code base? Just out of curiosity, what benefit do users have? It seems like longer term, there’ll be more and more benefit, but in the short term, just asking questions of the code base, what’s the usefulness of that?
What’s the biggest gains at this time you get from indexing the code base? Just out of curiosity, what benefit do users have? It seems like longer term, there’ll be more and more benefit, but in the short term, just asking questions of the code base, what’s the usefulness of that?
Arvid
I think the most obvious one is just, you want to find out where something is happening in your large code base, and you have a fuzzy memory of, “Okay, I want to find the place where we do X,” but you don’t exactly know what to search for in a normal text search. So you ask a chat, you hit command enter to ask with the code base chat. And then very often, it finds the right place that you were thinking of.
I think the most obvious one is just, you want to find out where something is happening in your large code base, and you have a fuzzy memory of, “Okay, I want to find the place where we do X,” but you don’t exactly know what to search for in a normal text search. So you ask a chat, you hit command enter to ask with the code base chat. And then very often, it finds the right place that you were thinking of.
Aman
Like you mentioned, in the future, I think there’s only going to get more and more powerful, where we’re working a lot on improving the quality of our retrieval. I think the ceiling for that is really, really much higher than people give the credit for.
Like you mentioned, in the future, I think there’s only going to get more and more powerful, where we’re working a lot on improving the quality of our retrieval. I think the ceiling for that is really, really much higher than people give the credit for.
Lex
One question that’s good to ask here, have you considered and why haven’t you much done local stuff to where you can do the… It seems like everything was just discussed as exceptionally difficult to do. To go to the cloud, you have to think about all these things with the caching and the large code base where a large number of programmers are using the same code base. You have to figure out the puzzle of that. A lot of it, most software just does this heavy computational stuff locally. So have you considered doing embeddings locally?
One question that’s good to ask here, have you considered and why haven’t you much done local stuff to where you can do the… It seems like everything was just discussed as exceptionally difficult to do. To go to the cloud, you have to think about all these things with the caching and the large code base where a large number of programmers are using the same code base. You have to figure out the puzzle of that. A lot of it, most software just does this heavy computational stuff locally. So have you considered doing embeddings locally?
Arvid
Yeah, we thought about it, and I think it would be cool to do it locally. I think it’s just really hard. One thing to keep in mind is that some of our users use the latest MacBook Pro, but most of our users, more than 80% of our users are in Windows machines, which many of them are not very powerful. So local models really only works on the latest computers, and it’s also a big overhead to build that in. So even if we would like to do that, it’s currently not something that we are able to focus on. I think there are some people that do that, and I think that’s great, but especially as models get bigger and bigger and you want to do fancier things with bigger models, it becomes even harder to do it locally.
Yeah, we thought about it, and I think it would be cool to do it locally. I think it’s just really hard. One thing to keep in mind is that some of our users use the latest MacBook Pro, but most of our users, more than 80% of our users are in Windows machines, which many of them are not very powerful. So local models really only works on the latest computers, and it’s also a big overhead to build that in. So even if we would like to do that, it’s currently not something that we are able to focus on. I think there are some people that do that, and I think that’s great, but especially as models get bigger and bigger and you want to do fancier things with bigger models, it becomes even harder to do it locally.
Sualeh
Yeah. It’s not a problem of weaker computers. It’s just that for example, if you’re some big company, you have big company code base. It’s just really hard to process big company code base even on the beefiest MacBook Pros. It’s not even a matter of if you’re just a student or something. I think if you’re the best programmer at a big company, you’re still going to have a horrible experience. If you do everything locally where you could do it and scrape by, but again, it wouldn’t be fun anymore.
Yeah. It’s not a problem of weaker computers. It’s just that for example, if you’re some big company, you have big company code base. It’s just really hard to process big company code base even on the beefiest MacBook Pros. It’s not even a matter of if you’re just a student or something. I think if you’re the best programmer at a big company, you’re still going to have a horrible experience. If you do everything locally where you could do it and scrape by, but again, it wouldn’t be fun anymore.
Aman
Yeah. Like at approximate nearest neighbors and this massive code base is going to just eat up your memory and your CPU, and it’s based off of that. That’s just that. Let’s talk about also the modeling side where, as Arvid said, there are these massive headwinds against local models where one, things that seem to move towards MOEs, which one benefit is maybe their more memory bandwidth bound, which plays in favor of local versus using GPUs or using Nvidia GPUs. But the downside is, these models are just bigger in total, and they’re going to need to fit, often not even on a single node but multiple nodes. There’s no way that’s going to fit inside of even really good MacBooks. I think especially for coding, it’s not a question as much of, does it clear some bar of the model’s good enough to do these things and then we’re satisfied? Which may be the case for other problems and maybe where local models shine, but people are always going to want the best, the most intelligent, the most capable things, and that’s going to be really, really hard to run for almost all people, locally.
Yeah. Like at approximate nearest neighbors and this massive code base is going to just eat up your memory and your CPU, and it’s based off of that. That’s just that. Let’s talk about also the modeling side where, as Arvid said, there are these massive headwinds against local models where one, things that seem to move towards MOEs, which one benefit is maybe their more memory bandwidth bound, which plays in favor of local versus using GPUs or using Nvidia GPUs. But the downside is, these models are just bigger in total, and they’re going to need to fit, often not even on a single node but multiple nodes. There’s no way that’s going to fit inside of even really good MacBooks. I think especially for coding, it’s not a question as much of, does it clear some bar of the model’s good enough to do these things and then we’re satisfied? Which may be the case for other problems and maybe where local models shine, but people are always going to want the best, the most intelligent, the most capable things, and that’s going to be really, really hard to run for almost all people, locally.
Sualeh
Don’t you want the most capable model? You want [inaudible 01:38:55] too?
Don’t you want the most capable model? You want [inaudible 01:38:55] too?
Aman
And also o1-
And also o1-
Lex
I like how you’re pitching me.
I like how you’re pitching me.
Aman
o1 is another-
o1 is another-
Lex
Would you be satisfied with an inferior model? Listen, yes, I’m one of those, but there’s some people that like to do stuff locally, especially like… Really, there’s a whole obviously open source movement that resists. It’s good that they exist actually because you want to resist the power centers that are growing our-
Would you be satisfied with an inferior model? Listen, yes, I’m one of those, but there’s some people that like to do stuff locally, especially like… Really, there’s a whole obviously open source movement that resists. It’s good that they exist actually because you want to resist the power centers that are growing our-
Arvid
There’s actually an alternative to local models that I am particularly fond of. I think it’s still very much in the research stage, but you could imagine to do homomorphic encryption for language model inference. So you encrypt your input on your local machine, then you send that up, and then the server can use loss of computation. They can run models that you cannot run locally on this encrypted data, but they cannot see what the data is, and then they send back the answer and you decrypt the answer and only you can see the answer. So I think that’s still very much research and all of it is about trying to make the overhead lower because right now, the overhead is really big, but if you can make that happen, I think that would be really, really cool, and I think it would be really, really impactful because I think one thing that’s actually worrisome is that, as these models get better and better, they’re going to become more and more economically useful.
There’s actually an alternative to local models that I am particularly fond of. I think it’s still very much in the research stage, but you could imagine to do homomorphic encryption for language model inference. So you encrypt your input on your local machine, then you send that up, and then the server can use loss of computation. They can run models that you cannot run locally on this encrypted data, but they cannot see what the data is, and then they send back the answer and you decrypt the answer and only you can see the answer. So I think that’s still very much research and all of it is about trying to make the overhead lower because right now, the overhead is really big, but if you can make that happen, I think that would be really, really cool, and I think it would be really, really impactful because I think one thing that’s actually worrisome is that, as these models get better and better, they’re going to become more and more economically useful.
So more and more of the world’s information and data will flow through one or two centralized actors. And then there are worries about, there can be traditional hacker attempts, but it also creates this scary part where if all of the world’s information is flowing through one node in plaintext, you can have surveillance in very bad ways. Sometimes that will happen for… Initially, will be good reasons. People will want to try to protect against bad actors using AI models in bad ways, and then you will add in some surveillance code. And then someone else will come in and you’re on a slippery slope, and then you start doing bad things with a lot of the world’s data. So I am very hopeful that we can solve homomorphic encryption for-
Lex
Yeah, and-
Yeah, and-
Arvid
… language model inference.
… language model inference.
Lex
… doing privacy, preserving machine learning. But I would say, that’s the challenge we have with all software these days. It’s like there’s so many features that can be provided from the cloud and all us increasingly rely on it and make our life awesome. But there’s downsides, and that’s why you rely on really good security to protect from basic attacks. But there’s also only a small set of companies that are controlling that data, and they obviously have leverage and they could be infiltrated in all kinds of ways. That’s the world we live in. So it’s-
… doing privacy, preserving machine learning. But I would say, that’s the challenge we have with all software these days. It’s like there’s so many features that can be provided from the cloud and all us increasingly rely on it and make our life awesome. But there’s downsides, and that’s why you rely on really good security to protect from basic attacks. But there’s also only a small set of companies that are controlling that data, and they obviously have leverage and they could be infiltrated in all kinds of ways. That’s the world we live in. So it’s-
Sualeh
Yeah, the thing I’m just actually quite worried about is the world where… Anthropic has this responsible scaling policy where we’re the low ASLs, which is the Anthropic security level or whatever of the models. But as we get to ASL-3, ASL-4, whatever models which are very powerful… But for mostly reasonable security reasons, you would want to monitor all the prompts. But I think that’s reasonable and understandable where everyone is coming from. But man, it’d be really horrible if all the world’s information is monitored that heavily, it’s way too centralized. It’s like this really fine line you’re walking where on the one side, you don’t want the models to go rogue. On the other side, humans like… I don’t know if I trust all the world’s information to pass through three model providers.
Yeah, the thing I’m just actually quite worried about is the world where… Anthropic has this responsible scaling policy where we’re the low ASLs, which is the Anthropic security level or whatever of the models. But as we get to ASL-3, ASL-4, whatever models which are very powerful… But for mostly reasonable security reasons, you would want to monitor all the prompts. But I think that’s reasonable and understandable where everyone is coming from. But man, it’d be really horrible if all the world’s information is monitored that heavily, it’s way too centralized. It’s like this really fine line you’re walking where on the one side, you don’t want the models to go rogue. On the other side, humans like… I don’t know if I trust all the world’s information to pass through three model providers.
Aman
Why do you think it’s different than cloud providers?
Why do you think it’s different than cloud providers?
Arvid
Because I think a lot of this data would never have gone to the cloud providers in the first place where this is often… You want to give more data to the AI models, you want to give personal data that you would never have put online in the first place to these companies or to these models. It also centralizes control where right now, for cloud, you can often use your own encryption keys, and AWS can’t really do much. But here, it’s just centralized actors that see the exact plain text of everything.
Because I think a lot of this data would never have gone to the cloud providers in the first place where this is often… You want to give more data to the AI models, you want to give personal data that you would never have put online in the first place to these companies or to these models. It also centralizes control where right now, for cloud, you can often use your own encryption keys, and AWS can’t really do much. But here, it’s just centralized actors that see the exact plain text of everything.
Context
Lex
Yeah. On the topic of a context, that’s actually been a friction for me. When I’m writing code in Python, there’s a bunch of stuff imported. You could probably intuit the kind of stuff I would like to include in the context. How hard is it to auto figure out the context?
Yeah. On the topic of a context, that’s actually been a friction for me. When I’m writing code in Python, there’s a bunch of stuff imported. You could probably intuit the kind of stuff I would like to include in the context. How hard is it to auto figure out the context?
Michael
It’s tricky. I think we can do a lot better at computing the context automatically in the future. One thing that’s important to note is, there are trade-offs with including automatic context. So the more context you include for these models, first of all, the slower they are and the more expensive those requests are, which means you can then do less model calls and do less fancy stuff in the background. Also, for a lot of these models, they get confused if you have a lot of information in the prompt. So the bar for accuracy and for relevance of the context you include should be quite high. Already, we do some automatic context in some places within the product. It’s definitely something we want to get a lot better at. I think that there are a lot of cool ideas to try there, both on the learning better retrieval systems, like better embedding models, better rerankers.
It’s tricky. I think we can do a lot better at computing the context automatically in the future. One thing that’s important to note is, there are trade-offs with including automatic context. So the more context you include for these models, first of all, the slower they are and the more expensive those requests are, which means you can then do less model calls and do less fancy stuff in the background. Also, for a lot of these models, they get confused if you have a lot of information in the prompt. So the bar for accuracy and for relevance of the context you include should be quite high. Already, we do some automatic context in some places within the product. It’s definitely something we want to get a lot better at. I think that there are a lot of cool ideas to try there, both on the learning better retrieval systems, like better embedding models, better rerankers.
I think that there are also cool academic ideas, stuff we’ve tried out internally, but also the field is grappling with writ large about, can you get language models to a place where you can actually just have the model itself understand a new corpus of information? The most popular talked about version of this is can you make the context windows infinite? Then if you make the context windows infinite, can you make the model actually pay attention to the infinite context? And then after you can make it pay attention to the infinite context to make it somewhat feasible to actually do it, can you then do caching for that infinite context? You don’t have to recompute that all the time. But there are other cool ideas that are being tried, that are a little bit more analogous to fine-tuning of actually learning this information in the weights of the model. It might be that you actually get a qualitative lead different type of understanding if you do it more at the weight level than if you do it at the in-context learning level.
I think the jury’s still a little bit out on how this is all going to work in the end? But in the interim, us as a company, we are really excited about better retrieval systems and picking the parts of the code base that are most relevant to what you’re doing, and we could do that a lot better.
Aman
One interesting proof of concept for the learning this knowledge directly in the weights is with VS Code. So we’re in a VS Code fork and VS Code. The code is all public. So these models in pre-training have seen all the code. They’ve probably also seen questions and answers about it. And then they’ve been fine-tuned and RLHFed to be able to answer questions about code in general. So when you ask it a question about VS Code, sometimes it’ll hallucinate, but sometimes it actually does a pretty good job at answering the question. I think this is just by… It happens to be okay, but what if you could actually specifically train or post-train a model such that it really was built to understand this code base?
One interesting proof of concept for the learning this knowledge directly in the weights is with VS Code. So we’re in a VS Code fork and VS Code. The code is all public. So these models in pre-training have seen all the code. They’ve probably also seen questions and answers about it. And then they’ve been fine-tuned and RLHFed to be able to answer questions about code in general. So when you ask it a question about VS Code, sometimes it’ll hallucinate, but sometimes it actually does a pretty good job at answering the question. I think this is just by… It happens to be okay, but what if you could actually specifically train or post-train a model such that it really was built to understand this code base?
It’s an open research question, one that we’re quite interested in. And then there’s also uncertainty of, do you want the model to be the thing that end-to-end is doing everything, i.e. it’s doing the retrieval in its internals and then answering a question, creating the code, or do you want to separate the retrieval from the frontier model, where maybe you’ll get some really capable models that are much better than the best open source ones in a handful of months? And then you’ll want to separately train a really good open source model to be the retriever, to be the thing that feeds in the context to these larger models.
Lex
Can you speak a little more to post-training a model to understand the code base? What do you mean by that? Is this a synthetic data direction? Is this-
Can you speak a little more to post-training a model to understand the code base? What do you mean by that? Is this a synthetic data direction? Is this-
Aman
Yeah, there are many possible ways you could try doing it. There’s certainly no shortage of ideas. It’s just a question of going in and trying all of them and being empirical about which one works best. One very naive thing is to try to replicate what’s done with VS Code and these frontier models. So let’s continue pre-training. Some kind of continued pre-training that includes general code data but also throws in of the data of some particular repository that you care about. And then in post-training, meaning in… Let’s just start with instruction fine-tuning. You have a normal instruction fine-tuning data set about code. Then you throw in a lot of questions about code in that repository.
Yeah, there are many possible ways you could try doing it. There’s certainly no shortage of ideas. It’s just a question of going in and trying all of them and being empirical about which one works best. One very naive thing is to try to replicate what’s done with VS Code and these frontier models. So let’s continue pre-training. Some kind of continued pre-training that includes general code data but also throws in of the data of some particular repository that you care about. And then in post-training, meaning in… Let’s just start with instruction fine-tuning. You have a normal instruction fine-tuning data set about code. Then you throw in a lot of questions about code in that repository.
So you could either get ground truth ones, which might be difficult or you could do what you hinted at or suggested using synthetic data, i.e. having the model ask questions about various recent pieces of the code. So you take the pieces of the code, then prompt the model or have a model propose a question for that piece of code, and then add those as instruction fine-tuning data points. And then in theory, this might unlock the model’s ability to answer questions about that code base.
OpenAI o1
Lex
Let me ask you about OpenAI o1. What do you think is the role of that kind of test time compute system in programming?
Let me ask you about OpenAI o1. What do you think is the role of that kind of test time compute system in programming?
Aman
I think test time compute is really, really interesting. So there’s been the pre-training regime which will, as you scale up the amount of data and the size of your model, get you better and better performance both on loss and then on downstream benchmarks and just general performance. So we use it for coding or other tasks. We’re starting to hit a bit of a data wall. Meaning, it’s going to be hard to continue scaling up this regime. So scaling up test time compute is an interesting way, if now increasing the number of inference time flops that we use but still getting… Yeah, as you increase the number of flops you use inference time getting corresponding improvements in the performance of these models. Traditionally, we just had to literally train a bigger model that always used that many more flops, but now, we could perhaps use the same size model and run it for longer to be able to get an answer at the quality of a much larger model.
I think test time compute is really, really interesting. So there’s been the pre-training regime which will, as you scale up the amount of data and the size of your model, get you better and better performance both on loss and then on downstream benchmarks and just general performance. So we use it for coding or other tasks. We’re starting to hit a bit of a data wall. Meaning, it’s going to be hard to continue scaling up this regime. So scaling up test time compute is an interesting way, if now increasing the number of inference time flops that we use but still getting… Yeah, as you increase the number of flops you use inference time getting corresponding improvements in the performance of these models. Traditionally, we just had to literally train a bigger model that always used that many more flops, but now, we could perhaps use the same size model and run it for longer to be able to get an answer at the quality of a much larger model.
So the really interesting thing I like about this is there are some problems that perhaps require 100 trillion parameter model intelligence trained on 100 trillion tokens. But that’s maybe 1%, maybe 0.1% of all queries. So are you going to spend all of this effort, all of this compute training a model that costs that much and then run it so infrequently? It feels completely wasteful when instead you get the model that can… You train the model that is capable of doing the 99.9% of queries, then you have a way of inference time running it longer for those few people that really, really want max intelligence.
Lex
How do you figure out which problem requires what level of intelligence? Is that possible to dynamically figure out when to use GPT-4, when to use a small model and when you need the o1?
How do you figure out which problem requires what level of intelligence? Is that possible to dynamically figure out when to use GPT-4, when to use a small model and when you need the o1?
Aman
Yeah, that’s an open research problem, certainly. I don’t think anyone’s actually cracked this model routing problem quite well. We have initial implementations of this for something like Cursor Tab, but at the level of going between 4o sonnet to o1, it’s a bit trickier. There’s also a question like, what level of intelligence do you need to determine if the thing is too hard for the four level model? Maybe you need the o1 level model. It’s really unclear.
Yeah, that’s an open research problem, certainly. I don’t think anyone’s actually cracked this model routing problem quite well. We have initial implementations of this for something like Cursor Tab, but at the level of going between 4o sonnet to o1, it’s a bit trickier. There’s also a question like, what level of intelligence do you need to determine if the thing is too hard for the four level model? Maybe you need the o1 level model. It’s really unclear.
Lex
But you mentioned this. So there’s a pre-training process then there’s post-training, and then there’s test time compute. Is that fair to separate? Where’s the biggest gains?
But you mentioned this. So there’s a pre-training process then there’s post-training, and then there’s test time compute. Is that fair to separate? Where’s the biggest gains?
Aman
Well, it’s weird because test time compute, there’s a whole training strategy needed to get test time compute to work. The other really weird thing about this is outside of the big labs and maybe even just OpenAI, no one really knows how it works. There’ve been some really interesting papers that show hints of what they might be doing. So perhaps they’re doing something with tree search using process reward models. But yeah, I think the issue is we don’t quite know exactly what it looks like, so it would be hard to comment on where it fits in. I would put it in post-training, but maybe the compute spent for this kind of… forgetting test time compute to work for a model is going to dwarf pre-training eventually.
Well, it’s weird because test time compute, there’s a whole training strategy needed to get test time compute to work. The other really weird thing about this is outside of the big labs and maybe even just OpenAI, no one really knows how it works. There’ve been some really interesting papers that show hints of what they might be doing. So perhaps they’re doing something with tree search using process reward models. But yeah, I think the issue is we don’t quite know exactly what it looks like, so it would be hard to comment on where it fits in. I would put it in post-training, but maybe the compute spent for this kind of… forgetting test time compute to work for a model is going to dwarf pre-training eventually.
Lex
So we don’t even know if o1 is using just chain of thought or we don’t know how they’re using any of these? We don’t know anything?
So we don’t even know if o1 is using just chain of thought or we don’t know how they’re using any of these? We don’t know anything?
Aman
It’s fun to speculate.
It’s fun to speculate.
Lex
If you were to build a competing model, what would you do?
If you were to build a competing model, what would you do?
Aman
Yeah. So one thing to do would be, I think you probably need to train a process reward model, which is… So maybe we can get into reward models and outcome reward models versus process reward models. Outcome reward models are the traditional reward models that people are trained for language modeling, and it’s just looking at the final thing. So if you’re doing some math problem, let’s look at that final thing. You’ve done everything and let’s assign a grade to it, how likely we think… What’s the reward for this outcome? Process reward models instead try to grade the chain of thought. So OpenAI had preliminary paper on this, I think, last summer where they use human labelers to get this pretty large several hundred thousand data set of creating chains of thought. Ultimately, it feels like I haven’t seen anything interesting in the ways that people use process reward models outside of just using it as a means of affecting how we choose between a bunch of samples.
Yeah. So one thing to do would be, I think you probably need to train a process reward model, which is… So maybe we can get into reward models and outcome reward models versus process reward models. Outcome reward models are the traditional reward models that people are trained for language modeling, and it’s just looking at the final thing. So if you’re doing some math problem, let’s look at that final thing. You’ve done everything and let’s assign a grade to it, how likely we think… What’s the reward for this outcome? Process reward models instead try to grade the chain of thought. So OpenAI had preliminary paper on this, I think, last summer where they use human labelers to get this pretty large several hundred thousand data set of creating chains of thought. Ultimately, it feels like I haven’t seen anything interesting in the ways that people use process reward models outside of just using it as a means of affecting how we choose between a bunch of samples.
So what people do in all these papers is they sample a bunch of outputs from the language model, and then use the process reward models to grade all those generations alongside maybe some other heuristics and then use that to choose the best answer. The really interesting thing that people think might work and people want to work is tree search with these process reward models. Because if you really can grade every single step of the chain of thought, then you can branch out and explore multiple paths of this chain of thought and then use these process reward models to evaluate how good is this branch that you’re taking.
Lex
Yeah. When the quality of the branch is somehow strongly correlated with the quality of the outcome at the very end, so you have a good model of knowing which branch to take. So not just in the short term, in the long term?
Yeah. When the quality of the branch is somehow strongly correlated with the quality of the outcome at the very end, so you have a good model of knowing which branch to take. So not just in the short term, in the long term?
Aman
Yeah. The interesting work that I think has been done is figuring out how to properly train the process… Or the interesting work that has been open sourced and people I think talk about is how to train the process reward models, maybe in a more automated way. I could be wrong here, could not be mentioning some papers. I haven’t seen anything super that seems to work really well for using the process reward models creatively to do tree search and code.
Yeah. The interesting work that I think has been done is figuring out how to properly train the process… Or the interesting work that has been open sourced and people I think talk about is how to train the process reward models, maybe in a more automated way. I could be wrong here, could not be mentioning some papers. I haven’t seen anything super that seems to work really well for using the process reward models creatively to do tree search and code.
Lex
This is an AI safety, maybe a bit of a philosophy question. So OpenAI says that they’re hiding the chain of thought from the user, and they’ve said that that was a difficult decision to make. Instead of showing the chain of thought, they’re asking the model to summarize the chain of thought. They’re also in the background saying they’re going to monitor the chain of thought to make sure the model is not trying to manipulate the user, which is a fascinating possibility. But anyway, what do you think about hiding the chain of thought?
This is an AI safety, maybe a bit of a philosophy question. So OpenAI says that they’re hiding the chain of thought from the user, and they’ve said that that was a difficult decision to make. Instead of showing the chain of thought, they’re asking the model to summarize the chain of thought. They’re also in the background saying they’re going to monitor the chain of thought to make sure the model is not trying to manipulate the user, which is a fascinating possibility. But anyway, what do you think about hiding the chain of thought?
Michael
One consideration for OpenAI, and this is completely speculative, could be that they want to make it hard for people to distill these capabilities out of their model. It might actually be easier if you had access to that hidden chain of thought to replicate the technology, because pretty important data, like seeing the steps that the model took to get to the final results.
One consideration for OpenAI, and this is completely speculative, could be that they want to make it hard for people to distill these capabilities out of their model. It might actually be easier if you had access to that hidden chain of thought to replicate the technology, because pretty important data, like seeing the steps that the model took to get to the final results.
Lex
So you could probably train on that also?
So you could probably train on that also?
Michael
And there was a mirror situation with this, with some of the large language model providers, and also this is speculation, but some of these APIs used to offer easy access to log probabilities for all the tokens that they’re generating and also log probabilities over the prompt tokens. And then some of these APIs took those away. Again, complete speculation, but one of the thoughts is that the reason those were taken away is if you have access to log probabilities similar to this hidden chain of thought, that can give you even more information to try and distill these capabilities out of the APIs, out of these biggest models and to models you control. As an asterisk on also the previous discussion about us integrating o1, I think that we’re still learning how to use this model. So we made o1 available in Cursor because when we got the model, we were really interested in trying it out. I think a lot of programmers are going to be interested in trying it out.
And there was a mirror situation with this, with some of the large language model providers, and also this is speculation, but some of these APIs used to offer easy access to log probabilities for all the tokens that they’re generating and also log probabilities over the prompt tokens. And then some of these APIs took those away. Again, complete speculation, but one of the thoughts is that the reason those were taken away is if you have access to log probabilities similar to this hidden chain of thought, that can give you even more information to try and distill these capabilities out of the APIs, out of these biggest models and to models you control. As an asterisk on also the previous discussion about us integrating o1, I think that we’re still learning how to use this model. So we made o1 available in Cursor because when we got the model, we were really interested in trying it out. I think a lot of programmers are going to be interested in trying it out.
o1 is not part of the default Cursor experience in any way up, and we still haven’t found a way to yet integrate it into the editor in a way that we reach for every hour, maybe even every day. So I think that the jury’s still out on how to use the model, and we haven’t seen examples yet of people releasing things where it seems really clear like, oh, that’s now the use case. The obvious one to turn to is maybe this can make it easier for you to have these background things running, to have these models and loops, to have these models be agentic. But we’re still discovering,
Sualeh
To be clear, we have ideas. We just need to try and get something incredibly useful before we put it out there.
To be clear, we have ideas. We just need to try and get something incredibly useful before we put it out there.
Aman
But it has these significant limitations. Even barring capabilities, it does not stream. That means it’s really, really painful to use for things where you want to supervise the output. Instead, you’re just waiting for the wall text to show up. Also, it does feel like the early innings of test time, compute and search where it’s just a very, very much a v0, and there’s so many things that don’t feel quite right. I suspect in parallel to people increasing the amount of pre-training data and the size of the models and pre-training and finding tricks there, you’ll now have this other thread of getting search to work better and better.
But it has these significant limitations. Even barring capabilities, it does not stream. That means it’s really, really painful to use for things where you want to supervise the output. Instead, you’re just waiting for the wall text to show up. Also, it does feel like the early innings of test time, compute and search where it’s just a very, very much a v0, and there’s so many things that don’t feel quite right. I suspect in parallel to people increasing the amount of pre-training data and the size of the models and pre-training and finding tricks there, you’ll now have this other thread of getting search to work better and better.
Lex
So let me ask you about strawberry tomorrow eyes. So it looks like GitHub Copilot might be integrating o1 in some kind of way, and I think some of the comments are saying, does this mean Cursor is done? I think I saw one comment saying that.
So let me ask you about strawberry tomorrow eyes. So it looks like GitHub Copilot might be integrating o1 in some kind of way, and I think some of the comments are saying, does this mean Cursor is done? I think I saw one comment saying that.
Arvid
It’s a time to shut down Cursor. Yeah.
It’s a time to shut down Cursor. Yeah.
Lex
Time to shut down Cursor.
Time to shut down Cursor.
Arvid
[inaudible 01:58:38].
[inaudible 01:58:38].
Lex
Thank you. So is it time to shut down Cursor?
Thank you. So is it time to shut down Cursor?
Michael
I think this space is a little bit different from past software spaces over the 2010s, where I think that the ceiling here is really, really, really incredibly high. So I think that the best product in three to four years will just be soon much more useful than the best product today. You can wax poetic about moats this and brand that and this is our advantage, but I think in the end, just if you stop innovating on the product, you will lose. That’s also great for startups, that’s great for people trying to enter this market because it means you have an opportunity to win against people who have lots of users already by just building something better. So I think over the next few years, it’s just about building the best product, building the best system. That both comes down to the modeling engine side of things, and it also comes down to the editing experience.
I think this space is a little bit different from past software spaces over the 2010s, where I think that the ceiling here is really, really, really incredibly high. So I think that the best product in three to four years will just be soon much more useful than the best product today. You can wax poetic about moats this and brand that and this is our advantage, but I think in the end, just if you stop innovating on the product, you will lose. That’s also great for startups, that’s great for people trying to enter this market because it means you have an opportunity to win against people who have lots of users already by just building something better. So I think over the next few years, it’s just about building the best product, building the best system. That both comes down to the modeling engine side of things, and it also comes down to the editing experience.
Aman
Yeah, I think most of the additional value from Cursor versus everything else out there is not just integrating the new model fast like o1. It comes from all of the depth that goes into these custom models that you don’t realize are working for you in every facet of the product, as well as the really thoughtful UX with every single feature.
Yeah, I think most of the additional value from Cursor versus everything else out there is not just integrating the new model fast like o1. It comes from all of the depth that goes into these custom models that you don’t realize are working for you in every facet of the product, as well as the really thoughtful UX with every single feature.
Synthetic data
Lex
All right. From that profound answer-
All right. From that profound answer-
Lex
All right, from that profound answer, let’s descend back down to the technical. You mentioned you have a taxonomy of synthetic data.
All right, from that profound answer, let’s descend back down to the technical. You mentioned you have a taxonomy of synthetic data.
Aman
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
Lex
Can you please explain?
Can you please explain?
Aman
Yeah, I think there are three main kinds of synthetic data. So what is synthetic data, first? So there’s normal data, like non-synthetic data, which is just data that’s naturally created, i.e. usually it’ll be from humans having done things. So from some human process you get this data. Synthetic data, the first one would be distillation. So having a language model, output tokens or probability distributions over tokens, and then you can train some less capable model on this.
Yeah, I think there are three main kinds of synthetic data. So what is synthetic data, first? So there’s normal data, like non-synthetic data, which is just data that’s naturally created, i.e. usually it’ll be from humans having done things. So from some human process you get this data. Synthetic data, the first one would be distillation. So having a language model, output tokens or probability distributions over tokens, and then you can train some less capable model on this.
This approach is not going to get you a more capable model than the original one that has produced the tokens, but it’s really useful for if there’s some capability you want to elicit from some really expensive high-latency model. You can then distill that down into some smaller task-specific model.
The second kind is when one direction of the problem is easier than the reverse. So a great example of this is bug detection, like we mentioned earlier, where it’s a lot easier to introduce reasonable-looking bugs than it is to actually detect them. And this is probably the case for humans too. And so what you can do, is you can get a model that’s not trained in that much data, that’s not that smart, to introduce a bunch of bugs and code. And then you can use that to then train… Use the synthetic data to train a model that can be really good at detecting bugs.
The last category I think is, I guess the main one that it feels like the big labs are doing for synthetic data, which is producing text with language models that can then be verified easily. So extreme example of this is if you have a verification system that can detect if language is Shakespeare level, and then you have a bunch of monkeys typing and typewriters. You can eventually get enough training data to train a Shakespeare-level language model.
And I mean this is very much the case for math where verification is actually really, really easy for formal languages. And then what you can do, is you can have an okay model, generate a ton of rollouts, and then choose the ones that you know have actually proved the ground truth theorems, and train that further.
There’s similar things you can do for code with lead code like problems, where if you have some set of tests that you know correspond to if something passes these tests, it actually solved problem. You could do the same thing where you verify that it’s passed the test and then train the model in the outputs that have passed the tests.
I think it’s going to be a little tricky getting this to work in all domains, or just in general. Having the perfect verifier feels really, really hard to do with just open-ended miscellaneous tasks. You give the model or more long horizon tasks, even in coding.
Lex
That’s because you’re not as optimistic as Arvid. But yeah, so yeah, that third category requires having a verifier.
That’s because you’re not as optimistic as Arvid. But yeah, so yeah, that third category requires having a verifier.
Aman
Verification, it feels like it’s best when you know for a fact that it’s correct. And then it wouldn’t be like using a language model to verify. It would be using tests or formal systems.
Verification, it feels like it’s best when you know for a fact that it’s correct. And then it wouldn’t be like using a language model to verify. It would be using tests or formal systems.
Michael
Or running the thing too. Doing the human form of verification, where you just do manual quality control.
Or running the thing too. Doing the human form of verification, where you just do manual quality control.
Aman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael
But the language model version of that, where it’s running the thing and it actually understands the output.
But the language model version of that, where it’s running the thing and it actually understands the output.
Aman
Yeah. No, that’s-
Yeah. No, that’s-
Michael
I’m sure it’s somewhere in between.
I’m sure it’s somewhere in between.
Aman
Yeah. I think that’s the category that is most likely to result in massive gains.
Yeah. I think that’s the category that is most likely to result in massive gains.
RLHF vs RLAIF
Lex
What about RL with feedback side RLHF versus RLAIF? What’s the role of that in getting better performance on the models?
What about RL with feedback side RLHF versus RLAIF? What’s the role of that in getting better performance on the models?
Aman
Yeah. So RLHF is when the reward model you use is trained from some labels you’ve collected from humans giving feedback. I think this works if you have the ability to get a ton of human feedback for this kind of task that you care about.
Yeah. So RLHF is when the reward model you use is trained from some labels you’ve collected from humans giving feedback. I think this works if you have the ability to get a ton of human feedback for this kind of task that you care about.
RLAIF is interesting because you’re depending on… This is actually, it’s depending on the constraint that verification is actually a decent bit easier than generation. Because it feels like, okay, what are you doing? Are you using this language model to look at the language model outputs and then prove the language model? But no, it actually may work if the language model has a much easier time verifying some solution than it does generating it. Then you actually could perhaps get this kind of recursive loop. But I don’t think it’s going to look exactly like that.
The other thing you could do, that we kind of do, is a little bit of a mix of RLAIF and RLHF, where usually the model is actually quite correct and this is the case of precursor tap picking between two possible generations of what is the better one. And then it just needs a little bit of human nudging with only on the order 50, 100 examples to align that prior the model has with exactly with what you want.
It looks different than I think normal RLHF where you’re usually training these reward models in tons of examples.
Fields Medal for AI
Lex
What’s your intuition when you compare generation and verification or generation and ranking? Is ranking way easier than generation?
What’s your intuition when you compare generation and verification or generation and ranking? Is ranking way easier than generation?
Aman
My intuition would just say, yeah, it should be. This is going back to… Like, if you believe P does not equal NP, then there’s this massive class of problems that are much, much easier to verify given proof, than actually proving it.
My intuition would just say, yeah, it should be. This is going back to… Like, if you believe P does not equal NP, then there’s this massive class of problems that are much, much easier to verify given proof, than actually proving it.
Lex
I wonder if the same thing will prove P not equal to NP or P equal to NP.
I wonder if the same thing will prove P not equal to NP or P equal to NP.
Arvid
That would be really cool.
That would be really cool.
Lex
That’d be a whatever Field’s Medal by AI. Who gets the credit? Another the open philosophical question.
That’d be a whatever Field’s Medal by AI. Who gets the credit? Another the open philosophical question.
Michael
Whoever prompted it.
Whoever prompted it.
Sualeh
I’m actually surprisingly curious what a good bet for one AI will get the Field’s Medal will be. I actually don’t have-
I’m actually surprisingly curious what a good bet for one AI will get the Field’s Medal will be. I actually don’t have-
Michael
Isn’t this Aman’s specialty?
Isn’t this Aman’s specialty?
Sualeh
I don’t know what Aman’s bet here is.
I don’t know what Aman’s bet here is.
Lex
Oh, sorry, Nobel Prize or Field’s Medal first?
Oh, sorry, Nobel Prize or Field’s Medal first?
Sualeh
Field’s Medal-
Field’s Medal-
Aman
Oh, Field’s Medal level?
Oh, Field’s Medal level?
Arvid
Field’s Medal comes first, I think.
Field’s Medal comes first, I think.
Sualeh
[inaudible 02:06:41].
[inaudible 02:06:41].
Lex
Field’s Medal comes first. Well, you would say that, of course.
Field’s Medal comes first. Well, you would say that, of course.
Arvid
But it’s also this isolated system you verify and…
But it’s also this isolated system you verify and…
Lex
Sure.
Sure.
Sualeh
I don’t even know if I-
I don’t even know if I-
Arvid
You don’t need to do [inaudible 02:06:50].
You don’t need to do [inaudible 02:06:50].
Aman
I feel like I have much more to do there. It felt like the path to get to IMO was a little bit more clear. Because it already could get a few IMO problems and there was a bunch of low-hanging fruit, given the literature at the time, of what tactics people could take. I think I’m, one, much less versed in the space of theorem proving now. And two, less intuition about how close we are to solving these really, really hard open problems.
I feel like I have much more to do there. It felt like the path to get to IMO was a little bit more clear. Because it already could get a few IMO problems and there was a bunch of low-hanging fruit, given the literature at the time, of what tactics people could take. I think I’m, one, much less versed in the space of theorem proving now. And two, less intuition about how close we are to solving these really, really hard open problems.
Lex
So you think you’ll be Field’s Medal first? It won’t be in physics or in-
So you think you’ll be Field’s Medal first? It won’t be in physics or in-
Sualeh
Oh, 100%. I think that’s probably more likely. It is probably much more likely that it’ll get in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well I think it both to… I don’t know, BSD, which is a Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, or [inaudible 02:07:33] iPods, or any one of these hard math problems are just actually really hard. It’s sort of unclear what the path to get even a solution looks like. We don’t even know what a path looks like, let alone [inaudible 02:07:47].
Oh, 100%. I think that’s probably more likely. It is probably much more likely that it’ll get in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well I think it both to… I don’t know, BSD, which is a Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, or [inaudible 02:07:33] iPods, or any one of these hard math problems are just actually really hard. It’s sort of unclear what the path to get even a solution looks like. We don’t even know what a path looks like, let alone [inaudible 02:07:47].
Arvid
And you don’t buy the idea this is just like an isolated system and you can actually have a good reward system, and it feels like it’s easier to train for that.
And you don’t buy the idea this is just like an isolated system and you can actually have a good reward system, and it feels like it’s easier to train for that.
Aman
I think we might get Field’s Medal before AGI.
I think we might get Field’s Medal before AGI.
Sualeh
I mean, I’d be very happy. I’d be very happy. But I don’t know if I… I think 2028, 2030.
I mean, I’d be very happy. I’d be very happy. But I don’t know if I… I think 2028, 2030.
Lex
For Field’s Medal?
For Field’s Medal?
Sualeh
Field’s Medal.
Field’s Medal.
Lex
All right. It feels like forever from now, given how fast things have been going.
All right. It feels like forever from now, given how fast things have been going.
Scaling laws
Speaking of how fast things have been going, let’s talk about scaling laws. So for people who don’t know, maybe it’s good to talk about this whole idea of scaling laws. What are they, where’d you think stand, and where do you think things are going?
Aman
I think it was interesting. The original scaling laws paper by open AI was slightly wrong. Because I think of some issues they did with learning right schedules. And then Chinchilla showed a more correct version. And then from then people have again deviated from doing the compute optimal thing. Because people start now optimizing more so for making the thing work really well given an inference budget.
I think it was interesting. The original scaling laws paper by open AI was slightly wrong. Because I think of some issues they did with learning right schedules. And then Chinchilla showed a more correct version. And then from then people have again deviated from doing the compute optimal thing. Because people start now optimizing more so for making the thing work really well given an inference budget.
And I think there are a lot more dimensions to these curves than what we originally used, of just compute number of parameters and data. Like inference compute is the obvious one. I think context length is another obvious one. So let’s say you care about the two things of inference compute and then context window, maybe the thing you want to train, is some kind of SSM. Because they’re much, much cheaper and faster at super, super long context. And even if, maybe it was 10 X more scaling properties during training, meaning you spend 10 X more compute to train the thing to get the same level of capabilities, it’s worth it. Because you care most about that inference budget for really long context windows. So it’ll be interesting to see how people play with all these dimensions.
Lex
So yeah, I mean you speak to the multiple dimensions, obviously. The original conception was just looking at the variables of the size of the model as measured by parameters, and the size of the data as measured by the number of tokens, and looking at the ratio of the two.
So yeah, I mean you speak to the multiple dimensions, obviously. The original conception was just looking at the variables of the size of the model as measured by parameters, and the size of the data as measured by the number of tokens, and looking at the ratio of the two.
Aman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex
And it’s kind of a compelling notion that there is a number, or at least a minimum. And it seems like one was emerging. Do you still believe that there is a kind of bigger is better?
And it’s kind of a compelling notion that there is a number, or at least a minimum. And it seems like one was emerging. Do you still believe that there is a kind of bigger is better?
Aman
I mean I think bigger is certainly better for just raw performance.
I mean I think bigger is certainly better for just raw performance.
Sualeh
And raw intelligence.
And raw intelligence.
Aman
And raw intelligence. I think the path that people might take, is… I’m particularly bullish on distillation. And how many knobs can you turn to, if we spend a ton, ton of money on training, get the most capable cheap model. Really, really caring as much as you can. Because the naive version of caring as much as you can about inference time compute, is what people have already done with the Llama models. Or just over-training the shit out of 7B models on way, way, way more tokens than is essential optimal.
And raw intelligence. I think the path that people might take, is… I’m particularly bullish on distillation. And how many knobs can you turn to, if we spend a ton, ton of money on training, get the most capable cheap model. Really, really caring as much as you can. Because the naive version of caring as much as you can about inference time compute, is what people have already done with the Llama models. Or just over-training the shit out of 7B models on way, way, way more tokens than is essential optimal.
But if you really care about it, maybe the thing to do is what Gamma did, which is let’s not just train on tokens, let’s literally train on minimizing the KL divergence with the distribution of gemma 27B, right? So knowledge distillation there. And you’re spending the compute of literally training this 27 billion parameter model on all these tokens, just to get out this, I don’t know, smaller model.
Lex
And the distillation gives you just a faster model, smaller means faster.
And the distillation gives you just a faster model, smaller means faster.
Aman
Yeah. Distillation in theory is, I think, getting out more signal from the data that you’re training on. And it’s perhaps another way of getting over, not completely over, but partially helping with the data wall. Where you only have so much data to train on, let’s train this really, really big model on all these tokens and we’ll distill it into this smaller one. And maybe we can get more signal per token for this much smaller model than we would’ve originally if we trained it.
Yeah. Distillation in theory is, I think, getting out more signal from the data that you’re training on. And it’s perhaps another way of getting over, not completely over, but partially helping with the data wall. Where you only have so much data to train on, let’s train this really, really big model on all these tokens and we’ll distill it into this smaller one. And maybe we can get more signal per token for this much smaller model than we would’ve originally if we trained it.
Lex
So if I gave you $10 trillion, how would you spend it? I mean you can’t buy an island or whatever. How would you allocate it in terms of improving the big model versus maybe paying for HF in the RLHF? Or-
So if I gave you $10 trillion, how would you spend it? I mean you can’t buy an island or whatever. How would you allocate it in terms of improving the big model versus maybe paying for HF in the RLHF? Or-
Aman
Yeah, yeah. I think there’s a lot of these secrets and details about training these large models that I just don’t know, and are only privy to the large labs. And the issue is, I would waste a lot of that money if I even attempted this, because I wouldn’t know those things. Suspending a lot of disbelief and assuming you had the know- how, or if you’re saying you have to operate with the limited information you have now-
Yeah, yeah. I think there’s a lot of these secrets and details about training these large models that I just don’t know, and are only privy to the large labs. And the issue is, I would waste a lot of that money if I even attempted this, because I wouldn’t know those things. Suspending a lot of disbelief and assuming you had the know- how, or if you’re saying you have to operate with the limited information you have now-
Lex
No, no, no. Actually, I would say you swoop in and you get all the information, all the little heuristics, all the little parameters, all the parameters that define how the thing is trained.
No, no, no. Actually, I would say you swoop in and you get all the information, all the little heuristics, all the little parameters, all the parameters that define how the thing is trained.
Aman
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Lex
If we look in how to invest money for the next five years in terms of maximizing what you called raw intelligence-
If we look in how to invest money for the next five years in terms of maximizing what you called raw intelligence-
Sualeh
I mean, isn’t the answer really simple? You just try to get as much compute as possible. At the end of the day all you need to buy, is the GPUs. And then the researchers can find all… You can tune whether you want to pre-train a big model or a small model.
I mean, isn’t the answer really simple? You just try to get as much compute as possible. At the end of the day all you need to buy, is the GPUs. And then the researchers can find all… You can tune whether you want to pre-train a big model or a small model.
Aman
Well this gets into the question of are you really limited by compute and money, or are you limited by these other things?
Well this gets into the question of are you really limited by compute and money, or are you limited by these other things?
Sualeh
I’m more privy to Arvid’s belief that we’re sort of idea-limited, but there’s always that like-
I’m more privy to Arvid’s belief that we’re sort of idea-limited, but there’s always that like-
Arvid
But if you have a lot of compute, you can run a lot of experiments.
But if you have a lot of compute, you can run a lot of experiments.
Lex
So you would run a lot of experiments versus use that compute to trend a gigantic model?
So you would run a lot of experiments versus use that compute to trend a gigantic model?
Arvid
I would, but I do believe that we are limited in terms of ideas that we have.
I would, but I do believe that we are limited in terms of ideas that we have.
Aman
I think yeah, because even with all this compute and all the data you could collect in the world, I think you really are ultimately limited by not even ideas, but just really good engineering. Even with all the capital in the world, would you really be able to assemble… There aren’t that many people in the world who really can make the difference here. And there’s so much work that goes into research that is just pure, really, really hard engineering work. As a very hand-wavy example, if you look at the original Transformer paper, how much work was joining together a lot of these really interesting concepts embedded in the literature, versus then going in and writing all the codes, maybe the CUDA kernels, maybe whatever else. I don’t know if it ran them GPUs or TPUs. Originally such that it actually saturated the GPU performance. Getting GNOME Azure to go in and do all this code. And GNOME is probably one of the best engineers in the world.
I think yeah, because even with all this compute and all the data you could collect in the world, I think you really are ultimately limited by not even ideas, but just really good engineering. Even with all the capital in the world, would you really be able to assemble… There aren’t that many people in the world who really can make the difference here. And there’s so much work that goes into research that is just pure, really, really hard engineering work. As a very hand-wavy example, if you look at the original Transformer paper, how much work was joining together a lot of these really interesting concepts embedded in the literature, versus then going in and writing all the codes, maybe the CUDA kernels, maybe whatever else. I don’t know if it ran them GPUs or TPUs. Originally such that it actually saturated the GPU performance. Getting GNOME Azure to go in and do all this code. And GNOME is probably one of the best engineers in the world.
Or maybe going a step further, like the next generation of models, having these things… Like getting model parallelism to work, and scaling it on thousands of, or maybe tens of thousands of V100s, which I think GBDE-III may have been. There’s just so much engineering effort that has to go into all of these things to make it work. If you really brought that cost down to maybe not zero, but just made it 10 X easier, made it super easy for someone with really fantastic ideas, to immediately get to the version of the new architecture they dreamed up, that is getting 50, 40% utilization on their GPUs, I think that would just speed up research by a ton.
Sualeh
I mean I think if you see a clear path to improvement, you should always take the low-hanging fruit first, right? I think probably OpenAI and all the other labs that did the right thing to pick off the low-hanging fruit. Where the low-hanging fruit is like, you could scale up to a GPT-4.25 scale and you just keep scaling, and things keep getting better. And as long as… There’s no point of experimenting with new ideas when everything is working. And you should sort of bang on and to try to get as much as much juice out of the possible. And then maybe when you really need new ideas for… I think if you’re spending $10 trillion, you probably want to spend some… Then actually reevaluate probably your idea a little bit at that point.
I mean I think if you see a clear path to improvement, you should always take the low-hanging fruit first, right? I think probably OpenAI and all the other labs that did the right thing to pick off the low-hanging fruit. Where the low-hanging fruit is like, you could scale up to a GPT-4.25 scale and you just keep scaling, and things keep getting better. And as long as… There’s no point of experimenting with new ideas when everything is working. And you should sort of bang on and to try to get as much as much juice out of the possible. And then maybe when you really need new ideas for… I think if you’re spending $10 trillion, you probably want to spend some… Then actually reevaluate probably your idea a little bit at that point.
Aman
I think all of us believe new ideas are probably needed to get all the way there to AGI. And all of us also probably believe there exist ways of testing out those ideas at smaller scales, and being fairly confident that they’ll play out. It’s just quite difficult for the labs in their current position to dedicate their very limited research and engineering talent to exploring all these other ideas, when there’s this core thing that will probably improve performance for some decent amount of time.
I think all of us believe new ideas are probably needed to get all the way there to AGI. And all of us also probably believe there exist ways of testing out those ideas at smaller scales, and being fairly confident that they’ll play out. It’s just quite difficult for the labs in their current position to dedicate their very limited research and engineering talent to exploring all these other ideas, when there’s this core thing that will probably improve performance for some decent amount of time.
The future of programming
Lex
But also, these big labs like winning. So they’re just going wild. Okay, so big question, looking out into the future: You’re now at the center of the programming world. How do you think programming, the nature of programming changes in the next few months, in the next year, in the next two years and the next five years, 10 years?
But also, these big labs like winning. So they’re just going wild. Okay, so big question, looking out into the future: You’re now at the center of the programming world. How do you think programming, the nature of programming changes in the next few months, in the next year, in the next two years and the next five years, 10 years?
Michael
I think we’re really excited about a future where the programmer is in the driver’s seat for a long time. And you’ve heard us talk about this a little bit, but one that emphasizes speed and agency for the programmer and control. The ability to modify anything you want to modify, the ability to iterate really fast on what you’re building. And this is a little different, I think, than where some people are jumping to in the space, where I think one idea that’s captivated people, is can you talk to your computer? Can you have it build software for you? As if you’re talking to an engineering department or an engineer over Slack. And can it just be this sort of isolated text box? And part of the reason we’re not excited about that, is some of the stuff we’ve talked about with latency, but then a big piece, a reason we’re not excited about that, is because that comes with giving up a lot of control.
I think we’re really excited about a future where the programmer is in the driver’s seat for a long time. And you’ve heard us talk about this a little bit, but one that emphasizes speed and agency for the programmer and control. The ability to modify anything you want to modify, the ability to iterate really fast on what you’re building. And this is a little different, I think, than where some people are jumping to in the space, where I think one idea that’s captivated people, is can you talk to your computer? Can you have it build software for you? As if you’re talking to an engineering department or an engineer over Slack. And can it just be this sort of isolated text box? And part of the reason we’re not excited about that, is some of the stuff we’ve talked about with latency, but then a big piece, a reason we’re not excited about that, is because that comes with giving up a lot of control.
It’s much harder to be really specific when you’re talking in the text box. And if you’re necessarily just going to communicate with a thing like you would be communicating with an engineering department, you’re actually advocating tons of really important decisions to this bot. And this kind of gets at, fundamentally, what engineering is. I think that some people who are a little bit more removed from engineering might think of it as the spec is completely written out and then the engineers just come and they just implement. And it’s just about making the thing happen in code and making the thing exist. But I think a lot of the best engineering, the engineering we enjoy, involves tons of tiny micro decisions about what exactly you’re building, and about really hard trade-offs between speed and cost and just all the other things involved in a system. As long as humans are actually the ones designing the software and the ones specifying what they want to be built, and it’s not just like company run by all AIs, we think you’ll really want the human in a driver’s seat dictating these decisions.
And so the jury’s still out on what that looks like. I think that one weird idea for what that could look like, is it could look like you can control the level of abstraction you view a code base at. And you can point at specific parts of a code base that… Like, maybe you digest a code base by looking at it in the form of pseudocode. And you can actually edit that pseudocode too, and then have changes get made down at the sort of formal programming level. And you can gesture at any piece of logic in your software component of programming. You keep the inflow text editing component of programming, you keep the control of, you can even go down into the code, you can go at higher levels of abstraction, while also giving you these big productivity gains.
Lex
It’d be nice if you can go up and down the abstraction stack.
It’d be nice if you can go up and down the abstraction stack.
Michael
Yeah. And there are a lot of details to figure out there that’s sort of like a fuzzy idea. Time will tell if it actually works. But these principles of control and speed in the human in the driver’s seat, we think are really important. We think for some things like Arvid mentioned before, for some styles of programming, you can hand it off chatbot-style. If you have a bug that’s really well specified. But that’s not most of programming, and that’s also not most of the programming we think a lot of people value.
Yeah. And there are a lot of details to figure out there that’s sort of like a fuzzy idea. Time will tell if it actually works. But these principles of control and speed in the human in the driver’s seat, we think are really important. We think for some things like Arvid mentioned before, for some styles of programming, you can hand it off chatbot-style. If you have a bug that’s really well specified. But that’s not most of programming, and that’s also not most of the programming we think a lot of people value.
Lex
What about the fundamental skill of programming? There’s a lot of people, like young people right now kind of scared, because they love programming, but they’re scared about, “Will I be able to have a future if I pursue this career path?” Do you think the very skill of programming will change fundamentally?
What about the fundamental skill of programming? There’s a lot of people, like young people right now kind of scared, because they love programming, but they’re scared about, “Will I be able to have a future if I pursue this career path?” Do you think the very skill of programming will change fundamentally?
Michael
I actually think this is a really, really exciting time to be building software. We remember what programming was like in 2013, 2012, whatever it was. And there was just so much more cruft and boilerplate and looking up something really gnarly. And that stuff still exists. It’s definitely not at zero. But programming today is way more fun than back then. It’s like we’re really getting down to the delight concentration. And all the things that really draw people to programming, for instance, this element of being able to build things really fast and speed and also individual control, all those are just being turned up a ton.
I actually think this is a really, really exciting time to be building software. We remember what programming was like in 2013, 2012, whatever it was. And there was just so much more cruft and boilerplate and looking up something really gnarly. And that stuff still exists. It’s definitely not at zero. But programming today is way more fun than back then. It’s like we’re really getting down to the delight concentration. And all the things that really draw people to programming, for instance, this element of being able to build things really fast and speed and also individual control, all those are just being turned up a ton.
And so I think it’s going to be a really, really fun time for people who build software. I think that the skills will probably change too. I think that people’s taste and creative ideas will be magnified. And it will be maybe less, a little bit, about boilerplate text editing. Maybe even a little bit less about carefulness, which I think is really important today if you’re a programmer. I think it’ll be a lot more fun.
Lex
What do you guys think?
What do you guys think?
Arvid
I agree. I’m very excited to be able to change… One thing that happened recently, was we wanted to do a relatively big migration to our code base. We were using AsyncLocalStorage in Node.js, which is known to be not very performant, and we wanted to migrate to a context object. And this is a big migration and affects the entire code base. [inaudible 02:22:38] and I spent, I don’t know, five days working through this, even with today’s AI tools. And I am really excited for a future where I can just show a couple of examples and then the AI applies that to all of the locations. And then it highlights, “Oh, this is a new example, what should I do?” And then I show exactly what to do there. And then that can be done in 10 minutes. And then you can iterate much, much faster. Then you don’t have to think as much upfront and stand at the blackboard and think, “Exactly how are we going to do this, because the cost is so high?” But you can just try something first and you realize, “Oh, this is not actually exactly what I want.” And then you can change it instantly again after. And so yeah, I think being a programmer in the future is going to be a lot of fun.
I agree. I’m very excited to be able to change… One thing that happened recently, was we wanted to do a relatively big migration to our code base. We were using AsyncLocalStorage in Node.js, which is known to be not very performant, and we wanted to migrate to a context object. And this is a big migration and affects the entire code base. [inaudible 02:22:38] and I spent, I don’t know, five days working through this, even with today’s AI tools. And I am really excited for a future where I can just show a couple of examples and then the AI applies that to all of the locations. And then it highlights, “Oh, this is a new example, what should I do?” And then I show exactly what to do there. And then that can be done in 10 minutes. And then you can iterate much, much faster. Then you don’t have to think as much upfront and stand at the blackboard and think, “Exactly how are we going to do this, because the cost is so high?” But you can just try something first and you realize, “Oh, this is not actually exactly what I want.” And then you can change it instantly again after. And so yeah, I think being a programmer in the future is going to be a lot of fun.
Aman
Yeah, I really like that point about… It feels like a lot of the time with programming, there are two ways you can go about it. One is you think really hard, carefully upfront about the best possible way to do it and then you spend your limited time of engineering to actually implement it. But I must refer just getting in the code and taking a crack at seeing how it lays out and then iterating really quickly on that. That feels more fun.
Yeah, I really like that point about… It feels like a lot of the time with programming, there are two ways you can go about it. One is you think really hard, carefully upfront about the best possible way to do it and then you spend your limited time of engineering to actually implement it. But I must refer just getting in the code and taking a crack at seeing how it lays out and then iterating really quickly on that. That feels more fun.
Lex
Yeah, just speaking to generate the boilerplate, is great. So you just focus on the nuanced, difficult design decisions. Migration, I feel like this is a cool one. It seems like a larger language models is able to basically translate for one program language to another. Or translate, migrate in the general sense of what migrate is. But that’s in the current moment. So mean the fear has to do with, okay, as these models get better and better, then you’re doing less and less creative decisions. And is it going to kind of move to a place where you’re operating in the design space of natural language where natural language is the main programming language? And I guess I could ask that by way of advice. If somebody’s interested in programming now, what do you think they should learn? You guys started in some Java and I forget the… Oh, some PHP.
Yeah, just speaking to generate the boilerplate, is great. So you just focus on the nuanced, difficult design decisions. Migration, I feel like this is a cool one. It seems like a larger language models is able to basically translate for one program language to another. Or translate, migrate in the general sense of what migrate is. But that’s in the current moment. So mean the fear has to do with, okay, as these models get better and better, then you’re doing less and less creative decisions. And is it going to kind of move to a place where you’re operating in the design space of natural language where natural language is the main programming language? And I guess I could ask that by way of advice. If somebody’s interested in programming now, what do you think they should learn? You guys started in some Java and I forget the… Oh, some PHP.
Michael
PHP.
PHP.
Arvid
PHP.
PHP.
Michael
Objective-C.
Objective-C.
Lex
Objective-C. There you go. I mean in the end, we all know JavaScript was going to win and not TypeScript. It’s going to be like vanilla JavaScript. It’s just going to eat the world and maybe live with PHP. And I mean it also brings up the question of, I think Don Knuth has this idea that some percent of the population is geeks, and there’s a particular kind of psychology in mind required for programming. And it feels like more and more that expands the kind of person that should be able to, can do great programming, might expand.
Objective-C. There you go. I mean in the end, we all know JavaScript was going to win and not TypeScript. It’s going to be like vanilla JavaScript. It’s just going to eat the world and maybe live with PHP. And I mean it also brings up the question of, I think Don Knuth has this idea that some percent of the population is geeks, and there’s a particular kind of psychology in mind required for programming. And it feels like more and more that expands the kind of person that should be able to, can do great programming, might expand.
Aman
I think different people do programming for different reasons. But I think the true, maybe the best programmers, are the ones that really love, just absolutely love programming. For example, there are folks on our team who literally when they get back from work, they go and then they boot up cursor and then they start coding on their side projects for the entire night. And they stay up until 3:00 a.m. doing that. And when they’re sad, they said, “I just really need to code.” And I think there’s that level of programmer where this obsession and love of programming, I think makes, really, the best programmers. And I think these types of people will really get into the details of how things work.
I think different people do programming for different reasons. But I think the true, maybe the best programmers, are the ones that really love, just absolutely love programming. For example, there are folks on our team who literally when they get back from work, they go and then they boot up cursor and then they start coding on their side projects for the entire night. And they stay up until 3:00 a.m. doing that. And when they’re sad, they said, “I just really need to code.” And I think there’s that level of programmer where this obsession and love of programming, I think makes, really, the best programmers. And I think these types of people will really get into the details of how things work.
Lex
I guess the question I’m asking, that exact programmer, let’s think about that person. When the super tab, the super awesome praise be the tab succeeds, and you keep pressing tab-
I guess the question I’m asking, that exact programmer, let’s think about that person. When the super tab, the super awesome praise be the tab succeeds, and you keep pressing tab-
Sualeh
That person in the team loves cursor tab more than anybody else, right?
That person in the team loves cursor tab more than anybody else, right?
Arvid
Yeah. And it’s also not just… Pressing tab is just pressing tab. That’s the easy way to say it in the catchphrase. But what you’re actually doing when you’re pressing tab, is that you’re injecting intent all the time while you’re doing it. Sometimes you’re rejecting it, sometimes you’re typing a few more characters. And that’s the way that you’re sort of shaping the things that’s being created. And I think programming will change a lot to just, “What is it that you want to make?”
Yeah. And it’s also not just… Pressing tab is just pressing tab. That’s the easy way to say it in the catchphrase. But what you’re actually doing when you’re pressing tab, is that you’re injecting intent all the time while you’re doing it. Sometimes you’re rejecting it, sometimes you’re typing a few more characters. And that’s the way that you’re sort of shaping the things that’s being created. And I think programming will change a lot to just, “What is it that you want to make?”
Sualeh
It’s sort of higher bandwidth. The communication to the computer just becomes higher and higher bandwidth as opposed to just typing as much lower bandwidth than communicating intent.
It’s sort of higher bandwidth. The communication to the computer just becomes higher and higher bandwidth as opposed to just typing as much lower bandwidth than communicating intent.
Lex
I mean, this goes to your manifesto titled Engineering Genius. “We are an applied research lab building extraordinary productive human AI systems.” So speaking to this hybrid element.
I mean, this goes to your manifesto titled Engineering Genius. “We are an applied research lab building extraordinary productive human AI systems.” So speaking to this hybrid element.
“To start, we’re building the engineer of the future, a human AI programmer that’s an order of magnitude more effective than any one engineer. This hybrid engineer will have effortless control over their code base and no low entropy keystrokes. They will iterate at the speed of their judgment, even in the most complex systems. Using a combination of AI and human ingenuity they will outsmart and out engineer the best pure AI systems. We are a group of researchers and engineers.
We build software and models to invent at the edge of what’s useful and what’s possible. Our work has already improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of programmers.”
And on the way to that, we’ll at least make programming more fun. So thank you for talking today.
Arvid
Thank you.
Thank you.
Michael
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us.
Aman
Thank you.
Thank you.
Sualeh
Thank you.
Thank you.
Lex
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael, Sualeh, Arvid and Aman. To support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with a random, funny and perhaps profound programming code I saw on Reddit. Nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution that works. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael, Sualeh, Arvid and Aman. To support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with a random, funny and perhaps profound programming code I saw on Reddit. Nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution that works. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #446 with Ed Barnhart.
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And I think that led to figuring out, “Hey, we could actually grow certain things.” And gardens turned into crops, turned into intensive crops, and then people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area. They didn’t have to roam around anymore and that’s where we get the first sedentary communities, which means they stayed in the same place all year long. For the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles depending on the geographic region where they’d know, “Okay, we’ll be in the summer in the mountains because berries and things, and then in the winter we’ll be down here and we’ll hunt,” but they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, I think there, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
And now the thing that seems like madness but might be true is that it could have been as early as 60. A lot of the DNA things are suggesting that the very first migration could have come across as early as 60. And when I was a younger archeologist, it was heresy to go beyond this 12,500. You were a wacko if you said that, but now it’s really very clear that they came over at least by 30,000 and the bridge opened and closed, then open and closed.
Most of those guys have O-blood type and they’re haplogroup D, which is the oldest one that entered the U.S. And what are they doing down there? I do believe they came across the Bering Strait. We have no real evidence to say they came in mass across Oceania. So they made it probably by boat along the coast all the way to South America.
Some of them, Caral is one of the most famous ones just north of Lima, we’ve known about it for a couple of decades now, how old it is. But every time I visit there, it’s like I visited the moon. There’s absolutely nobody there, not for miles. It’s amazing how such a discovery was made, and yet still nobody goes to see it. It’s not easy to get to.
Caral was one of these sites because the coast of Peru has, some of those pyramids that were made by the Moche are full of gold and beautiful ceramics, things that you can sell for big money. But Caral was found a long time ago, but the archeologist was like, “God, no gold, no ceramics. Forget about it. This place is no good. We can’t sell anything here.” And then about the 1970s or ’80s, somebody said, “Hey, no ceramics. Is that older than the invention of ceramics? Shit, we better go take another look at that place.”
I think a lot of the things that are interpreted as baby sacrifices, Coral’s evidence being one of them, I think it’s more about the tragic nature of infant mortality. In the past, it was a lot more common. There were cultures that didn’t even really properly name their kid until they got to five, because chances were they were going to die. And so I think a lot of these babies that we find in these ceremonial contexts that are interpreted as sacrifices, I think they’re putting them in special places because they mourn the death of their kids, and it just happened a lot more frequently then.
Now, that being said, remember we were just talking about Huaca Prieta and this one that’s almost 6000 BC now, is the first one, that one’s a funny case. We just talked about all these lofty goals, but actually I’m pretty sure that Huaca Prieta’s first pyramid was about capping a smelly pile of trash. I think everybody piled up their trash in the middle of town and it stunk. It’s on the coast. It stunk like fish. And somebody said, “If we just bury this thing with dirt, it won’t smell anymore.” And then it was a big mound where people could get up and talk to everybody and then said, “Well, it’s squishy. If we cap it with clay, then it will really not smell.” I really think that the very first pyramids in Peru were about trash management. Talk about deflating, huh?
It used to be archeology that was just the end all, be all. Civilization starts with the invention of agriculture. And we can’t have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm. But that’s been discounted. Peru was a big part of that. That area of Caral, it’s connected to another city on the coast called Aspero. Aspero starts about the same time, but they’re all about fishing. They have no farming. And Caral, who’s upriver from them, is farming, but funny enough, they’re not really farming food. They’re farming cotton and they’re making nets and they’re trading the nets with the people on the coast for the fish. So it’s not as simple as, it’s just agriculture anymore. But it is, I think, still rooted in, how can we feed more people than just our family? How can we together create a food abundance so we’re no longer scared about running out of food?
He also likes to sever people’s heads off and carry them around, but he’s the fanged deity and he’s there. He shows up in ChavÃn de Juantar, the capital of that ChavÃn culture, and he keeps showing up through every culture, even thousands of miles away throughout the next two millennium, right up to the Inca. The Inca have a creator deity they call Viracocha, but Viracocha is the fanged deity. When we do see him, by the time you get to Inca, they do this almost Islamic thing where they say you can’t understand the face of Viracocha. So when they do put him in a cosmogram, they’ll make him just a blob, like he’s just unknowable, but he’s at the very top. I think we’re misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural beings.
If we flip the mirror on Christianity and take a look at it, which of course, Christianity is monotheistic, right? It would be heresy to say otherwise, but who are all these other characters? Who are all these angels and demons and Jesus Christ? I don’t even know who the Holy Spirit is, but he’s some sort of supernatural being. But it’s that monotheistic system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not God. That’s where I think the crux of us misunderstanding ancient Andean art is.
He’s got circular eyes, he’s got a fanged mouth. He’s got claws on his hands and feet. He’s a humanoid, but he also has snakes coming off of his head like hair and snakes coming off of his belt. And then not so much in ChavÃn, but as it goes forward, he starts carting around severed heads, human severed heads. So they’re like, in the old literature, the Moche will call him the decapitator deity, but then they have these other like, “Oh, here’s the crab deity and here’s the fox deity.” But if you look at them, the crab deity is just that guy’s face coming off of a crab, and the fox deity is that guy’s face coming off of a fox.
So I think on that particular instance, I explain it similar to what Zeus did. You know how Zeus was able to turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted, and he showed up in all sorts of forms, but he was always Zeus. I think that the fanged deity manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing stories of mythology that we don’t have anymore.
But the thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fanged deity has a little puppy. He has a puppy that’s just dancing around his feet and jumping up on him in various scenes. They see him again and again. Sometimes he’s in these healing sex scenes. In fact, I tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where a priest was having sex with somebody in a house and a fanged deity, and there’s a puppy just scratching at the door like, “Hey, you forgot me.” And then finally, one day I found one with the puppy having sex with the woman instead of the fanged deity. I was like, “Oh, he really is very involved in this. What is this weird puppy?”
So when the music starts, that’s bringing those spirits in and people don’t see them unless they’ve imbibed the San Pedro cactus juice, which is this hallucinogen, which is in the Amazon side, it was Ayahuasca. On the coast, it was San Pedro cactus, but that’s what allows you to actually see that other world.
Ayahuasca traditionally, they’d take a blow gun and just shoot it up your nose or up your ass, but a lot of times up your nose and when it shoots up your nose, the first thing that happens is just this gush of snot comes out of you. And there are stone depictions of people uncontrollably snotting on the backside of this temple from 3,000 years ago.
Again, it’s not stone built and it’s been under the forest forever. So it’s very torn up, but it’s there. Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now, and a thing that I think is completed now is Brazil and Bolivia partnered together and built a highway all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land, which has found more of these what we call like geometric earthworks. So there’s more and more evidence of these civilizations. It’s not, it could be there. It’s there for sure.
And when I took a trip into the Amazon, I went from Manaus, up the river, the Black River a couple of days, and went and met some different communities. And I asked them about this black earth, and they were like, “Yeah, that’s why we’re here. Sometimes we move our village, but when we move, we look for the terra preta, and that’s where we’re going to put our village, because that’s a place that all of our gardens work. The other places, they don’t.”
There’s where I disagree with him. I think these were independent civilizations that grew up in their own ways, that they were not seeded by some more advanced civilization from the past, and that they all hold things in common because they have this common ancestry of… In his early books, he suggested it’s Atlantis. I don’t think he suggests that anymore, but he still hangs on to the single advanced, now completely lost civilization. And archeologists, all of our ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts, and we could have the story wrong, but one thing we’re real good at is finding stuff. We find fish scales, so I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that we can’t even find a potsherd from.
Another thing that starts fights, that when nobody even fought, is illness. Illness in the Amazon and all of the ancient Americas wasn’t seen as a biological thing, it was a spiritual thing. So if somebody in your village gets sick, the question is asked, “Well, what spirit is menacing him and who called it out on him?” And then, the rumor starts, “Well, I bet you it was Joe over there in that other community. He’s still pissed off for that time when we stole his daughter, and we ought to go over there and kill Joe, and then he’ll get better.” And so this round of never-ending violence, like Hatfields & McCoys had that thing, and the people of New Guinea also do that. So there are certain areas, mostly wooded areas, now that I think about it, where people just hide out and they attack each other as a cultural institution.
There’s a culture that’s some called the Mokaya, not Maya, but they’re on the Pacific coast, where Guatemala and Mexico connect. It’s called the Soconusco. And those are the first people that are really going to be culturally Maya, and they’re interacting with the culture that has traditionally been seen as Mexico’s mother culture, which is the Olmec. They’re kind of the same thing as we were talking about in South America, where the Maya, the original Maya, there’s not a whole lot to indicate that they have a religion. But the Olmec have this religion they develop, and they start exporting it. And you see the Maya become more and more involved in the religion that’s being created by the Olmec, who are to the north of them, in the swamps of what we call the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
The Olmec are really bringing the religion part, but the other areas are bringing technology, ceramic technology, making hematite mirrors, making tools out of obsidian and other stone types. So you’ve got the Olmec in the middle, where Mexico gets skinny, and it gets swampy down there. That’s called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. That’s where the Olmec are. Then, you’ve got the Maya to the east of them. Then, you have the Valley of Oaxaca, where the people called the Zapotecs, they’re rising up. And then, you have the Valley of Mexico, which will eventually become the Aztecs, but not for millennia. All those areas are interacting with each other.
There’s five planets we can see visibly. So they started watching, like, “Why are just those seven moving differently than the rest?” And those are the things that they keyed on mathematically. The Sun, of course, was also involved in the agricultural cycle, so that was important in and of itself. But the planets, we can see them coming up with ideas, definitely doing the math, and seeing that there is a repeated cycle, and then coming up with mythology around them, like Venus for them was associated with war, and they had very ritualized times to go to war that had something to do with Venus.
Sometimes, in the classic period Maya, it was the first appearance of Venus as the Morning Star. That was a good time to go to battle with your neighbors. And when it became the post-classic, with Chichén Itzá being the capital of the Yucatan, then it looks like, if you watch Venus day after day, it goes slowly up every day, and then when it hits its highest point as Morning Star in the morning, it goes down to the Earth like three times as fast. All of a sudden, it just shoots down and hits the Earth. And so the people of post-classic Maya civilization saw that as the gods shooting a spear into the Earth, and that was a good time to attack your neighbors. That was like war time, when the spear is going to hit the earth.
That’s how they figured out kind of the Holy Grail of ancient astronomy. How good were they was whether they could see the procession of the equinoxes, the fact that we’re just barely wobbling, and there’s a 26,000-year period where the stars as that backdrop will spin all the way around and come back. It’s 26,000 years. But the Maya we’re able to figure out, “Wait, it’s moving one degree every 72 years,” and did a calculation based on where it should be in the ancient past, and they were using constellations. They’re showing us they know by saying like, “This planet’s in this constellation right now, and 33,000 years ago, it would be in this constellation.”
Everybody in the highlands knows what their birthday is in that calendar, knows what it means about their personality and the kind of jobs that they’re supposed to do. Each one of those days has their own spirit and what’s supposed to happen in those days. The Maya collectively call them the Mom, the Grandmother, Grandfather spirits, and they talk to each one of those days, and they pray to them. There’s now an association of some 8,000 people that are called [inaudible 01:31:33], that are daykeepers who are keeping the days, and they’re also like community psychologists, almost. People come to them and say, “You know, my life is mixed up. What’s wrong here?” “Well, let’s ask the Mom. Okay, well, it looks like you’re not doing this or that, or you know what, you’re an accountant? You’re not supposed to be an accountant. You’re supposed to be a midwife. What are you doing? You’re living your life wrong. You’re a Kibʼ. You need to start being a Kibʼ person.”
And so it should be there’s 1s, there’s 20s, there’s 400s, there’s 8,000s, there’s 160,000s. It goes just like our 10s, 100s, 1,000s, 10,000s, but it’s times 20. So they have days, months of 20 days, and then they have these years that should be, by their math, 400, but it’s only 360. And that throws the whole thing out of whack going further up. Then, they have a 20-year period and a 400- year period. 400 years to their calendar, but by that time, it’s only 396 years in our reckoning. So it’s mysterious that it’s… Why did they tweak it at the year to be only 360 days? That doesn’t follow any astronomy, that’s not the human cycle.
And they have a creation story called the and the Popol Vuh, and the Popol Vuh is clear as day that the third creation ends with the help of these heroes called the Hero Twins, and the fourth creation begins. And so on the Maya monuments, we see them doing the math through the Long Count, and we can calculate it back very exactly. It happened, the fourth creation started on August 11th 3114 BC. And it doesn’t say it’s day one, it says it’s the last day of the 13th baktun of the third creation, which leads us to believe that a creation is only 13 baktuns long.
Above that, there’s the piktun, then there’s the kalabatun, then there’s alawatun, and it goes on and on. And these are like 160,000 years, huge increments of time. Whenever they want to do that, and they talk about a long period of time, they start putting 13s in all of those increments, those higher increments. And I think what they’re saying is they’re making an esoteric statement about the never-ending nature of time. That’s what I think they’re telling us in those texts, that time goes on forever, magically.
One of the weird things is that the Aztecs, who we talked to a lot at contact, they also had the concept of multiple creations before us, but they were real clear to the Spanish that they weren’t all the same time element. Some of them were in the three hundreds of years, some of them were in the seven hundreds of years, but they were not the same time period. So our mathematical logic that if the third creation was 13, this one must be third creation, or also be 13, it’s in direct opposition to what the Aztecs told us about the nature of creations. They’re different time periods.
But it is funny how oftentimes these Maya horoscopes, for lack of a better word, do hit the mark. There was some student who surveyed like 300 people with the app I made and asked them about their Greek sign and their Maya sign, and his conclusion for his term paper was that the Maya one was working way better, which that’s fascinating. At least that’s fun. But no, I think I’m too much of a scientist to believe that. I just don’t have any foundation in science that would allow us to believe that the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny.
The big key is that the Maya still speak that same language. There are millions of Maya people who are speaking a version of Maya. Now there’s where I get confused, that we’ve got a single writing system that is intelligible, we’ve broken the code, so we know that it’s basically the same writing system from the top of the Yucatan into Guatemala and El Salvador. But we have 33 Maya languages today that are mutually unintelligible. And we backwards project the language of what they spoke back then that the glyphs are in to something called Chʼoltiʼ, which is a combination of Chʼortiʼ and Ch’ol, two of those languages.
But it doesn’t work for me at all. If there was one language, maybe two back then, how did it flower into 33 mutually unintelligible languages in just 500 years during acculturation and horrible infectious diseases that killed 90% of the population? How did that happen? So we’re missing something huge here. I think it’s more like Chinese, where Chinese letters, writing can be read in multiple languages and still understood. I don’t know exactly the mechanics of how that would happen, but it just seems impossible that there are more languages, not less languages, in the Maya area after the last 500 years that they’ve been through.
His two key examples were a picture of a dog with a symbol over it and a picture of a turkey with a symbol over it. And the dog, a dog in Yucatec is tzul. So he saw two symbols and he said, “This one’s probably tzul and this one’s ul”. And then the Turkey was kutz, so it would be ku ending in tz. And he showed how, look, this is, this is tzul. Those two things that should be tz are the same symbol. And that began this process of unraveling the syllables that we’re still working on today.
There’s also, the big one is Harappan. For a long time we used to say there were five independent scripts on the planet, and those were Chinese, Cuneiform, which is Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Maya, and then Harappan, which is from Northern India. That’s the only one that we’ve never cracked. And now all the epigraphers, the people, that’s the term, epigraphy is translating these languages, they’re all ganging up on Harappan and want to kick it off the list because we can’t break it. It had a big enough symbol set, but no one’s been able to crack it. And now they’re saying it’s just an elaborate symbol set and doesn’t reflect the spoken word.
They also encoded language in there. They had entire libraries in Cusco where Spanish conquistadors were brought through, and the caretakers of the libraries would just, they’d say, “Pull that one down, read that one to me.” And he’d pull it out and just read a history of something that happened 200 years earlier. So it was definitely writing.
But in the 1570s, one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called quipucamayocs, gathered up, had them read all of their quipus and transcribe them into Spanish books, and then had the quipus burned and those people murdered.
But then on a much simpler level, there’s llama herders who keep a string in their pocket and they’ve got the knots equaling how many llamas they have, and then they have subcategories of information like, this one’s sick, we’ve lost these ones, this one’s pregnant. So they have these more simple and more mathematical quipus, but they’re using them to affect as a record.
There was the site that I mapped for my dissertation and spent years in the jungle there, Palenque, had a lord’s title named Fire Lord. That was one of the generals of their army. And we could tell that position changed over time. So there was one guy named Chak Suutz’ who was the Fire Lord for the early part of a reign of a king called Ahkal Moʼ Nahb. Then by the time he carves this other panel, there’s another guy in the position of K’ak Ajaw, which was the Fire Lord. And so he had-
But then when Chichen Itza falls, there’s a new city that’s architecture looks a lot like Chichen Itza. It’s called Mayapan. But it has what is called the League of Mayapan. And it has a council of representatives from the communities from all around the Yucatan. And it is basically a democracy. It is a Maya democracy that happens. The individuals from all around the Yucatan are there. Each family has their own council house at Mayapan, though they live back at their place. It’s kind of like a Maya Congress.
So yeah, we have Preclassic is like the origins of civilization. They’re starting to build cities. They’re starting to create their calendar. They’re starting to create these wonderful works of art. And the Classic period, if you look at 10 different textbooks for the Maya, you’ll get 10 different dates that wiggle around in there. But basically that’s the age of kings to me. That’s when these cities decide that they’re going to organize themselves around elite royal families that have this magical blood that can contact their ancestors that are directly in contact with the gods. The Maya never contact their gods directly. They contact their ancestors who are up there who act like liaisons to the gods.
And so the Maya age of kings has these dynasties sprouting up where these people have basically snowed the rest of the people, that they’ve got a special quality of their blood and only their offspring can do the same trick and talk to the gods, where everybody, every Joe Maya can let their blood and burn it and contact their ancestor. But Joe Maya’s dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below and he’s got no influence over the gods. But the rulers, their spirits go down briefly, but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are and act as liaisons. So that’s the validation for this kingship that happens for about 400 years.
I know we say 250 to 900, which is kind of the encompassing edges of it, but it’s interesting that it’s actually specifically the ninth bakʼtun of their history. The ninth bakʼtun begins in like 426, and it ends in like 829. So it’s a 400-year period of time. And before that, there were no kings. And after that, there really aren’t kings. They’re heads of councils. So I call it the age of kings, where everybody’s following the directives of basically a despot. And for a while, that’s great. Cities build up, populations happening. I see it as kind of a cult of personality moment too. Strong, charismatic leaders inspire people to do great things together.
But eventually happens all the time with power, too much power corrupts. All of a sudden there’s this unwieldy huge elite class that has to be treated special by everybody else. And they start saying, “Well, I think we should fight with those guys and you guys should go take these things.” And people eventually get sick of it and they walk away from these cities, and that’s how we get the mysterious Maya collapse where all these cities are just gone.
And it seems like right there around between 800 and 900, a lot of the elites that were on top, most of it was in the rainforests of northern Guatemala, they move. They move in two directions. Some of them move into the highlands of Guatemala, and some of them move up into the Yucatan. The city of Chichen Itza becomes the next big capital in Yucatan. But the word Itza is actually a word describing the people who lived around Lake Peten Itza in northern Guatemala. And all of the Maya are super clear about that, that the Itza came in as immigrants with these new ideas and created Chichen Itza. So the elites who were no longer welcome in their cities just moved and set up shops somewhere else.
I remember really stark evidence in Copán, Honduras. Copán was this beautiful city, lineage of 17 kings. But the last kings and the last elite burials that we dig from the city center, the teeth are the telling part. They get this thing, when you’re growing up and you’re not getting enough food seasonally, it shows up in the enamel of your teeth. It’s called dental hypoplasia. And if somebody’s seasonally starving, it gets these lines in their teeth. And that last generation of Maya before they left Copán, even the rich people are seasonally starving. So there’s a problem there for sure.
But I also think, it’s a weird thing, it was not an empire. It was a group of independent city states like Greece. Some of them were allied, some of them were enemies. There was a huge civil war that settled out about the end of the Classic period. So if it was Europe, the victors would’ve taken over, the losers would’ve beat it and gone wherever they went. But when they abandoned these cities that were independent still, they all left both the guys that won and the guys that lost the war. So it couldn’t be just as simple as spoils go to the victor.
It’s such a wide area. Not everybody was starving like the people in the Copán Valley. So I personally think it was calendrically timed. It is interesting to note that that ninth period, that ninth 400-year period ends right then. And I think a lot of people, I can’t prove it archeologically, but I think a lot of people said we’re coming to the end of a great cycle and we need to renew. We need to change what we’re doing.
When you talk to the Maya today, like at the end of this 2012 thing, if you actually talk to Maya, say, “What happens at the end of a big cycle here?” They say cycles are a time of renewal and transformation, that it is all of our obligation to change our lives at the end of cycles. That change is coming. We can either be part of it or we can get steamrolled by it.
The Aztecs did this neat thing called the New Fire Ceremony every 52 years, which was the biggest their calendar would go. They’d burn down perfectly good temples. And they’d burn down their houses sometimes. And they would just, everybody in society would perform this, what they call the New Fire Ceremony, and they would renew the world. So I think my personal theory is that the Maya decided at the end of the ninth bakʼtun that it was time to renew the world.
But then they show up late game, and they become mercenaries. They just start working for communities in the Valley of Mexico. And this takes place in the 1300s. So about 200 years before Cortez shows up, the Aztecs show up to the Valley of Mexico. And they make themselves this indispensable group of mercenaries. They do the dirty work. All the civilized communities around Lake Texcoco, which is now Mexico City, it’s all dried up, but those guys were too civilized to fight with each other. But they could hire the Aztecs to do their dirty stuff. So the Aztecs did that and really changed the politics in the game of the Valley of Mexico.
So one of these kings that they were working for really liked them and decided, I’m going to make the Aztecs part of our ancestry. I’m going to give them my daughter to marry the head of the Aztecs. And the Aztecs sacrificed her. And that really pissed that guy off. So he took his whole army and ran the Aztecs out for a while. They say they live in this horrible desert section eating lizards.
But then one of their priests say, “We’re going to walk around the lake, and my visions say that where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital.” And they see that, but it’s out on an island in the lake. And he said, “Well, I don’t know, that’s the place.” So they build up an island, they go to that island, and then they just start piling up lake muck until they make a whole city there in the middle of the lake. They make an island city. And all of this occurs in about a hundred years. So they show up about 1300. The capital of Tenochtitlan, as they called it, is really established. And from there, they quickly take over the entire valley. They make what they call the Triple Alliance, which is the two other big communities of the lake are now their allies, but they’re not really allies. The Aztecs were brutal. Those guys agreed to shut up and let the Aztecs run the show. And then the Aztecs spread like a wildfire all the way down into the Maya area. Everywhere they go, they rename everybody’s towns and make them pay tribute.
The first thing they’d do is they’d show up with a bunch of merchants. There was a merchant class who were also military. They were really the people who assessed where they were going to attack next. They’d go in with a bunch of Aztec products and say, “We’d like to trade with you.” But all the time, they were assessing their military prowess, what products they had that they could take. And then soon after the pochteca were there would come the military with the reconnaissance.
But then right next to the temple, on either side were the two temples of the warriors. One was the Eagle Warrior clan, the other one was the Jaguar Warrior clan. And they were symbolically in competition with each other, though a unified force. I guess probably an analogy between the Navy and the Air Force. They had a good-natured competition of who was better, but they were the same force. So those were their symbolic warriors.
The same sort of thing happened with the Aztec that there was, Mesoamerica really didn’t have huge standing armies, but the Aztec put this army together and they intimidated people. They didn’t actually have to use it a lot. It was used to great effect in the valley of Mexico and for the rest of Mesoamerica it was mostly the fear factor.
They had this just grotesque, violent bent, but in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance. The same Aztec king who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry or the poetry of famous statesmen that had come before him. And they spent money on things like flower gardens. All of the causeways leading to the Aztec capitol had beautiful flower gardens and they had a museum and they had an aquarium and a zoo, and they had an opera and they had a ballet. And these things existed together. There was not, in the Aztec mind, any conflict between witnessing someone’s heart getting ripped out one moment, and in the evening we’d go to the ballet.
But they’d actually tie this paper onto their penis, cut it, and then dance. So the blood splattered, but it was them cutting themselves. It was different than killing a bunch of other people for it. It was a auto-sacrifice, we call it. Still very macabre, but very different than deciding a whole bunch of other people should die. It was a self-sacrifice thing.
So they decided this one poor sucker group, not that far away, called the Tlaxcallans, that they were never going to make peace with them so that they could go close by every year and just have a little symbolic war with the Tlaxcallans and haul them back for a sacrifice. Cortes met those guys and he was like, here are people who hate their guts. I’ll just use these guys. So we say, oh, Cortes took over the Aztec world. It was Cortes and 20,000 super pissed-off, Tlaxcallans.
But Pedro Alvarado is left back in town in charge and they’re doing another one of these huge Aztec buffets and parties to honor them. And it happens. The guy says, “Hey, do you like dinner?” Like, oh yeah, it’s a nice dinner. “Well, it’s humans. You’re eating humans. See, I told you they were good.” And Alvarado just freaks out and he has the guards close the doors and he murders everyone in the party. Women, children, nobody has weapons. He just murders everyone.
And that’s what spazzes the Aztecs out to eventually murder Montezuma who was their captive and then try to murder all of them. And it was all Pedro Alvarado’s fault for freaking out about eating humans.
And if your mayor here agrees, then he can have a town. He can have a house in Cusco. But then the very next month, a big work crew would show up and they’d start building agricultural terraces and storage units. And every month with the agricultural excess, they would have big parties and everybody would eat. So people lived well in the Inca Empire. It was a rough beginning, but everybody who agreed to be part of it immediately had access to a whole bunch of resources and security they never had.
They’d send the Khipukamayuq, the guys who would weave or knot the khipus as accountants, and they would go through and say what everybody did. Okay, you’re a good farmer. You’re going to farm. You are a good weaver. You’re going to weave. All the men here are going to take a turn at being part of the army. And then they sent independent Khipukamayuqs too. Every community had five or six that were not allowed to work with each other, and they all had to independently send their Khipus back to Cusco. And if there were accounting discrepancies that were called to Cusco to figure out who was lying about what.
We’ll go dig up your dog. And they were like, but the kids really want to help you. So their kids came out and this was like their puppy, and it died less than a year ago. When we got to it, one of them just grabbed up a bone and he was like, [inaudible 02:40:59] like little bitty bones. Yay. What a weird attitude. That’s your dead dog there. But they have a different relationship with the dead.
I think they melted them together. And there are weird places when you really look at closely to these stones, which I’ve done a number of times. I’m going back next month to Machu Picchu and especially Cusco. I walk around in the alleys where these 500 to a thousand-year-old walls are still there. And I see things like the crystals in the andesite are almost stitched together along the seams. The andesite around it is melted and the crystals haven’t. And there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall. It’s just melted. Like somebody took a rag and wiped it while it was soft. Lots of talk about soft stones turning hard too. I haven’t been able to prove it. This is one of these end of my archeological career chapters. I’m either going to prove myself wrong or prove it, but I think they used acids. My dad’s a chemist and he told me a long time ago that there’s no way, there’s no naturally occurring acids. But my current theory, actually, I got the idea initially from the show Breaking Bad.
I don’t know if you ever saw that show, but there’s a point in which they’re trying to dissolve a body and they’re using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling. That hydrofluoric acid is so fascinating. It won’t go through plastic, and you can also bring it in inert parts and then combine it. The Inca made tons of jewelry out of fluorite. Fluorite is big in the Andes, and they also mined a lot of things for gold and silver. And the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid.
You put sulfuric acid and fluorite together and it’s hydrofluoric acid, and that will burn through andesite or anything. And if you learned how to do it judiciously and you didn’t care whether servants lost an arm or two, then you could actually use them to fuse these together. And I think they’re fused together. I asked the city of Cusco if I could take some core samples, and they said, go away, gringo. Don’t touch our walls. So actually this next time I’m going to go try to talk to the more Quechua authorities in a place called Ollantaytambo and maybe I can convince them, but right now, they just think I’m a weird-ass gringo who wants to put holes in their walls.
So we’ve got these two clusters. The very first major community in North America is in the most unlikely place. It’s in Northern Louisiana. People think I’m crazy when I say this, but there is a pyramid in Northern Louisiana, a big one at a site called Poverty Point that is 3,500 years old. So it’s the same age as the pyramids in Egypt, and it is a giant thing just poking out of the bayous of Louisiana. And people don’t believe me when I say it, but it’s there.
But in their full living form, they did have cores of dirt, but then they also had kind of clay caps. So they had terraces. They had whole complexes of buildings up on top. There were kings that lived up there. There’s the biggest of the Mississippian cities is called Cahokia, and it’s right outside of St. Louis.
And it was huge. It had a population of 20,000 people and pyramids all over the place, a huge palisade wall around it. It was absolutely gigantic, a thriving metropolis. And we in America have kind of a collective amnesia. We never hear about these massive civilizations. Cahokia was the big first city, but then it spread from the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic. There were hundreds and hundreds of these big cities that had five to 10,000 people each.
I’m not talking about just archeology. We find him in archeology now. But Hernando de Soto landed in Florida and went for three years from, he went up into the Carolinas and over down into Alabama and Louisiana, and he’s the first one to see the Mississippi up there. But for three years he went through city after city after city, unfortunately decimating them, eating all their corn, giving them diseases. But the documentation’s clearly there. He met collectively, millions of people in a very sophisticated and uniform civilization.
But the numbers, it’s a shameful part of history, and it wasn’t something that Europe perpetrated on them. Medical science at that time was still the four humors theory, that people were made of yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. And we did things like, well, you’ve got to bleed him. He’ll feel better then. So we had no idea what an infectious disease was, but the reality was that this horde of diseases hit everyone. And the numbers are now saying in the first 50 years that 90% of everybody was dead, and that the number of people has increased as well as far as our estimates. We’re thinking it’s somewhere around 150 million people and 90% of them died. And with them, all their knowledge. Just, I mean, imagine the moment where who dies when things get bad? It’s the young and the old. So all the knowledge keepers die suddenly.
The children die. This next generation that’s half taught and now completely demoralized thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their gods hate them, that the only way out of it is to accept this new Christianity. But they don’t want to have to bring kids into this world where everybody’s dying. And even if they do, they can’t teach them what the old people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn’t finish the transmission. So in a single terrible moment in human history, the generation loses all their knowledge. So a lot of the things these people knew just blipped out.
They attacked the Viking settlement every day and did not give them an inch until they decided it was just worthless and they left it. The Vikings attacked Ireland, and they just found a bunch of monasteries full of gold with a bunch of guys going, “We’re men of God, we don’t fight.” And the Vikings were like, “This is great. That’s great. This will be easy, then. We’ll just loot all these Easter eggs.” But the Native Americans in Canada were not having it. They kicked their ass. In fact, Leif Erickson’s brother Thor died there. The natives killed him. He was supposed to be in charge of expanding the settlement, but they just killed him.
In fact, there was a really poignant story I read of a Spanish priest in the Amazon, in the Brazilian northern part of the Amazon where he made this utopian community and he was bringing people in that were getting sick, and he wrote, “I’m baptizing everyone. I have baptized 10,000 people a day, and yet God’s still killing them. Why is he doing this to them? They’re doing everything that I ask them to do. They are submitting to the will of God.” But this guy doesn’t realize that the same bowl of holy water that he’s baptizing them in, he’s just wiping the disease on everybody’s faces. He’s accelerating it when he doesn’t even realize. He thinks he’s saving them, but he’s actually killing them. That’s a tragedy. That’s not just like spoils go to the victor stuff. That’s just straight up tragedy.
Statistically speaking, the universe is way too big. We can’t be the only sentient beings. There’s got to be somebody else out there. Whether they care about us, that’s a question. I’ve been on Ancient Aliens a number of times. I show up and I’m an educator. I mean, refusing to be part of the conversation is an immediate fail in my book. But there was one time where they asked me at the end, “Do you have anything else do you want to say?” And I said, “Well, y’all’s premise is that aliens came down a long time ago and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts of science and medicine, engineering, all these things. Today we also have a lot of stories of the aliens coming down, but now all they’re doing is mutilating cows and sodomizing rednecks.” Like whatever we did, we super pissed them off apparently.”
I think we’re wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this. We’re delusional. I’m all for electric cars and being good stewards of the environment, but we are wasting our time not technologically adapting to what’s about to happen. We’re spending too much time pretending, the average American thinks if we all just drive electric cars, we’ll be okay. That’s bullshit. That’s not going to happen. We need to start making technologies that desalinize water, a host of things that we need to use our technological capacity to accept it and adapt, instead of Pollyanna thinking we can make it go away.
What I’m really trying to do with this too, it’s specifically the Americas. I want to be part of the reawakening that there were these great civilizations here, especially North America. I think that we have a group amnesia that there was no great civilizations here before Europe showed up. That’s simply not true. I think it should be part of our history books. In fact, I have a program called Before the Americas that would introduce as part of a American history, the part before European contact. And I think that kids in the K through 12 level should grow up not being told this fallacy that no one was here before we showed up in 1492. And one of these days I’m going to find a funder to help us put together Before the Americas and we’re going to make it part of the curriculum for every kid in the U.S. to know the full history of this country.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 1:39 – Lost civilizations
- 8:43 – Hunter-gatherers
- 12:16 – First humans in the Americas
- 22:07 – South America
- 27:36 – Pyramids
- 34:40 – Religion
- 47:44 – Shamanism
- 49:41 – Ayahuasca
- 55:54 – Lost City of Z
- 1:00:48 – Graham Hancock
- 1:07:51 – Uncontacted tribes
- 1:13:51 – Maya civilization
- 1:29:40 – Mayan calendar
- 1:44:57 – Flood myths
- 2:13:25 – Aztecs
- 2:30:52 – Inca Empire
- 2:48:52 – Early humans in North America
- 2:54:50 – Columbus
- 2:59:26 – Vikings
- 3:03:35 – Aliens
- 3:08:02 – Earth in 10,000 years
- 3:24:12 – Hope for the future
Introduction
Ed Barnhart
For the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region, but they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
For the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region, but they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
Lex Fridman
I think you said beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec.
I think you said beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec.
Ed Barnhart
What I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and ripping people’s hearts out. They had this just grotesque, violent bend, but in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance. The same Aztec king who would order the hearts of 1,000 people extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry. But they were really just surgical about it. They’d use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down, pull up, and just [inaudible 00:01:11].
What I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and ripping people’s hearts out. They had this just grotesque, violent bend, but in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance. The same Aztec king who would order the hearts of 1,000 people extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry. But they were really just surgical about it. They’d use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down, pull up, and just [inaudible 00:01:11].
Lex Fridman
While the person was alive?
While the person was alive?
Ed Barnhart
Yep, while the person was alive.
Yep, while the person was alive.
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Ed Barnhart, an archeologist specializing in ancient civilizations of South America, Mesoamerica, and North America. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Ed Barnhart.
The following is a conversation with Ed Barnhart, an archeologist specializing in ancient civilizations of South America, Mesoamerica, and North America. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Ed Barnhart.
Lost civilizations
Lex Fridman
Do you think there are lost civilizations in the history of humans on earth which we don’t know anything about?
Do you think there are lost civilizations in the history of humans on earth which we don’t know anything about?
Ed Barnhart
Yes, I do. And in fact, we have found some civilizations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime. I mean, we’ve got Gobekli Tepe and we’ve got the stuff that’s going on in the Amazon, and there’s some other less startling things that we had no idea existed and push our dates back and gave us whole new civilizations we had no idea about. So yeah, it’s happened and I think it’ll happen again.
Yes, I do. And in fact, we have found some civilizations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime. I mean, we’ve got Gobekli Tepe and we’ve got the stuff that’s going on in the Amazon, and there’s some other less startling things that we had no idea existed and push our dates back and gave us whole new civilizations we had no idea about. So yeah, it’s happened and I think it’ll happen again.
Lex Fridman
Do you think there’s a loss civilization in the Amazon that the Amazon jungle has eaten up or is hiding the evidence of?
Do you think there’s a loss civilization in the Amazon that the Amazon jungle has eaten up or is hiding the evidence of?
Ed Barnhart
Yes, I do. And we’re beginning to find it. There are these huge, what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average Joe, when they hear the word civilization, they think of something that looks like Rome. And I don’t think we’re ever going to find anything that looks like Rome in the Amazon. I think a lot of things there, I mean, wherever you are on the planet, you use your natural resources. And in the Amazon, there’s not a whole lot of stone. What stone is there is deep, deep, deep. So a lot of their things were built out of dirt and trees and feathers and textiles.
Yes, I do. And we’re beginning to find it. There are these huge, what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average Joe, when they hear the word civilization, they think of something that looks like Rome. And I don’t think we’re ever going to find anything that looks like Rome in the Amazon. I think a lot of things there, I mean, wherever you are on the planet, you use your natural resources. And in the Amazon, there’s not a whole lot of stone. What stone is there is deep, deep, deep. So a lot of their things were built out of dirt and trees and feathers and textiles.
Lex Fridman
But is it possible that all that land that’s not covered by trees is actually hiding stone, for example, some architecture, some things that are just very difficult to find for archeologists.
But is it possible that all that land that’s not covered by trees is actually hiding stone, for example, some architecture, some things that are just very difficult to find for archeologists.
Ed Barnhart
I think at the base of the Andes where the Amazon connects to the Andes, there’s a lot of potential there because that’s where the stone actually starts poking up. When you get down into the basin, stone is meters and meters under the ground except for a stray cliff here and there where the river dug deep. And even then only in the dry season, because that river rises over 100 feet every year.
I think at the base of the Andes where the Amazon connects to the Andes, there’s a lot of potential there because that’s where the stone actually starts poking up. When you get down into the basin, stone is meters and meters under the ground except for a stray cliff here and there where the river dug deep. And even then only in the dry season, because that river rises over 100 feet every year.
Lex Fridman
Well, that’s one of the things, having visited that area, just interacting with waterfalls and seeing the water, I was humbled by the power of water to shape landscapes and probably erase history in the context that we’re talking about of civilizations. Water can just make everything disappear over a period of centuries and millennia, and so if there’s something existed a very long time ago, thousands of years ago, it’s very possible it was just eaten up by nature.
Well, that’s one of the things, having visited that area, just interacting with waterfalls and seeing the water, I was humbled by the power of water to shape landscapes and probably erase history in the context that we’re talking about of civilizations. Water can just make everything disappear over a period of centuries and millennia, and so if there’s something existed a very long time ago, thousands of years ago, it’s very possible it was just eaten up by nature.
Ed Barnhart
Absolutely. In fact, in my opinion, that’s almost a certainty in a lot of places. The Grand Canyon was dug by water. There’s this wimpy little river in it right now, and you can’t possibly imagine that it dug that, but it did. The power of nature and geology is really magical. And when it comes to ancient civilizations that could be from a long time ago, there’s probably a lot that are just under the ocean, and just the wave action have destroyed them and what they haven’t destroyed buried deep.
Absolutely. In fact, in my opinion, that’s almost a certainty in a lot of places. The Grand Canyon was dug by water. There’s this wimpy little river in it right now, and you can’t possibly imagine that it dug that, but it did. The power of nature and geology is really magical. And when it comes to ancient civilizations that could be from a long time ago, there’s probably a lot that are just under the ocean, and just the wave action have destroyed them and what they haven’t destroyed buried deep.
Lex Fridman
Under the ocean. So you think Atlantis ever existed?
Under the ocean. So you think Atlantis ever existed?
Ed Barnhart
I don’t think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato’s many parables talking about putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school. If one did exist or a shadow of it, my money would be on Akrotiri. Akrotiri is what’s left of a big city that was on the island of Santorini, and when their volcano blew up, it blew up most of the city and shot chunks of it so vast that 70 miles away in Crete there are chunks of Santorini in their cliff. So it blasted what was ever there. But what’s left on the side of the crater Akrotiri is strangely advanced for its age. And so if there’s anything that’s a model for Atlantis, as Plato explained it, it’s Akrotiri.
I don’t think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato’s many parables talking about putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school. If one did exist or a shadow of it, my money would be on Akrotiri. Akrotiri is what’s left of a big city that was on the island of Santorini, and when their volcano blew up, it blew up most of the city and shot chunks of it so vast that 70 miles away in Crete there are chunks of Santorini in their cliff. So it blasted what was ever there. But what’s left on the side of the crater Akrotiri is strangely advanced for its age. And so if there’s anything that’s a model for Atlantis, as Plato explained it, it’s Akrotiri.
Lex Fridman
Akrotiri, the ancient Greek city, it says, “The settlement was destroyed in the Theran eruption sometime in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash, which preserved the remains of the frescoes and many objects and artworks.” So we don’t know how advanced that civilization was.
Akrotiri, the ancient Greek city, it says, “The settlement was destroyed in the Theran eruption sometime in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash, which preserved the remains of the frescoes and many objects and artworks.” So we don’t know how advanced that civilization was.
Ed Barnhart
No, but we can walk around the ruins and see that it’s got streets, it’s got plumbing, it’s got little sconces for torches at night. It was a vibrant city with a lot of, especially in terms of hydraulic engineering, it’s very advanced for being 3,500 years old.
No, but we can walk around the ruins and see that it’s got streets, it’s got plumbing, it’s got little sconces for torches at night. It was a vibrant city with a lot of, especially in terms of hydraulic engineering, it’s very advanced for being 3,500 years old.
Lex Fridman
So if you check it out, here’s an image of the excavation. What a project.
So if you check it out, here’s an image of the excavation. What a project.
Ed Barnhart
It’s an amazing place and you can tell that it’s just part of it because it’s pretty close to where the crater begins. So the city itself was probably much larger.
It’s an amazing place and you can tell that it’s just part of it because it’s pretty close to where the crater begins. So the city itself was probably much larger.
Lex Fridman
So in this case, there’s a lot of evidence, but like we said, there could be civilizations that there is very little evidence of because of the natural environment that destroys all the evidence.
So in this case, there’s a lot of evidence, but like we said, there could be civilizations that there is very little evidence of because of the natural environment that destroys all the evidence.
Ed Barnhart
Right. And I think Akrotiri’s actually a great example of that because here we have the side that did preserve, that looks amazing, but we know there was more of the city that was completely obliterated. It was shot. Chunks of that city are probably in the walls of Crete 70 miles away, and Plato says that it sunk. It was on an island and it sunk. Well, that’s exactly what happened to Akrotiri.
Right. And I think Akrotiri’s actually a great example of that because here we have the side that did preserve, that looks amazing, but we know there was more of the city that was completely obliterated. It was shot. Chunks of that city are probably in the walls of Crete 70 miles away, and Plato says that it sunk. It was on an island and it sunk. Well, that’s exactly what happened to Akrotiri.
Lex Fridman
Do you think this is what Plato was referring to?
Do you think this is what Plato was referring to?
Ed Barnhart
If it does exist, at least the model of it, I think this is probably what he was talking about.
If it does exist, at least the model of it, I think this is probably what he was talking about.
Lex Fridman
And there could be other civilizations of which Plato has never written that we have no record of?
And there could be other civilizations of which Plato has never written that we have no record of?
Ed Barnhart
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
And it’s humbling to think that entire civilizations with all the dreams, the hope, the technological innovation, the wars, the conflicts, the political tensions, all of that, the social interactions, the hierarchies, all of that, the art can be just destroyed like that and forgotten, completely lost to ancient history.
And it’s humbling to think that entire civilizations with all the dreams, the hope, the technological innovation, the wars, the conflicts, the political tensions, all of that, the social interactions, the hierarchies, all of that, the art can be just destroyed like that and forgotten, completely lost to ancient history.
Ed Barnhart
I reflect upon that often as an archeologist. I think about this great country that I live in and love and all the things we’ve achieved, but we’re a baby historically speaking. We’ve been around 200 years. Heck, a lot of the cities I study in Central and South America, they had a run of 800, 1,000 years, and now they’re ruins. But we’re barely getting started in terms of historical civilizations.
I reflect upon that often as an archeologist. I think about this great country that I live in and love and all the things we’ve achieved, but we’re a baby historically speaking. We’ve been around 200 years. Heck, a lot of the cities I study in Central and South America, they had a run of 800, 1,000 years, and now they’re ruins. But we’re barely getting started in terms of historical civilizations.
Hunter-gatherers
Lex Fridman
So humans, homo sapiens evolved, but they didn’t start civilizations right away. There was a long period of time when they did not form these complex societies. So how do we, let’s say, 300,000 years ago in Africa, actually go from there to creating civilizations?
So humans, homo sapiens evolved, but they didn’t start civilizations right away. There was a long period of time when they did not form these complex societies. So how do we, let’s say, 300,000 years ago in Africa, actually go from there to creating civilizations?
Ed Barnhart
I think that a lot of human evolution had to do with the pressures that their environment put upon them. And a lot of things start changing right around 12,000 years ago, and that’s when our last ice age really ended. I think there was a whole lot of things that just pressured them into, especially, finding new ways of subsistence. Here in the Americas, a huge thing that happened was all the megafauna went away. When the climate changed enough, the mammoths died out and the bison died out, and they had to come up with different ways of doing things. We were hunters and gatherers, and we had things we got from hunting, and we got things we got from gathering. And in the Americas, when the things that they were used to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits, the gathering started to be a much more important thing.
I think that a lot of human evolution had to do with the pressures that their environment put upon them. And a lot of things start changing right around 12,000 years ago, and that’s when our last ice age really ended. I think there was a whole lot of things that just pressured them into, especially, finding new ways of subsistence. Here in the Americas, a huge thing that happened was all the megafauna went away. When the climate changed enough, the mammoths died out and the bison died out, and they had to come up with different ways of doing things. We were hunters and gatherers, and we had things we got from hunting, and we got things we got from gathering. And in the Americas, when the things that they were used to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits, the gathering started to be a much more important thing.
And I think that led to figuring out, “Hey, we could actually grow certain things.” And gardens turned into crops, turned into intensive crops, and then people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area. They didn’t have to roam around anymore and that’s where we get the first sedentary communities, which means they stayed in the same place all year long. For the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles depending on the geographic region where they’d know, “Okay, we’ll be in the summer in the mountains because berries and things, and then in the winter we’ll be down here and we’ll hunt,” but they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, I think there, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
Lex Fridman
There’s a lot of questions I want to ask here. What do you think is the motivation for societies? Is it the carrot or the stick? So you said, is it when resources run out, when the old way of life is no longer feeding everybody, then you have to figure stuff out? Or is it more the carrot of there’s always this human spirit that wants to explore, that wants to maybe impress the rest of the village or something like this with the new discovery they made in venturing out and coming out with different ideas or technological innovation, let’s call it?
There’s a lot of questions I want to ask here. What do you think is the motivation for societies? Is it the carrot or the stick? So you said, is it when resources run out, when the old way of life is no longer feeding everybody, then you have to figure stuff out? Or is it more the carrot of there’s always this human spirit that wants to explore, that wants to maybe impress the rest of the village or something like this with the new discovery they made in venturing out and coming out with different ideas or technological innovation, let’s call it?
Ed Barnhart
Well, I have an explorer’s heart, so I’m biased. I do think that we have an innate desire to see what’s on the horizon and to impress other people with our achievements, things like that. We’re social beings. That’s really the edge that humans have, is our ability to work together. So I think that it’s much more the carrot than the stick. When things get ugly, the stick comes out, but usually the carrot does the job.
Well, I have an explorer’s heart, so I’m biased. I do think that we have an innate desire to see what’s on the horizon and to impress other people with our achievements, things like that. We’re social beings. That’s really the edge that humans have, is our ability to work together. So I think that it’s much more the carrot than the stick. When things get ugly, the stick comes out, but usually the carrot does the job.
First humans in the Americas
Lex Fridman
The really interesting story is how the first people came to the Americas. To me, that’s pretty gangster, to go from Asia all the way potentially during the ice Age or maybe at the end of the ice age or during that whole period not knowing what the world looks like going into the unknown. Can you talk to that process? How did the first people come to the Americas?
The really interesting story is how the first people came to the Americas. To me, that’s pretty gangster, to go from Asia all the way potentially during the ice Age or maybe at the end of the ice age or during that whole period not knowing what the world looks like going into the unknown. Can you talk to that process? How did the first people come to the Americas?
Ed Barnhart
Well, first off, I agree with you, that was pretty gangster. That’s a hard place to live. I listened to some of your podcasts, that guy, Jordan Jonas, he cut the mustard, but I wouldn’t have made it crossing there.
Well, first off, I agree with you, that was pretty gangster. That’s a hard place to live. I listened to some of your podcasts, that guy, Jordan Jonas, he cut the mustard, but I wouldn’t have made it crossing there.
Lex Fridman
Well, there you go. The fact that those guys exist, that somebody like Jordan Jonas exists, people that survive and thrive in these harsh conditions, that’s an indication that it’s possible. So when do you think and how did the first people come?
Well, there you go. The fact that those guys exist, that somebody like Jordan Jonas exists, people that survive and thrive in these harsh conditions, that’s an indication that it’s possible. So when do you think and how did the first people come?
Ed Barnhart
The traditional theories are still somewhat valid, or at least on the table, that when that land bridge occurred, that nomadic hunters just followed the game like they always had and the game went across there because there was no barrier, and they followed them across. The thing that has changed is how early that happened. DNA has been a total game changer for archeology. We get all these evolutionary tracks that we could never see before. When I was a young archeologist, I would’ve never dreamed we’d have the information we have now and that information, a lot of it’s coming out of Texas A&M. We see the traditional 12,500 years ago that there was a migration, but now we’re seeing one that’s almost certainly happening closer to 30,000 years ago.
The traditional theories are still somewhat valid, or at least on the table, that when that land bridge occurred, that nomadic hunters just followed the game like they always had and the game went across there because there was no barrier, and they followed them across. The thing that has changed is how early that happened. DNA has been a total game changer for archeology. We get all these evolutionary tracks that we could never see before. When I was a young archeologist, I would’ve never dreamed we’d have the information we have now and that information, a lot of it’s coming out of Texas A&M. We see the traditional 12,500 years ago that there was a migration, but now we’re seeing one that’s almost certainly happening closer to 30,000 years ago.
And now the thing that seems like madness but might be true is that it could have been as early as 60. A lot of the DNA things are suggesting that the very first migration could have come across as early as 60. And when I was a younger archeologist, it was heresy to go beyond this 12,500. You were a wacko if you said that, but now it’s really very clear that they came over at least by 30,000 and the bridge opened and closed, then open and closed.
Lex Fridman
That’s during the Ice Age?
That’s during the Ice Age?
Ed Barnhart
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
I mean, that’s crazy, right? That is crazy.
I mean, that’s crazy, right? That is crazy.
Ed Barnhart
Yeah. I mean, they didn’t roll in and immediately make New York, but there were people. And there were definitely not people here before that, which is fascinating. When the bridge closed, DNA mutated, and so we have specific kinds of haplogroups that are here in the Americas that don’t exist otherwise, and that same haplogroup game has been showing us more and more that people came across Siberia. It’s not Africa. It’s not Western Europe. Those are still, they’ve become fringe theories, but they’re not totally eradicated. DNA is a developing science as well, and I think we all need to keep that in mind, that it’s not like they just cracked the code and now we know all the answers. And sometimes, like in any science, a breakthrough puts us two steps backwards, not forwards. So I think we don’t need to have too much faith in the models that are now being created through DNA, but they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from Siberia, that all Native American people are of Asiatic descent.
Yeah. I mean, they didn’t roll in and immediately make New York, but there were people. And there were definitely not people here before that, which is fascinating. When the bridge closed, DNA mutated, and so we have specific kinds of haplogroups that are here in the Americas that don’t exist otherwise, and that same haplogroup game has been showing us more and more that people came across Siberia. It’s not Africa. It’s not Western Europe. Those are still, they’ve become fringe theories, but they’re not totally eradicated. DNA is a developing science as well, and I think we all need to keep that in mind, that it’s not like they just cracked the code and now we know all the answers. And sometimes, like in any science, a breakthrough puts us two steps backwards, not forwards. So I think we don’t need to have too much faith in the models that are now being created through DNA, but they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from Siberia, that all Native American people are of Asiatic descent.
Lex Fridman
Do you think it was a gradual process? If it’s like 30,000 to 60,000 years ago, was it just gradual movement of these nomadic tribes as they follow the animals? Or was it like one explorer that pushed the tribe to just go, go, go, go, and go maybe across 100 years travel all the way across maybe into North America, where Canada is now, and then big leaps in movement versus gradual movement?
Do you think it was a gradual process? If it’s like 30,000 to 60,000 years ago, was it just gradual movement of these nomadic tribes as they follow the animals? Or was it like one explorer that pushed the tribe to just go, go, go, go, and go maybe across 100 years travel all the way across maybe into North America, where Canada is now, and then big leaps in movement versus gradual movement?
Ed Barnhart
I think it was big leaps. Now, this is just mostly guess, I’ll admit, but I think that much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change and then it settles out into a more slow and steady pattern, and then something big will happen again. I do think that the early people went as far as they could go, and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for thousands of years. One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon.
I think it was big leaps. Now, this is just mostly guess, I’ll admit, but I think that much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change and then it settles out into a more slow and steady pattern, and then something big will happen again. I do think that the early people went as far as they could go, and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for thousands of years. One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon.
Most of those guys have O-blood type and they’re haplogroup D, which is the oldest one that entered the U.S. And what are they doing down there? I do believe they came across the Bering Strait. We have no real evidence to say they came in mass across Oceania. So they made it probably by boat along the coast all the way to South America.
Lex Fridman
So there’s some kind of cultural engine that drove them to explore. So if you had to bet all your money, it happened like tens of thousands of years ago, but in a very rapid pace. There’s these explorers. They went all the way to South America and there established their more stable existence. And from there, South America, Mesoamerica, North America was gradually expanded into that area?
So there’s some kind of cultural engine that drove them to explore. So if you had to bet all your money, it happened like tens of thousands of years ago, but in a very rapid pace. There’s these explorers. They went all the way to South America and there established their more stable existence. And from there, South America, Mesoamerica, North America was gradually expanded into that area?
Ed Barnhart
I think the next waves came down and did North America and Central America, and the very first wave made it all the way down to South America and got isolated there.
I think the next waves came down and did North America and Central America, and the very first wave made it all the way down to South America and got isolated there.
Lex Fridman
Isolated.
Isolated.
Ed Barnhart
And then mixed in with the next groups that came.
And then mixed in with the next groups that came.
Lex Fridman
That’s fascinating.
That’s fascinating.
Ed Barnhart
There’s an interesting correlate in Europe where today everybody feels like Celtic people are from Ireland, but actually Celtic people started in Eastern Europe and it was the entire area. And when Rome swept everything and Rome was now the ruler of the day, it was only that far edge of the Celtic world, Ireland, that they were like, “Ah, we’re not going to mess with those guys on that island. We’ll leave them be.” So now it looks like that’s the heart of Celtic tradition, but actually it’s the fringe.
There’s an interesting correlate in Europe where today everybody feels like Celtic people are from Ireland, but actually Celtic people started in Eastern Europe and it was the entire area. And when Rome swept everything and Rome was now the ruler of the day, it was only that far edge of the Celtic world, Ireland, that they were like, “Ah, we’re not going to mess with those guys on that island. We’ll leave them be.” So now it looks like that’s the heart of Celtic tradition, but actually it’s the fringe.
Lex Fridman
So if it is 60,000 years ago, these are really early humans?
So if it is 60,000 years ago, these are really early humans?
Ed Barnhart
Yeah. And there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about very old carbon-14 dates in the Amazon and in the Andes area that everybody just dismissed as, “No, it didn’t get a date of 40,000 years.” But I think we’re going to come back around to start readdressing some of these based on new evidence at hand.
Yeah. And there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about very old carbon-14 dates in the Amazon and in the Andes area that everybody just dismissed as, “No, it didn’t get a date of 40,000 years.” But I think we’re going to come back around to start readdressing some of these based on new evidence at hand.
Lex Fridman
And that’s the interesting thing. The early human spread throughout the world and then, like you said, perhaps have gotten isolated, and then civilizations sprung from there, and they all have similar elements even though they were isolated. That’s really interesting. That’s really interesting that there’s multiple cradles of civilization, not just one. One good idea, those ideas naturally come up. Those structures naturally come up.
And that’s the interesting thing. The early human spread throughout the world and then, like you said, perhaps have gotten isolated, and then civilizations sprung from there, and they all have similar elements even though they were isolated. That’s really interesting. That’s really interesting that there’s multiple cradles of civilization, not just one. One good idea, those ideas naturally come up. Those structures naturally come up.
Ed Barnhart
And I wonder whether the similarities that all those cradles have, it could be a shared much deeper past that they all have, or it could be a more Star Trek thing where Captain Kirk was always talking about the theory of parallel human development, that humans across the universe go through certain stages of development and that, that could be the answer to it.
And I wonder whether the similarities that all those cradles have, it could be a shared much deeper past that they all have, or it could be a more Star Trek thing where Captain Kirk was always talking about the theory of parallel human development, that humans across the universe go through certain stages of development and that, that could be the answer to it.
Lex Fridman
Which one do you lean on? Which one do you lean towards?
Which one do you lean on? Which one do you lean towards?
Ed Barnhart
I think it’s a case by case thing. I think if we look globally, I’d lean much more towards the human parallel development. But if I look just to the Americas and we have a shorter time period where the things that become major civilizations, now, I’ll say up to 30,000 years ago, which is still a blip in the time of humans, I think that there were shared things that those people came over with from Asia and that, as they got separated, that they had core values that then turned into things like religion and cultural customs that we can see. I’m a big proponent that there are commonalities in all the cultures of the Americas that lead back to and point to a single distant origin.
I think it’s a case by case thing. I think if we look globally, I’d lean much more towards the human parallel development. But if I look just to the Americas and we have a shorter time period where the things that become major civilizations, now, I’ll say up to 30,000 years ago, which is still a blip in the time of humans, I think that there were shared things that those people came over with from Asia and that, as they got separated, that they had core values that then turned into things like religion and cultural customs that we can see. I’m a big proponent that there are commonalities in all the cultures of the Americas that lead back to and point to a single distant origin.
South America
Lex Fridman
You’ve spoken about the lost cradle of civilization, South America. South America is not often talked about as one of the cradles of civilization, South America, Mesoamerica. Can you explain?
You’ve spoken about the lost cradle of civilization, South America. South America is not often talked about as one of the cradles of civilization, South America, Mesoamerica. Can you explain?
Ed Barnhart
Well, we have very early stuff in South America. You’re right. Especially as an American, our country’s so big and we are so far removed from these places, we don’t even think about it. But more and more we’re seeing things that predate the earliest stuff that we like to talk about, like Egypt and Mesopotamia. It’s all on the Peruvian coast that we have these cradles of civilization. Someday we might start talking about the Amazon more and more, but right now what we’ve got are things that date back into the 3000s BCE along the coast of Peru. And there are big stone-built pyramids and temples, and they’re amazingly isolated, even now that we’ve found them.
Well, we have very early stuff in South America. You’re right. Especially as an American, our country’s so big and we are so far removed from these places, we don’t even think about it. But more and more we’re seeing things that predate the earliest stuff that we like to talk about, like Egypt and Mesopotamia. It’s all on the Peruvian coast that we have these cradles of civilization. Someday we might start talking about the Amazon more and more, but right now what we’ve got are things that date back into the 3000s BCE along the coast of Peru. And there are big stone-built pyramids and temples, and they’re amazingly isolated, even now that we’ve found them.
Some of them, Caral is one of the most famous ones just north of Lima, we’ve known about it for a couple of decades now, how old it is. But every time I visit there, it’s like I visited the moon. There’s absolutely nobody there, not for miles. It’s amazing how such a discovery was made, and yet still nobody goes to see it. It’s not easy to get to.
Lex Fridman
So you think there’s a bunch of locations like that? Some may not have been discovered in the Peru area.
So you think there’s a bunch of locations like that? Some may not have been discovered in the Peru area.
Ed Barnhart
Oh, there are so many. Peru has tons. That desert gets really ugly quick and it buries things completely. There are so many pyramids out there that are still completely untouched. When people hear the name pyramids, they think of Egypt immediately. Egypt has got about 140 pyramids, and we have pretty much found them all. Peru has thousands, thousands of pyramids, and not all of them were built of stone. Some of them were Adobe bricks, which have weathered terribly, so now they’re not exciting places to visit today. What’s funny too, we started off talking about whether I think there’s a lost civilization out there, there are definitely things that are still to be discovered, but there are some things that were discovered 100 years ago and archeologists, or back then they call themselves antiquarians, just passed over.
Oh, there are so many. Peru has tons. That desert gets really ugly quick and it buries things completely. There are so many pyramids out there that are still completely untouched. When people hear the name pyramids, they think of Egypt immediately. Egypt has got about 140 pyramids, and we have pretty much found them all. Peru has thousands, thousands of pyramids, and not all of them were built of stone. Some of them were Adobe bricks, which have weathered terribly, so now they’re not exciting places to visit today. What’s funny too, we started off talking about whether I think there’s a lost civilization out there, there are definitely things that are still to be discovered, but there are some things that were discovered 100 years ago and archeologists, or back then they call themselves antiquarians, just passed over.
Caral was one of these sites because the coast of Peru has, some of those pyramids that were made by the Moche are full of gold and beautiful ceramics, things that you can sell for big money. But Caral was found a long time ago, but the archeologist was like, “God, no gold, no ceramics. Forget about it. This place is no good. We can’t sell anything here.” And then about the 1970s or ’80s, somebody said, “Hey, no ceramics. Is that older than the invention of ceramics? Shit, we better go take another look at that place.”
Lex Fridman
So what’s the dating on Caral?
So what’s the dating on Caral?
Ed Barnhart
Caral, I think, starts at about 3200 BCE, and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of other cities around it until about 1800 BCE.
Caral, I think, starts at about 3200 BCE, and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of other cities around it until about 1800 BCE.
Lex Fridman
So what’s the story behind looking at some of these images? What’s the story about constructions like that? What was the idea of that thing? Isn’t that amazing?
So what’s the story behind looking at some of these images? What’s the story about constructions like that? What was the idea of that thing? Isn’t that amazing?
Ed Barnhart
Gosh, it should be some sort of, I’ll be a flaky archeologist like, “This is a place where rituals took place.”
Gosh, it should be some sort of, I’ll be a flaky archeologist like, “This is a place where rituals took place.”
Lex Fridman
It could mean a million [inaudible 00:26:09].
It could mean a million [inaudible 00:26:09].
Ed Barnhart
So many things we say are so just painfully vague, and that’s about what we got. A place like this, I know the one we’re looking at here, I’ve been here a couple of times, in the pyramid behind it, the rubble’s built in a way where the building won’t rock apart. This is a very earthquake-prone place, but the buildings haven’t fallen because they make these net baskets of rocks inside that all wiggle around and don’t allow the building to fall down. And inside these, we’ve also found a couple of things that were babies, that were human babies that were buried in there. There’s a lot of people that see that and go, “Oh, look at that. They were sacrificing babies, these monsters.”
So many things we say are so just painfully vague, and that’s about what we got. A place like this, I know the one we’re looking at here, I’ve been here a couple of times, in the pyramid behind it, the rubble’s built in a way where the building won’t rock apart. This is a very earthquake-prone place, but the buildings haven’t fallen because they make these net baskets of rocks inside that all wiggle around and don’t allow the building to fall down. And inside these, we’ve also found a couple of things that were babies, that were human babies that were buried in there. There’s a lot of people that see that and go, “Oh, look at that. They were sacrificing babies, these monsters.”
I think a lot of the things that are interpreted as baby sacrifices, Coral’s evidence being one of them, I think it’s more about the tragic nature of infant mortality. In the past, it was a lot more common. There were cultures that didn’t even really properly name their kid until they got to five, because chances were they were going to die. And so I think a lot of these babies that we find in these ceremonial contexts that are interpreted as sacrifices, I think they’re putting them in special places because they mourn the death of their kids, and it just happened a lot more frequently then.
Pyramids
Lex Fridman
One of the things you said that really surprised me is that pyramids were built in Peru possibly hundreds of years before they were built in Egypt. Is that true?
One of the things you said that really surprised me is that pyramids were built in Peru possibly hundreds of years before they were built in Egypt. Is that true?
Ed Barnhart
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
That’s crazy.
That’s crazy.
Ed Barnhart
In fact, there’s one that’s now pushing 6000 BCE. That’s thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one’s called Huaca Prieta. And it was not an Egyptian pyramid, but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.
In fact, there’s one that’s now pushing 6000 BCE. That’s thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one’s called Huaca Prieta. And it was not an Egyptian pyramid, but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.
Lex Fridman
What do you think is the motivation to build a pyramid? The fact that it can withstand the elements structurally, that kind of thing? Why do humans build pyramids and why do they build it in all kinds of different locations in the world?
What do you think is the motivation to build a pyramid? The fact that it can withstand the elements structurally, that kind of thing? Why do humans build pyramids and why do they build it in all kinds of different locations in the world?
Ed Barnhart
Well, my rude answer is pretty boring, really. A lot of people ask me, “Why are there pyramids all over the planet? Is that a coincidence?” I think that when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top, and that turns into a pyramid. Any kid who’s playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple towers and his brother knocks them down, and if he wants one that’s going to stay and be tall, he ends up making something with a fat base and a tiny top. And I think that building something big and tall together is one of those human things like, “We built that. That will be here after we’re gone. People will remember who we were.” If there’s any human commonality, it’s fear of our own deaths and that we were nothing and no one will ever remember us. I think that the first big monuments like that were probably a group of people saying, “We’re going to do something that people will remember forever.”
Well, my rude answer is pretty boring, really. A lot of people ask me, “Why are there pyramids all over the planet? Is that a coincidence?” I think that when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top, and that turns into a pyramid. Any kid who’s playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple towers and his brother knocks them down, and if he wants one that’s going to stay and be tall, he ends up making something with a fat base and a tiny top. And I think that building something big and tall together is one of those human things like, “We built that. That will be here after we’re gone. People will remember who we were.” If there’s any human commonality, it’s fear of our own deaths and that we were nothing and no one will ever remember us. I think that the first big monuments like that were probably a group of people saying, “We’re going to do something that people will remember forever.”
Now, that being said, remember we were just talking about Huaca Prieta and this one that’s almost 6000 BC now, is the first one, that one’s a funny case. We just talked about all these lofty goals, but actually I’m pretty sure that Huaca Prieta’s first pyramid was about capping a smelly pile of trash. I think everybody piled up their trash in the middle of town and it stunk. It’s on the coast. It stunk like fish. And somebody said, “If we just bury this thing with dirt, it won’t smell anymore.” And then it was a big mound where people could get up and talk to everybody and then said, “Well, it’s squishy. If we cap it with clay, then it will really not smell.” I really think that the very first pyramids in Peru were about trash management. Talk about deflating, huh?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. But then they probably saw it and they were impressed and humbled by the enormity of the construction, and they were like, maybe the next guy thought, “Maybe we should keep building these kinds of things.”
Yeah. But then they probably saw it and they were impressed and humbled by the enormity of the construction, and they were like, maybe the next guy thought, “Maybe we should keep building these kinds of things.”
Ed Barnhart
Yeah. Not to jump ahead, but in North America, where they also made pyramids, there’s this interesting evolution where there were these piles of shells along rivers and along the coastlines. People ate a lot of shells. That was an easy thing to collect and eat. So these piles of shells would be near communities, and they probably became landmarks, but eventually they started burying their dead inside those too. Probably, again, about stink and about, “Well, we don’t want the dogs to eat them. Maybe we’ll put them in the middle of the shell pile.” But then that all of a sudden became this, ” That’s where my grandfather’s body is. That’s where great-grandfather’s body is.” And all of a sudden people started being attached to place, not just for the resources, but for the shared memories of their ancestors. So when the very first pyramid was built in the Ohio area by the Adena people, it was built out of dirt, but it’s full of bodies. And I think it’s an echo of an old thing where they used to be putting bodies in shell mounds.
Yeah. Not to jump ahead, but in North America, where they also made pyramids, there’s this interesting evolution where there were these piles of shells along rivers and along the coastlines. People ate a lot of shells. That was an easy thing to collect and eat. So these piles of shells would be near communities, and they probably became landmarks, but eventually they started burying their dead inside those too. Probably, again, about stink and about, “Well, we don’t want the dogs to eat them. Maybe we’ll put them in the middle of the shell pile.” But then that all of a sudden became this, ” That’s where my grandfather’s body is. That’s where great-grandfather’s body is.” And all of a sudden people started being attached to place, not just for the resources, but for the shared memories of their ancestors. So when the very first pyramid was built in the Ohio area by the Adena people, it was built out of dirt, but it’s full of bodies. And I think it’s an echo of an old thing where they used to be putting bodies in shell mounds.
Lex Fridman
So where and who were the first civilizations in South America, Mesoamerica?
So where and who were the first civilizations in South America, Mesoamerica?
Ed Barnhart
Well, I think we’re still piecing that together. Coming back to the first things we talked about, I think we’re still missing a lot of stuff, especially in South America. It just keeps getting older and older. Part of the reason it’s hard to answer that question is, at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture? We have in the Americas this long period of time that we call the Paleo-Indian time where they were hunting megafauna. And then when those went away, we get into this even longer period of time called The Archaic, where they’re just hunters and gatherers. Sometimes somebody’s coming up with a cool different kind of arrowhead. They go back and forth with different hunting tools, but really nothing changes for thousands of years and then finally they start developing into these larger groups, which for the most part has to do with agriculture.
Well, I think we’re still piecing that together. Coming back to the first things we talked about, I think we’re still missing a lot of stuff, especially in South America. It just keeps getting older and older. Part of the reason it’s hard to answer that question is, at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture? We have in the Americas this long period of time that we call the Paleo-Indian time where they were hunting megafauna. And then when those went away, we get into this even longer period of time called The Archaic, where they’re just hunters and gatherers. Sometimes somebody’s coming up with a cool different kind of arrowhead. They go back and forth with different hunting tools, but really nothing changes for thousands of years and then finally they start developing into these larger groups, which for the most part has to do with agriculture.
It used to be archeology that was just the end all, be all. Civilization starts with the invention of agriculture. And we can’t have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm. But that’s been discounted. Peru was a big part of that. That area of Caral, it’s connected to another city on the coast called Aspero. Aspero starts about the same time, but they’re all about fishing. They have no farming. And Caral, who’s upriver from them, is farming, but funny enough, they’re not really farming food. They’re farming cotton and they’re making nets and they’re trading the nets with the people on the coast for the fish. So it’s not as simple as, it’s just agriculture anymore. But it is, I think, still rooted in, how can we feed more people than just our family? How can we together create a food abundance so we’re no longer scared about running out of food?
Lex Fridman
So is it possible, which is something you’ve argued, that civilization started in the Amazon, in the jungle versus the coast?
So is it possible, which is something you’ve argued, that civilization started in the Amazon, in the jungle versus the coast?
Ed Barnhart
I do think so. I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old. Actually, the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, all these places that we have civilizations that grew up, you know where the oldest pottery is? The middle of the Amazon.
I do think so. I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old. Actually, the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, all these places that we have civilizations that grew up, you know where the oldest pottery is? The middle of the Amazon.
Religion
Lex Fridman
So there’s interesting cultures developing in the Amazon. So religion, you would say, preceded civilization?
So there’s interesting cultures developing in the Amazon. So religion, you would say, preceded civilization?
Ed Barnhart
In South America, Caral and Aspero that I was just talking about, it’s weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion we have. We have those pyramids and things that we call temples, but we don’t really know what went on in there. And there’s no…
In South America, Caral and Aspero that I was just talking about, it’s weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion we have. We have those pyramids and things that we call temples, but we don’t really know what went on in there. And there’s no…
Ed Barnhart
… Things that we call temples, but we don’t really know what went on in there, and there’s no hints of religious iconography, ceremonies, nothing like that. The first stuff that we get is right when that culture ends, about 1800 BCE. This culture called Chavin starts up and their main temple is up in the Andes in this place of path of least resistance between the Amazon and the coast. It’s about three days walk either way, from this place where this temple is. That’s where we start seeing the very first religious iconography and it’s all over the temples. There are things that are definitely from the coast, but the iconography are all jaguars and snakes and crocodiles, and those don’t come from the coast. All of those things are coming out of the Amazon.
… Things that we call temples, but we don’t really know what went on in there, and there’s no hints of religious iconography, ceremonies, nothing like that. The first stuff that we get is right when that culture ends, about 1800 BCE. This culture called Chavin starts up and their main temple is up in the Andes in this place of path of least resistance between the Amazon and the coast. It’s about three days walk either way, from this place where this temple is. That’s where we start seeing the very first religious iconography and it’s all over the temples. There are things that are definitely from the coast, but the iconography are all jaguars and snakes and crocodiles, and those don’t come from the coast. All of those things are coming out of the Amazon.
Lex Fridman
Religion is a really powerful idea. Religions are one of the most powerful ideas. There are the strongest myths that tie people together. And to you, it’s possible that this powerful idea in South America started in the Amazon.
Religion is a really powerful idea. Religions are one of the most powerful ideas. There are the strongest myths that tie people together. And to you, it’s possible that this powerful idea in South America started in the Amazon.
Ed Barnhart
I do. I do think it did, and you’re right, ideas are more powerful than weapons, but archeology can’t see them at all. Sometimes we can see ideas manifesting in the things they create and lead to, but there’s an interpretation problem. Are we right about what idea created this? Those are things that archeology just can’t get at.
I do. I do think it did, and you’re right, ideas are more powerful than weapons, but archeology can’t see them at all. Sometimes we can see ideas manifesting in the things they create and lead to, but there’s an interpretation problem. Are we right about what idea created this? Those are things that archeology just can’t get at.
Lex Fridman
That’s one of the challenges of archeology and looking into ancient histories. You’re trying to not just understand what they were doing in terms of architecture, but understand what was going on inside their mind.
That’s one of the challenges of archeology and looking into ancient histories. You’re trying to not just understand what they were doing in terms of architecture, but understand what was going on inside their mind.
Ed Barnhart
That’s really what I’m in it for, trying to understand these people and it’s real detective work, and we know we’re dealing with a totally flawed record. We only have what could preserve the test of time. If we look around this room here, if 2,000 years of weathering happened in this room, what would be left and what would we think happened here?
That’s really what I’m in it for, trying to understand these people and it’s real detective work, and we know we’re dealing with a totally flawed record. We only have what could preserve the test of time. If we look around this room here, if 2,000 years of weathering happened in this room, what would be left and what would we think happened here?
Lex Fridman
Right, right, but not in this room, but if you look at thousands of rooms like it, maybe you can start to piece things together about the different ideologies that ruled the world, the religion, the different ideas. Tell me about this fanged deity. One of your more controversial ideas is that you believe that the religions, there’s a thread that connects the different civilizations, the societies of the Andean region and the religion they practiced is more monotheistic than is currently believed in the mainstream.
Right, right, but not in this room, but if you look at thousands of rooms like it, maybe you can start to piece things together about the different ideologies that ruled the world, the religion, the different ideas. Tell me about this fanged deity. One of your more controversial ideas is that you believe that the religions, there’s a thread that connects the different civilizations, the societies of the Andean region and the religion they practiced is more monotheistic than is currently believed in the mainstream.
Ed Barnhart
That is exactly what I think, and I think it’s all about this fanged deity who somewhere, thousands of years ago, crawled his way out of the Amazon up into the Andes and a religion took hold. That could have been a combination of ideas from the coast and the Amazon. But he is the one creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon still talk about him there. His name is Viho Masse in some groups, but they say that his emissaries on earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity.
That is exactly what I think, and I think it’s all about this fanged deity who somewhere, thousands of years ago, crawled his way out of the Amazon up into the Andes and a religion took hold. That could have been a combination of ideas from the coast and the Amazon. But he is the one creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon still talk about him there. His name is Viho Masse in some groups, but they say that his emissaries on earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity.
Lex Fridman
Why is the current mainstream belief is that a lot of the religions are not monotheistic?
Why is the current mainstream belief is that a lot of the religions are not monotheistic?
Ed Barnhart
Well, there are bona fide pantheons. Greece had one, Egypt had one, Mesopotamia had one. Lots of the early religions of the old world were pantheons, and I think that was part of the problem. The earliest archeologists walked in there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons. And so they went to the art looking for them, and they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess and the sun God, and all these things. But when I look at the art, and I was trained by a person right here in Austin, Texas as an art historian, you follow certain diagnostic traits through art to see the development over time. And when I look at it and use that methodology, there’s a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming off of his head and off of his belt. He’s got really identifiable traits.
Well, there are bona fide pantheons. Greece had one, Egypt had one, Mesopotamia had one. Lots of the early religions of the old world were pantheons, and I think that was part of the problem. The earliest archeologists walked in there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons. And so they went to the art looking for them, and they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess and the sun God, and all these things. But when I look at the art, and I was trained by a person right here in Austin, Texas as an art historian, you follow certain diagnostic traits through art to see the development over time. And when I look at it and use that methodology, there’s a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming off of his head and off of his belt. He’s got really identifiable traits.
He also likes to sever people’s heads off and carry them around, but he’s the fanged deity and he’s there. He shows up in ChavÃn de Juantar, the capital of that ChavÃn culture, and he keeps showing up through every culture, even thousands of miles away throughout the next two millennium, right up to the Inca. The Inca have a creator deity they call Viracocha, but Viracocha is the fanged deity. When we do see him, by the time you get to Inca, they do this almost Islamic thing where they say you can’t understand the face of Viracocha. So when they do put him in a cosmogram, they’ll make him just a blob, like he’s just unknowable, but he’s at the very top. I think we’re misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural beings.
If we flip the mirror on Christianity and take a look at it, which of course, Christianity is monotheistic, right? It would be heresy to say otherwise, but who are all these other characters? Who are all these angels and demons and Jesus Christ? I don’t even know who the Holy Spirit is, but he’s some sort of supernatural being. But it’s that monotheistic system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not God. That’s where I think the crux of us misunderstanding ancient Andean art is.
Lex Fridman
So what is the process of analyzing art through time that try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture? Do you just see what shows up over and over and over and over?
So what is the process of analyzing art through time that try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture? Do you just see what shows up over and over and over and over?
Ed Barnhart
Well, certainly without the advent of writing, depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them, and there are certain, what we call diagnostic elements. We can pull apart the same sort of thing like in the Greek pantheon, you know by their dress and what they’re holding, what the different gods are. You can tell Hades from Zeus by the different things they’re holding lightning bolts or tridents or whatever. So they all have these diagnostic elements to them. So that’s how art history goes about analyzing art over time. Once we can put it in a chronological sequence, then we can say, “Okay, here’s a deity here in ChavÃn culture.” Now we move forward 500 years. Now we’re in Moche and Nazca culture. Where are the deities here? And what I see is that same guy with not just one or two traits, but a whole package of them that shows up again and again and again for thousands of years in each one of these cultures.
Well, certainly without the advent of writing, depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them, and there are certain, what we call diagnostic elements. We can pull apart the same sort of thing like in the Greek pantheon, you know by their dress and what they’re holding, what the different gods are. You can tell Hades from Zeus by the different things they’re holding lightning bolts or tridents or whatever. So they all have these diagnostic elements to them. So that’s how art history goes about analyzing art over time. Once we can put it in a chronological sequence, then we can say, “Okay, here’s a deity here in ChavÃn culture.” Now we move forward 500 years. Now we’re in Moche and Nazca culture. Where are the deities here? And what I see is that same guy with not just one or two traits, but a whole package of them that shows up again and again and again for thousands of years in each one of these cultures.
He’s got circular eyes, he’s got a fanged mouth. He’s got claws on his hands and feet. He’s a humanoid, but he also has snakes coming off of his head like hair and snakes coming off of his belt. And then not so much in ChavÃn, but as it goes forward, he starts carting around severed heads, human severed heads. So they’re like, in the old literature, the Moche will call him the decapitator deity, but then they have these other like, “Oh, here’s the crab deity and here’s the fox deity.” But if you look at them, the crab deity is just that guy’s face coming off of a crab, and the fox deity is that guy’s face coming off of a fox.
So I think on that particular instance, I explain it similar to what Zeus did. You know how Zeus was able to turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted, and he showed up in all sorts of forms, but he was always Zeus. I think that the fanged deity manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing stories of mythology that we don’t have anymore.
Lex Fridman
And across hundreds of years, thousands of years from ChavÃn to Moja to Inca, as you’re saying.
And across hundreds of years, thousands of years from ChavÃn to Moja to Inca, as you’re saying.
Ed Barnhart
Right. Wari has them too, Tiahuanaco, that famous place, Pumapunku, he’s all over there.
Right. Wari has them too, Tiahuanaco, that famous place, Pumapunku, he’s all over there.
Lex Fridman
I wonder how those ideas spread and morph of this fanged deity?
I wonder how those ideas spread and morph of this fanged deity?
Ed Barnhart
I think people walked and proselytized and places like ChavÃn, there’s a later one in Inca times called Pachacamac that are pilgrimage places where people come in to be healed if they’re sick, but also just to pay homage to the powers that be. So ChavÃn was a place where people from the Amazon and people from the coast were all coming together. In fact, we saw it in the archeology there. There’s these interesting labyrinths under the pyramids with the fanged deity all over them that have… One labyrinth will have all pottery. The next labyrinth will have a bunch of animal bones. The next one will have a bunch of things made out of stone. So people are showing up and giving this tribute and they’re learning and then they’re going back to their communities. So I think it dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became just like pilgrimage spots do. Somebody goes back and they build a temple to the fanged deity.
I think people walked and proselytized and places like ChavÃn, there’s a later one in Inca times called Pachacamac that are pilgrimage places where people come in to be healed if they’re sick, but also just to pay homage to the powers that be. So ChavÃn was a place where people from the Amazon and people from the coast were all coming together. In fact, we saw it in the archeology there. There’s these interesting labyrinths under the pyramids with the fanged deity all over them that have… One labyrinth will have all pottery. The next labyrinth will have a bunch of animal bones. The next one will have a bunch of things made out of stone. So people are showing up and giving this tribute and they’re learning and then they’re going back to their communities. So I think it dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became just like pilgrimage spots do. Somebody goes back and they build a temple to the fanged deity.
Lex Fridman
Do we know much about the relationship they had with the fanged deity and their conception of the powers of the fanged deity? Were they afraid of the fanged deities and all-knowing God? Is it something that brings joy and harvest or is it something that you’re supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals and humans to keep at bay?
Do we know much about the relationship they had with the fanged deity and their conception of the powers of the fanged deity? Were they afraid of the fanged deities and all-knowing God? Is it something that brings joy and harvest or is it something that you’re supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals and humans to keep at bay?
Ed Barnhart
I think he had two sides of the coin. A lot of the Hindu gods are… One aspect is terrible, the other aspect is lovely. I think he had that same sorts of qualities because we do see him as a fierce warrior taking people’s heads off, and he is a jaguar, which in and of itself implies a certain power and ferocity, but then there are other funny things about him. He is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with sex acts. When it comes to the Moche, there’s this whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men, and some of them show their faces transforming into that fanged deity, he is acting through them.
I think he had two sides of the coin. A lot of the Hindu gods are… One aspect is terrible, the other aspect is lovely. I think he had that same sorts of qualities because we do see him as a fierce warrior taking people’s heads off, and he is a jaguar, which in and of itself implies a certain power and ferocity, but then there are other funny things about him. He is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with sex acts. When it comes to the Moche, there’s this whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men, and some of them show their faces transforming into that fanged deity, he is acting through them.
But the thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fanged deity has a little puppy. He has a puppy that’s just dancing around his feet and jumping up on him in various scenes. They see him again and again. Sometimes he’s in these healing sex scenes. In fact, I tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where a priest was having sex with somebody in a house and a fanged deity, and there’s a puppy just scratching at the door like, “Hey, you forgot me.” And then finally, one day I found one with the puppy having sex with the woman instead of the fanged deity. I was like, “Oh, he really is very involved in this. What is this weird puppy?”
Lex Fridman
Okay.
Okay.
Ed Barnhart
So yeah, he likes to take heads off, but he also has a puppy he adores.
So yeah, he likes to take heads off, but he also has a puppy he adores.
Shamanism
Lex Fridman
This awesomely makes sense now because I saw the opening of a paper you wrote 30 years ago on shamanism and Mocha civilization. It reads, “The Mocha are the major focus of this paper. Sex puppies and headhunting will be shown to be related to ancient Mocha shamanism.” So now I understand. I was like, “Well, the puppies.”
This awesomely makes sense now because I saw the opening of a paper you wrote 30 years ago on shamanism and Mocha civilization. It reads, “The Mocha are the major focus of this paper. Sex puppies and headhunting will be shown to be related to ancient Mocha shamanism.” So now I understand. I was like, “Well, the puppies.”
Ed Barnhart
Puppies, yeah, it’s true.
Puppies, yeah, it’s true.
Lex Fridman
And the headhunting. That’s the decapitator.
And the headhunting. That’s the decapitator.
Ed Barnhart
And I’ve added rock and roll to that list since actually. Rock and roll music is also a big part of it.
And I’ve added rock and roll to that list since actually. Rock and roll music is also a big part of it.
Lex Fridman
Oh, interesting.
Oh, interesting.
Ed Barnhart
They call spirits down. There’s this whole spirit world. There’s the ancestors and the people that drink San Pedro cactus juice, they don’t talk about the fanged deity anymore. I think Christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back. It was unpopular to have a pagan deity. So they don’t talk about him much anymore though he’s still around. They’re around Trujillo. They call him Iopec. But music, in the Amazon, they play flute. Sometimes a chorus of women sing and that’s supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There’s a spirit that’s hurting the person that’s sick, and then the priest or the shaman or the corundero, whatever you want to call him, has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out what’s going on.
They call spirits down. There’s this whole spirit world. There’s the ancestors and the people that drink San Pedro cactus juice, they don’t talk about the fanged deity anymore. I think Christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back. It was unpopular to have a pagan deity. So they don’t talk about him much anymore though he’s still around. They’re around Trujillo. They call him Iopec. But music, in the Amazon, they play flute. Sometimes a chorus of women sing and that’s supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There’s a spirit that’s hurting the person that’s sick, and then the priest or the shaman or the corundero, whatever you want to call him, has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out what’s going on.
So when the music starts, that’s bringing those spirits in and people don’t see them unless they’ve imbibed the San Pedro cactus juice, which is this hallucinogen, which is in the Amazon side, it was Ayahuasca. On the coast, it was San Pedro cactus, but that’s what allows you to actually see that other world.
Ayahuasca
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I went to the Amazon recently and did Ayahuasca, a very high dose of it.
Yeah. I went to the Amazon recently and did Ayahuasca, a very high dose of it.
Ed Barnhart
Bold move.
Bold move.
Lex Fridman
When in Rome. How far back does that go?
When in Rome. How far back does that go?
Ed Barnhart
Oh, I think longer than anybody can remember, but it’s a natural plant that’s been there forever. I think that it’s thousands and thousands of years. That’s another thing ChavÃn de Juantara was talking about where I think the things came, the religion came from the Amazon. There’s this wall on the backside that faces the Amazon side. So if you’re entering the city from the Amazon path, you see this wall first, and it’s a bunch of faces that some of them are humans. Some of them are total jaguar and some of them are transforming in-between. But there’s a group of them that are midway through transformation and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that’s coming down their face. San Pedro doesn’t do that to you, but Ayahuasca does.
Oh, I think longer than anybody can remember, but it’s a natural plant that’s been there forever. I think that it’s thousands and thousands of years. That’s another thing ChavÃn de Juantara was talking about where I think the things came, the religion came from the Amazon. There’s this wall on the backside that faces the Amazon side. So if you’re entering the city from the Amazon path, you see this wall first, and it’s a bunch of faces that some of them are humans. Some of them are total jaguar and some of them are transforming in-between. But there’s a group of them that are midway through transformation and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that’s coming down their face. San Pedro doesn’t do that to you, but Ayahuasca does.
Ayahuasca traditionally, they’d take a blow gun and just shoot it up your nose or up your ass, but a lot of times up your nose and when it shoots up your nose, the first thing that happens is just this gush of snot comes out of you. And there are stone depictions of people uncontrollably snotting on the backside of this temple from 3,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman
So that you think could have been a big component of the development of religion and shamanism?
So that you think could have been a big component of the development of religion and shamanism?
Ed Barnhart
I think that hallucinogens opened the mind then like they opened the mind now.
I think that hallucinogens opened the mind then like they opened the mind now.
Lex Fridman
Do you think that the stoned ape theory, do you think that actually could have been an actual catalyst for the formation of civilization?
Do you think that the stoned ape theory, do you think that actually could have been an actual catalyst for the formation of civilization?
Ed Barnhart
In the Americas, yes, I do, though hallucinogens are not part of every ancient tradition in the world. In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas. Of course, now they’re global and they can be grown all over the place. But originally speaking, very, very few were outside of the Americas. So they were part of the experience here in a way that they just couldn’t be in other places.
In the Americas, yes, I do, though hallucinogens are not part of every ancient tradition in the world. In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas. Of course, now they’re global and they can be grown all over the place. But originally speaking, very, very few were outside of the Americas. So they were part of the experience here in a way that they just couldn’t be in other places.
Lex Fridman
I wonder to what degree they were just part of a ritual and the creative force behind art versus literally the method by which you come up with ideas that define as civilization. It’s the degree to which they had a role in the formation of civilizations. It’s fun to think about psychedelics being a critical role in formation of civilizations.
I wonder to what degree they were just part of a ritual and the creative force behind art versus literally the method by which you come up with ideas that define as civilization. It’s the degree to which they had a role in the formation of civilizations. It’s fun to think about psychedelics being a critical role in formation of civilizations.
Ed Barnhart
I think in terms of South America, they probably really were.
I think in terms of South America, they probably really were.
Lex Fridman
It’s possible.
It’s possible.
Ed Barnhart
In North America where we’re in a more northern climb here, and there are less of them, not so much, at least in terms of psychedelics, things like tobacco was always a big part of it. There’s more than one way to reach a hallucinatory state. The hard way is starvation, sleep deprivation. And for the Maya, for example, would go sleep deprivation, starvation, and then they’d cut themselves very badly. And that loss of blood, we believe triggered hallucinations and visions. Nothing to do with drugs. I would much prefer the drugs route.
In North America where we’re in a more northern climb here, and there are less of them, not so much, at least in terms of psychedelics, things like tobacco was always a big part of it. There’s more than one way to reach a hallucinatory state. The hard way is starvation, sleep deprivation. And for the Maya, for example, would go sleep deprivation, starvation, and then they’d cut themselves very badly. And that loss of blood, we believe triggered hallucinations and visions. Nothing to do with drugs. I would much prefer the drugs route.
Lex Fridman
It’s the result. The tools aren’t the thing that creates insight. It’s the result.
It’s the result. The tools aren’t the thing that creates insight. It’s the result.
Ed Barnhart
Hallucinogens are poisoning us. They’re killing us. It’s a near death state and people of the Americas believed sleeping was entering that other world, death. You entered this other world and that when you took this mighty dose of poison, it was helping you enter that other world for a period of time.
Hallucinogens are poisoning us. They’re killing us. It’s a near death state and people of the Americas believed sleeping was entering that other world, death. You entered this other world and that when you took this mighty dose of poison, it was helping you enter that other world for a period of time.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, as Tom Waits said in that one song, “I like my town with a little drop of poison.” So maybe that poison is a good catalyst for invention. So who were the early first mother cultures, mother civilizations in South America? If we look chronologically, is there a label we can put on the first peoples that emerged?
Yeah, as Tom Waits said in that one song, “I like my town with a little drop of poison.” So maybe that poison is a good catalyst for invention. So who were the early first mother cultures, mother civilizations in South America? If we look chronologically, is there a label we can put on the first peoples that emerged?
Ed Barnhart
That picture is evolving. Forever, it was just the Chavin people that we’ve been talking about. The ones with all the first depictions of religious art were the mother culture, and they certainly did transmit a lot of stuff, but then all of a sudden, we find Kerala. The next one that we’ve barely even begun looking at, but it’s probably older than Kerala, is Sachin culture. I was just poking around there last year and just from the bus on the highway, I could see, “That’s a pyramid out there. Oh, there’s another one.” And I know how old the stuff we have studied there is. It’s again, 3000 BC. We’re just barely beginning to understand them. Kerala frustrates me to no end, the lack of art there. We’ve got stones and bones and not even ceramics to go on, and they didn’t have the courtesy to leave me a bunch of art I can interpret. So I don’t know what those people believed.
That picture is evolving. Forever, it was just the Chavin people that we’ve been talking about. The ones with all the first depictions of religious art were the mother culture, and they certainly did transmit a lot of stuff, but then all of a sudden, we find Kerala. The next one that we’ve barely even begun looking at, but it’s probably older than Kerala, is Sachin culture. I was just poking around there last year and just from the bus on the highway, I could see, “That’s a pyramid out there. Oh, there’s another one.” And I know how old the stuff we have studied there is. It’s again, 3000 BC. We’re just barely beginning to understand them. Kerala frustrates me to no end, the lack of art there. We’ve got stones and bones and not even ceramics to go on, and they didn’t have the courtesy to leave me a bunch of art I can interpret. So I don’t know what those people believed.
Lex Fridman
Right. So one of the ways to understand what people believe is looking at the art, the stories told through the art, and then hopefully deciphering if they were doing any kind of writing.
Right. So one of the ways to understand what people believe is looking at the art, the stories told through the art, and then hopefully deciphering if they were doing any kind of writing.
Ed Barnhart
That’s our most fruitful place to try to get at this elusive ideas.
That’s our most fruitful place to try to get at this elusive ideas.
Lost City of Z
Lex Fridman
And it sucks when they don’t have art. If we just go back to the Amazon, you’ve mentioned that it’s possible that there’s a law civilization that existed in the Amazon, so it’s carried a lot of names. Lost City of Z or El Dorado. Do you think it’s possible it existed?
And it sucks when they don’t have art. If we just go back to the Amazon, you’ve mentioned that it’s possible that there’s a law civilization that existed in the Amazon, so it’s carried a lot of names. Lost City of Z or El Dorado. Do you think it’s possible it existed?
Ed Barnhart
Well, City of Z and El Dorado are in pretty different places. El Dorado, the ideas of where it is center around towards Columbia.
Well, City of Z and El Dorado are in pretty different places. El Dorado, the ideas of where it is center around towards Columbia.
Lex Fridman
Okay.
Okay.
Ed Barnhart
And the City of Z is named after a region of Brazil called the Xingu. And so those are an America worth of distance apart. People don’t really think about it on the map, but the entire United States would fit inside the Amazon. That’s how big that place is. And these two are on either end, but both of them have evidence of civilizations. It’s lowland and it floods all the time. So what they did is they’d make these big mounds and then they’d make huge causeways between mounds so they could walk through their cities while they were seasonally inundated. And a bunch of that stuff has been found in the Xingu area, like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people.
And the City of Z is named after a region of Brazil called the Xingu. And so those are an America worth of distance apart. People don’t really think about it on the map, but the entire United States would fit inside the Amazon. That’s how big that place is. And these two are on either end, but both of them have evidence of civilizations. It’s lowland and it floods all the time. So what they did is they’d make these big mounds and then they’d make huge causeways between mounds so they could walk through their cities while they were seasonally inundated. And a bunch of that stuff has been found in the Xingu area, like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people.
Again, it’s not stone built and it’s been under the forest forever. So it’s very torn up, but it’s there. Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now, and a thing that I think is completed now is Brazil and Bolivia partnered together and built a highway all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land, which has found more of these what we call like geometric earthworks. So there’s more and more evidence of these civilizations. It’s not, it could be there. It’s there for sure.
Lex Fridman
By the way, the people who are trying to protect the rainforest really hate the highway. One of the things I learned is if you build a road, loggers will come-
By the way, the people who are trying to protect the rainforest really hate the highway. One of the things I learned is if you build a road, loggers will come-
Ed Barnhart
Yep.
Yep.
Lex Fridman
And they will start cutting stuff down. Now, from an archeology perspective, if you cut down trees, you get to discover things. But from a protective, very precious rainforest perspective, it’s obviously the opposite way. But it is interesting, I’ve seen where loggers cut through the forest and when they leave, the forest heals itself very quickly.
And they will start cutting stuff down. Now, from an archeology perspective, if you cut down trees, you get to discover things. But from a protective, very precious rainforest perspective, it’s obviously the opposite way. But it is interesting, I’ve seen where loggers cut through the forest and when they leave, the forest heals itself very quickly.
Ed Barnhart
So quickly.
So quickly.
Lex Fridman
And you just think that across decades, you expand that to centuries and you could see how a civilization could be completely swallowed up by the rainforest.
And you just think that across decades, you expand that to centuries and you could see how a civilization could be completely swallowed up by the rainforest.
Ed Barnhart
And it happened for sure in the Amazon. One of the ways that we’re trying to push the frontier of where people were in the Amazon, because yes, the trees and just the biomass have eaten so much evidence, but they’re finding more and more of these places that they call terra preta, which is black earth, and they’re huge swaths of it. So I guess the anthropology term is anthropogenic landscapes. And what they’re saying is that that really dark earth couldn’t have just got that way through natural forest processes, that sometime in the distant past that forest wasn’t there and there was major farming and human activity to the point where they totally turned the soil black and it’s much more enriched.
And it happened for sure in the Amazon. One of the ways that we’re trying to push the frontier of where people were in the Amazon, because yes, the trees and just the biomass have eaten so much evidence, but they’re finding more and more of these places that they call terra preta, which is black earth, and they’re huge swaths of it. So I guess the anthropology term is anthropogenic landscapes. And what they’re saying is that that really dark earth couldn’t have just got that way through natural forest processes, that sometime in the distant past that forest wasn’t there and there was major farming and human activity to the point where they totally turned the soil black and it’s much more enriched.
And when I took a trip into the Amazon, I went from Manaus, up the river, the Black River a couple of days, and went and met some different communities. And I asked them about this black earth, and they were like, “Yeah, that’s why we’re here. Sometimes we move our village, but when we move, we look for the terra preta, and that’s where we’re going to put our village, because that’s a place that all of our gardens work. The other places, they don’t.”
Lex Fridman
One of the things you talked about, literally just you have to ask the right question. And the stories, all the secrets are carried by the people and they’ll tell you.
One of the things you talked about, literally just you have to ask the right question. And the stories, all the secrets are carried by the people and they’ll tell you.
Ed Barnhart
Yeah, there’s so many of them. A thing that excites the world about archeology right now is Gobekli Tepe, and this 10,000, now Karahan Tepe is 11,000. The whole area is called the Tas Tepler. We only found it a couple of decades ago, but it was just an archeologist rowing through the area and ask a sheep herder, “Hey, you guys know where anything ancient is?” “Oh yeah, let me show you this.” And then all of a sudden we’ve got a lost civilization. And the shepherds always knew where it was. Just nobody asked them.
Yeah, there’s so many of them. A thing that excites the world about archeology right now is Gobekli Tepe, and this 10,000, now Karahan Tepe is 11,000. The whole area is called the Tas Tepler. We only found it a couple of decades ago, but it was just an archeologist rowing through the area and ask a sheep herder, “Hey, you guys know where anything ancient is?” “Oh yeah, let me show you this.” And then all of a sudden we’ve got a lost civilization. And the shepherds always knew where it was. Just nobody asked them.
Graham Hancock
Lex Fridman
So speaking of Gobekli Tepe, what do you think about the work of Graham Hancock, who also believes that there’s a lost civilization in the Amazon?
So speaking of Gobekli Tepe, what do you think about the work of Graham Hancock, who also believes that there’s a lost civilization in the Amazon?
Ed Barnhart
Well, I’ve met Graham, and personally I like him. He’s a nice guy, got a nice sense of humor, and I think he’s smart. And I also think he is a very good researcher. He and I are working on the same set of facts. The differences are interpretations. I do not believe Graham’s idea that a single, now lost ancient civilization seeded the rest of them. I just don’t see that on a number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art, historical analysis. So I think his research is great. I think that he’s very well-read, in fact, better read than a lot of my colleagues, but his conclusions I disagree with. And he and I have talked about this and had a very civil and normal conversation about it and agree to disagree without spitting any venom at any point in the conversation.
Well, I’ve met Graham, and personally I like him. He’s a nice guy, got a nice sense of humor, and I think he’s smart. And I also think he is a very good researcher. He and I are working on the same set of facts. The differences are interpretations. I do not believe Graham’s idea that a single, now lost ancient civilization seeded the rest of them. I just don’t see that on a number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art, historical analysis. So I think his research is great. I think that he’s very well-read, in fact, better read than a lot of my colleagues, but his conclusions I disagree with. And he and I have talked about this and had a very civil and normal conversation about it and agree to disagree without spitting any venom at any point in the conversation.
Lex Fridman
That would be a fun argument to be a fly on the wall for. So he’s proposed that it’s possible that the Amazon jungle is a man-made garden. So it was planted there by advanced ancient civilization. Is there any degree to which that could be possible?
That would be a fun argument to be a fly on the wall for. So he’s proposed that it’s possible that the Amazon jungle is a man-made garden. So it was planted there by advanced ancient civilization. Is there any degree to which that could be possible?
Ed Barnhart
Frankly, I agree with him. It’s just like what I was just talking about. It’s the conclusion part that we differ from.
Frankly, I agree with him. It’s just like what I was just talking about. It’s the conclusion part that we differ from.
Lex Fridman
Sure.
Sure.
Ed Barnhart
But the facts that he’s basing that on are that terra preta are the huge geometric earthworks, are the ever-increasing evidence of them. They are now from the bottom of Bolivia to Guyana. They’re everywhere. Every time we open up the jungle, we find these big works. So yes, there was a vast civilization that was there. How advanced they were is a question and also a perspective thing. Graham really focuses in on what we don’t know and what could be.
But the facts that he’s basing that on are that terra preta are the huge geometric earthworks, are the ever-increasing evidence of them. They are now from the bottom of Bolivia to Guyana. They’re everywhere. Every time we open up the jungle, we find these big works. So yes, there was a vast civilization that was there. How advanced they were is a question and also a perspective thing. Graham really focuses in on what we don’t know and what could be.
Lex Fridman
Just to educate me, what’s the key idea that he’s proposing that you disagree with? Is it it was the level of advancement the civilization was, or how large and centralized it was?
Just to educate me, what’s the key idea that he’s proposing that you disagree with? Is it it was the level of advancement the civilization was, or how large and centralized it was?
Ed Barnhart
My main point of disagreement is that his… And his ideas evolve like everybody’s. No scientist or researcher in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it till the day they die. His ideas are evolving, but his ideas remain. A core of them are that there was a very advanced single ancient civilization that was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions, and the younger Dryas hypothesis is part of that. Most recently, he used to not say that. Now he’s into this meteor thing, but he believes that that civilization was destroyed, but that members of it escaped this cataclysm and then spread out all over the world to seed all of the world’s civilizations for the next revival.
My main point of disagreement is that his… And his ideas evolve like everybody’s. No scientist or researcher in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it till the day they die. His ideas are evolving, but his ideas remain. A core of them are that there was a very advanced single ancient civilization that was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions, and the younger Dryas hypothesis is part of that. Most recently, he used to not say that. Now he’s into this meteor thing, but he believes that that civilization was destroyed, but that members of it escaped this cataclysm and then spread out all over the world to seed all of the world’s civilizations for the next revival.
There’s where I disagree with him. I think these were independent civilizations that grew up in their own ways, that they were not seeded by some more advanced civilization from the past, and that they all hold things in common because they have this common ancestry of… In his early books, he suggested it’s Atlantis. I don’t think he suggests that anymore, but he still hangs on to the single advanced, now completely lost civilization. And archeologists, all of our ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts, and we could have the story wrong, but one thing we’re real good at is finding stuff. We find fish scales, so I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that we can’t even find a potsherd from.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, and of course, it is a compelling story that there’s a single civilization from which all of this came from, because the alternative is the idea that we came across the Bering Strait from Asia went all the way down to South America and got isolated and created all these marvelous, sophisticated civilizations and ideas, including religious ideas that look similar to other… Everybody has a flood myth.
Yeah, and of course, it is a compelling story that there’s a single civilization from which all of this came from, because the alternative is the idea that we came across the Bering Strait from Asia went all the way down to South America and got isolated and created all these marvelous, sophisticated civilizations and ideas, including religious ideas that look similar to other… Everybody has a flood myth.
Ed Barnhart
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
So there’s a lot of similarities, everybody building pyramids, but there could be a lot of other explanations. And for even if it’s a simple compelling explanation, that has to be evidence for it, and what would that evidence look like?
So there’s a lot of similarities, everybody building pyramids, but there could be a lot of other explanations. And for even if it’s a simple compelling explanation, that has to be evidence for it, and what would that evidence look like?
Ed Barnhart
Well, that’s the bottom line.
Well, that’s the bottom line.
Lex Fridman
That’s tough.
That’s tough.
Ed Barnhart
Everything’s theories were… And as responsible scientists, we’re trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That’s one more foot out of the science box that archeology often steps. We’re supposed to be disproving what we think is happening, not proving it.
Everything’s theories were… And as responsible scientists, we’re trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That’s one more foot out of the science box that archeology often steps. We’re supposed to be disproving what we think is happening, not proving it.
Lex Fridman
You don’t want to lean into the mystery too much. It’s such a weird discipline because you’re operating in… It’s really in a dark room. You’re feeling around a dark room. So it’s mostly mystery. I would say a lot of sciences operate in a mostly well-lit room. It’s like a dark corner and you’re figuring out a way to light it. But yeah, in archeology, most of it is a mystery. Right?
You don’t want to lean into the mystery too much. It’s such a weird discipline because you’re operating in… It’s really in a dark room. You’re feeling around a dark room. So it’s mostly mystery. I would say a lot of sciences operate in a mostly well-lit room. It’s like a dark corner and you’re figuring out a way to light it. But yeah, in archeology, most of it is a mystery. Right?
Ed Barnhart
Yes, it’s job security. I like that part. But I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant. And so we got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish, because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift. And if we are busy burning books of ideas that we don’t like, that’s where we close our minds to the possibility of advancing things.
Yes, it’s job security. I like that part. But I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant. And so we got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish, because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift. And if we are busy burning books of ideas that we don’t like, that’s where we close our minds to the possibility of advancing things.
Uncontacted tribes
Lex Fridman
I really love that, and I really appreciate that you’re saying that. One of the fascinating things about just the Amazon to me is that there’s still a large number of uncontacted tribes. To rewind back into ancient history, you can imagine all of these tribes that existed in the Amazon that were isolated, very distinct from each other. Can you speak to this, your understanding of these tribes and their history that are still here today?
I really love that, and I really appreciate that you’re saying that. One of the fascinating things about just the Amazon to me is that there’s still a large number of uncontacted tribes. To rewind back into ancient history, you can imagine all of these tribes that existed in the Amazon that were isolated, very distinct from each other. Can you speak to this, your understanding of these tribes and their history that are still here today?
Ed Barnhart
Well, a lot of them are these… By uncontacted, we mean we don’t know anything about these guys. We know roughly where they are, but places like Ecuador have very responsible policies where no one’s allowed to go contact them. So we have a dearth of information. If they walk out of the jungle and talk to us, that’s one thing, but we don’t go out and there looking for them, but they do seem frozen in time, and I don’t think any of us have a good estimation of how long they’ve been like that. But we were saying earlier that humans change based on pressures of their environment. Mother necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why we change, it’s pressure. And one thing the Amazon is, once you figure out how not to die in it, it’s a paradise of food. Food’s fallen from the sky all the time there, and once you learn to adapt to that environment, you’ve got very little need. There’s no pressure to make anything else. Things are working.
Well, a lot of them are these… By uncontacted, we mean we don’t know anything about these guys. We know roughly where they are, but places like Ecuador have very responsible policies where no one’s allowed to go contact them. So we have a dearth of information. If they walk out of the jungle and talk to us, that’s one thing, but we don’t go out and there looking for them, but they do seem frozen in time, and I don’t think any of us have a good estimation of how long they’ve been like that. But we were saying earlier that humans change based on pressures of their environment. Mother necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why we change, it’s pressure. And one thing the Amazon is, once you figure out how not to die in it, it’s a paradise of food. Food’s fallen from the sky all the time there, and once you learn to adapt to that environment, you’ve got very little need. There’s no pressure to make anything else. Things are working.
Lex Fridman
So for the modern humans that come across these uncontacted tribes, one of the things they document and notice is the propensity of these tribes for violence. So they get very aggressive in attacking whoever they come across.
So for the modern humans that come across these uncontacted tribes, one of the things they document and notice is the propensity of these tribes for violence. So they get very aggressive in attacking whoever they come across.
Ed Barnhart
And not just foreigners. They attack each other. The Yanomamo are famous for just having never ending feuds with each other.
And not just foreigners. They attack each other. The Yanomamo are famous for just having never ending feuds with each other.
Lex Fridman
What do you think is the philosophy behind that?
What do you think is the philosophy behind that?
Ed Barnhart
I’m a relatively peaceful person, but I’ve got the monster in me like everybody does.
I’m a relatively peaceful person, but I’ve got the monster in me like everybody does.
Ed Barnhart
I’ve got the monster in me, like everybody does. And I think that these, it’s cultural norms that become institutionalized. For the YÄ…nomamö, they really, part of the right of passage to be a man is to go kill or maim somebody from an outer village. And they go in there, they oftentimes, the way they don’t let inbreeding set in and ruin everybody, not that they think of it scientifically, but they typically go and steal women from far-off communities, and that starts a big fight.
I’ve got the monster in me, like everybody does. And I think that these, it’s cultural norms that become institutionalized. For the YÄ…nomamö, they really, part of the right of passage to be a man is to go kill or maim somebody from an outer village. And they go in there, they oftentimes, the way they don’t let inbreeding set in and ruin everybody, not that they think of it scientifically, but they typically go and steal women from far-off communities, and that starts a big fight.
Another thing that starts fights, that when nobody even fought, is illness. Illness in the Amazon and all of the ancient Americas wasn’t seen as a biological thing, it was a spiritual thing. So if somebody in your village gets sick, the question is asked, “Well, what spirit is menacing him and who called it out on him?” And then, the rumor starts, “Well, I bet you it was Joe over there in that other community. He’s still pissed off for that time when we stole his daughter, and we ought to go over there and kill Joe, and then he’ll get better.” And so this round of never-ending violence, like Hatfields & McCoys had that thing, and the people of New Guinea also do that. So there are certain areas, mostly wooded areas, now that I think about it, where people just hide out and they attack each other as a cultural institution.
Lex Fridman
It’s such a tricky thing to do, to study an uncontacted tribe, without obviously contacting them, to figure out their language, their philosophy of mind, how they communicate, the hierarchy they operate under.
It’s such a tricky thing to do, to study an uncontacted tribe, without obviously contacting them, to figure out their language, their philosophy of mind, how they communicate, the hierarchy they operate under.
Ed Barnhart
And yeah, there was a fascinating story in Peru, I guess it was probably like eight years ago or something. But there was a ranger from one of the biology stations who, just in the by and by of protecting his area, met one of these uncontacted tribes and befriended someone. Not the whole tribe, but he made some friends who would meet him in the woods, not in their community. And he started to learn their language over a couple years. And so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk to these people. And one day, a couple of them just came out of the woods, and just plugged him with arrows, and just killed him, and then they went back in the woods. Like, “That’s the one guy who understands what we’re saying, we should kill him and move our village.”
And yeah, there was a fascinating story in Peru, I guess it was probably like eight years ago or something. But there was a ranger from one of the biology stations who, just in the by and by of protecting his area, met one of these uncontacted tribes and befriended someone. Not the whole tribe, but he made some friends who would meet him in the woods, not in their community. And he started to learn their language over a couple years. And so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk to these people. And one day, a couple of them just came out of the woods, and just plugged him with arrows, and just killed him, and then they went back in the woods. Like, “That’s the one guy who understands what we’re saying, we should kill him and move our village.”
Lex Fridman
So those folks really lean into the, as you said, the monster versus the puppy.
So those folks really lean into the, as you said, the monster versus the puppy.
Ed Barnhart
You know, everybody’s got it, I think. I think we need to listen to our better angels, because if we don’t, we, as a human species, can easily devolve into just using violence against others to get what we want. It’s a daily choice we make not to be savages.
You know, everybody’s got it, I think. I think we need to listen to our better angels, because if we don’t, we, as a human species, can easily devolve into just using violence against others to get what we want. It’s a daily choice we make not to be savages.
Lex Fridman
Which is a fascinating thing to remember. We’re kind of thinking civilized society, we’ve moved past all that, but it can be summoned, like in 1984, the two minutes of hate. With the right words, that primal thing can be summoned, and directed, and lead to a lot of destruction.
Which is a fascinating thing to remember. We’re kind of thinking civilized society, we’ve moved past all that, but it can be summoned, like in 1984, the two minutes of hate. With the right words, that primal thing can be summoned, and directed, and lead to a lot of destruction.
Ed Barnhart
And our sports are really based on taking those kinds of urges and channeling them positive, where somebody’s not dead at the end of it.
And our sports are really based on taking those kinds of urges and channeling them positive, where somebody’s not dead at the end of it.
Maya civilization
Lex Fridman
Yep. So at which point did what we now call the Maya Civilization arise?
Yep. So at which point did what we now call the Maya Civilization arise?
Ed Barnhart
That’s another complicated one, another group living mostly in a jungle that we have barely begun to explore. You know, the truth is a lot of the questions in the Amazon and what we’re talking about now is the Patan and the mountains there. Those aren’t places archeologists want to live, they’re horrible. I mean, I’ve been there. I don’t want to live in a tent and eat rations. I want to live in a nice town. So a lot of the places where the answers are, we still really haven’t gotten there, because it takes a special person to be educated enough to know what they’re looking at, and tough enough to want to be there. I’ve done my tour of duty, I’m now in a nice little podcast studio. But seriously, the Maya, the first hint that we see people who are culturally Maya, very close to where the time period for that Chavin culture, is about 1800 BCE.
That’s another complicated one, another group living mostly in a jungle that we have barely begun to explore. You know, the truth is a lot of the questions in the Amazon and what we’re talking about now is the Patan and the mountains there. Those aren’t places archeologists want to live, they’re horrible. I mean, I’ve been there. I don’t want to live in a tent and eat rations. I want to live in a nice town. So a lot of the places where the answers are, we still really haven’t gotten there, because it takes a special person to be educated enough to know what they’re looking at, and tough enough to want to be there. I’ve done my tour of duty, I’m now in a nice little podcast studio. But seriously, the Maya, the first hint that we see people who are culturally Maya, very close to where the time period for that Chavin culture, is about 1800 BCE.
There’s a culture that’s some called the Mokaya, not Maya, but they’re on the Pacific coast, where Guatemala and Mexico connect. It’s called the Soconusco. And those are the first people that are really going to be culturally Maya, and they’re interacting with the culture that has traditionally been seen as Mexico’s mother culture, which is the Olmec. They’re kind of the same thing as we were talking about in South America, where the Maya, the original Maya, there’s not a whole lot to indicate that they have a religion. But the Olmec have this religion they develop, and they start exporting it. And you see the Maya become more and more involved in the religion that’s being created by the Olmec, who are to the north of them, in the swamps of what we call the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
Lex Fridman
I have a lot of questions to ask here about just natural stupid confusion I have. So first, did the Maya or the Olmec come first, and are they distinct groups? How do you maintain a distinct civilization when you’re so close together?
I have a lot of questions to ask here about just natural stupid confusion I have. So first, did the Maya or the Olmec come first, and are they distinct groups? How do you maintain a distinct civilization when you’re so close together?
Ed Barnhart
I just finished filming a whole thing on the Olmecs and their interaction with the Maya for The Great Courses. I’m thrilled for it to come out next spring. I think they co-evolved. Archeology, in this regard, is the worst enemy of this. So we put these names on cultures, we talk about how they evolve from one to another, we draw these lines where there aren’t any. We make these time periods that a culture magically transforms into somebody with another name, where I’m pretty sure they didn’t care about any of those names. But the Maya and the Olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that’s happening in Mesoamerica, a very dynamic time.
I just finished filming a whole thing on the Olmecs and their interaction with the Maya for The Great Courses. I’m thrilled for it to come out next spring. I think they co-evolved. Archeology, in this regard, is the worst enemy of this. So we put these names on cultures, we talk about how they evolve from one to another, we draw these lines where there aren’t any. We make these time periods that a culture magically transforms into somebody with another name, where I’m pretty sure they didn’t care about any of those names. But the Maya and the Olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that’s happening in Mesoamerica, a very dynamic time.
The Olmec are really bringing the religion part, but the other areas are bringing technology, ceramic technology, making hematite mirrors, making tools out of obsidian and other stone types. So you’ve got the Olmec in the middle, where Mexico gets skinny, and it gets swampy down there. That’s called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. That’s where the Olmec are. Then, you’ve got the Maya to the east of them. Then, you have the Valley of Oaxaca, where the people called the Zapotecs, they’re rising up. And then, you have the Valley of Mexico, which will eventually become the Aztecs, but not for millennia. All those areas are interacting with each other.
Lex Fridman
Can we just also draw some more lines?
Can we just also draw some more lines?
Ed Barnhart
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, sure.
Lex Fridman
So what is Mesoamerica and what is South America? And what you just said, the Olmecs and the Maya, can we just linger on the geography that we’re talking about here in the… What is this, like 1000 BC?
So what is Mesoamerica and what is South America? And what you just said, the Olmecs and the Maya, can we just linger on the geography that we’re talking about here in the… What is this, like 1000 BC?
Ed Barnhart
Yeah, the time period we’re talking about, where the Olmec are there, 1000 BC is a great midpoint of it. I’d say it starts about 1800 BCE, and by 500 BCE, the Olmec are gone, and a whole new wave of civilization and population increase happened. In terms of Mesoamerica, looking at your map here, I’d say about halfway through the Chihuahua Desert, up there in the top left, that’s about the boundary of Mesoamerica. There’s this big desert where almost nobody lives, and once you get north enough, you get into the ancestral Pueblo people of what’s now America, the Four Corners area. They’re not Mesoamerican, they have different lives.
Yeah, the time period we’re talking about, where the Olmec are there, 1000 BC is a great midpoint of it. I’d say it starts about 1800 BCE, and by 500 BCE, the Olmec are gone, and a whole new wave of civilization and population increase happened. In terms of Mesoamerica, looking at your map here, I’d say about halfway through the Chihuahua Desert, up there in the top left, that’s about the boundary of Mesoamerica. There’s this big desert where almost nobody lives, and once you get north enough, you get into the ancestral Pueblo people of what’s now America, the Four Corners area. They’re not Mesoamerican, they have different lives.
Lex Fridman
Where does modern Mexico end?
Where does modern Mexico end?
Ed Barnhart
Modern Mexico ends, right, you see the name Maya there with the white line around it?
Modern Mexico ends, right, you see the name Maya there with the white line around it?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ed Barnhart
That’s Guatemala, so Guatemala cuts off most of Mexico from Central America.
That’s Guatemala, so Guatemala cuts off most of Mexico from Central America.
Lex Fridman
Got it.
Got it.
Ed Barnhart
But Mesoamerica only goes about halfway through Honduras, and then it’s really kind of a no man’s land. Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, they really, they’re neither. They’re not Mesoamerica, they’re not South America. They’re more South America, because they’ve got some gold there. But then, basically, you get on the other side of Panama, and you’re fully in South America, with two distinct groups, too. You’ve got the guys that are on the Andes, on the west coast, and then you have the Amazon.
But Mesoamerica only goes about halfway through Honduras, and then it’s really kind of a no man’s land. Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, they really, they’re neither. They’re not Mesoamerica, they’re not South America. They’re more South America, because they’ve got some gold there. But then, basically, you get on the other side of Panama, and you’re fully in South America, with two distinct groups, too. You’ve got the guys that are on the Andes, on the west coast, and then you have the Amazon.
Lex Fridman
So the Andes and the Amazon are very distinct.
So the Andes and the Amazon are very distinct.
Ed Barnhart
Yep.
Yep.
Lex Fridman
So when you refer to the Andean region, is that referring to the Andes and the Amazon, or just the Andes?
So when you refer to the Andean region, is that referring to the Andes and the Amazon, or just the Andes?
Ed Barnhart
Just the Andes and the coast to the Pacific there. That’s Andean civilization.
Just the Andes and the coast to the Pacific there. That’s Andean civilization.
Lex Fridman
So did Maya make it to the Andes, the Andean region?
So did Maya make it to the Andes, the Andean region?
Ed Barnhart
Not that archeology can prove, but it’s almost certain that they interacted with each other. Number one, it’s just, it’s biased to think that these people couldn’t travel as widely as people on the other side of the planet did, but there’s all sorts of hints like that first ceramics I was talking about, that the Maya made, they show up strangely sophisticated technologically already. And down in Ecuador, they had them for 1,000 years before. So a lot of people, myself included, think that the idea of ceramics actually came from South America to the Maya.
Not that archeology can prove, but it’s almost certain that they interacted with each other. Number one, it’s just, it’s biased to think that these people couldn’t travel as widely as people on the other side of the planet did, but there’s all sorts of hints like that first ceramics I was talking about, that the Maya made, they show up strangely sophisticated technologically already. And down in Ecuador, they had them for 1,000 years before. So a lot of people, myself included, think that the idea of ceramics actually came from South America to the Maya.
Lex Fridman
Did the Maya get seeded by the second wave across the Bering Strait, or did that initial wave of people that came and populated South America, were they the ancestors of the Maya? How did the migration happen here? Do we understand that?
Did the Maya get seeded by the second wave across the Bering Strait, or did that initial wave of people that came and populated South America, were they the ancestors of the Maya? How did the migration happen here? Do we understand that?
Ed Barnhart
We’re still piecing it together. You know, I’d be lying if I told you I had the answers. But we do have evidence of Maya stature people. They were small people. Generally speaking, people that grow up in the forest are smaller and people that grow up in the open plains are taller, probably about just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not.
We’re still piecing it together. You know, I’d be lying if I told you I had the answers. But we do have evidence of Maya stature people. They were small people. Generally speaking, people that grow up in the forest are smaller and people that grow up in the open plains are taller, probably about just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not.
Lex Fridman
You’re joking, but there could be something to that.
You’re joking, but there could be something to that.
Ed Barnhart
I think there’s some truth to it. I mean, the Pygmies are small and the people on the plains in Africa are big. The North American Indians are tall and the Maya are small. There is definitely a pattern of smaller people in the forests. But anyway, there’s a cave in the Yucatan called Loltun Cave that has hand prints in the cave. It’s somebody who put their hand on the cave and spit charcoal around their hand, like a negative print. We can date that charcoal, and it comes from 10,000 years ago, and the hands are all small. It’s typical Old Mexico. I walked right up to these things and could put my hand… I didn’t mess with them, but I put my hand next to these hands, and they’re all smaller than my Northern European hand, and so either it was a bunch of kids who were in this cave 10,000 years ago, or it was people of Maya stature who did it.
I think there’s some truth to it. I mean, the Pygmies are small and the people on the plains in Africa are big. The North American Indians are tall and the Maya are small. There is definitely a pattern of smaller people in the forests. But anyway, there’s a cave in the Yucatan called Loltun Cave that has hand prints in the cave. It’s somebody who put their hand on the cave and spit charcoal around their hand, like a negative print. We can date that charcoal, and it comes from 10,000 years ago, and the hands are all small. It’s typical Old Mexico. I walked right up to these things and could put my hand… I didn’t mess with them, but I put my hand next to these hands, and they’re all smaller than my Northern European hand, and so either it was a bunch of kids who were in this cave 10,000 years ago, or it was people of Maya stature who did it.
Lex Fridman
It’s so cool that you can date the charcoal, and it’s so cool that 10,000 years ago there are people leaving [inaudible 01:22:37]-
It’s so cool that you can date the charcoal, and it’s so cool that 10,000 years ago there are people leaving [inaudible 01:22:37]-
Ed Barnhart
And actually, we have one that’s I think 2,000 years older now, just a couple years ago, again in Yucatan, in a cave, they found a woman they named Naia now, and she’s like 12,000 years old.
And actually, we have one that’s I think 2,000 years older now, just a couple years ago, again in Yucatan, in a cave, they found a woman they named Naia now, and she’s like 12,000 years old.
Lex Fridman
So the best guess maybe that you have is it goes across the Bering Strait to South America, possibly the Amazon, develop a lot of cool ideas in the Amazon, and started drifting back up into Mesoamerica?
So the best guess maybe that you have is it goes across the Bering Strait to South America, possibly the Amazon, develop a lot of cool ideas in the Amazon, and started drifting back up into Mesoamerica?
Ed Barnhart
Was kind of a co-evolution, the technology of ceramics I think got there through an interaction with-
Was kind of a co-evolution, the technology of ceramics I think got there through an interaction with-
Lex Fridman
See, the interesting thing is that the Maya didn’t really have religion, didn’t have as a vibrant religious set of ideas, and they borrowed it from the Olmec.
See, the interesting thing is that the Maya didn’t really have religion, didn’t have as a vibrant religious set of ideas, and they borrowed it from the Olmec.
Ed Barnhart
I’ve been doing a deep dive on this for this Olmec course that I just did, and it really does seem like these other cultures that have jade, and hematite, and obsidian, the Olmec had none of that stuff. They were living in a swamp, and building things out of dirt, but they were importing those materials from those areas, carving them into all sorts of religious iconography, and then exporting them back to them.
I’ve been doing a deep dive on this for this Olmec course that I just did, and it really does seem like these other cultures that have jade, and hematite, and obsidian, the Olmec had none of that stuff. They were living in a swamp, and building things out of dirt, but they were importing those materials from those areas, carving them into all sorts of religious iconography, and then exporting them back to them.
Lex Fridman
And still, the fanged deity show up [inaudible 01:23:58]-
And still, the fanged deity show up [inaudible 01:23:58]-
Ed Barnhart
No, the fanged deity is nowhere in Central America and Mesoamerica, that’s why… There’s jaguars, there’s jaguar iconography, but it’s not the same thing. This whole jaguar transformer deity does not exist there. They do have a pantheon.
No, the fanged deity is nowhere in Central America and Mesoamerica, that’s why… There’s jaguars, there’s jaguar iconography, but it’s not the same thing. This whole jaguar transformer deity does not exist there. They do have a pantheon.
Lex Fridman
So the Maya, the Olmecs are the interesting peoples of the regions. I’d love to ask questions about who were they? So one question I’m curious about, what was their sense when they looked up at the stars? What was their conception of the cosmos?
So the Maya, the Olmecs are the interesting peoples of the regions. I’d love to ask questions about who were they? So one question I’m curious about, what was their sense when they looked up at the stars? What was their conception of the cosmos?
Ed Barnhart
That’s a question I’ve spent my entire career trying to answer. I think that they saw it as proof of the cyclical nature of life, and certainly, they saw, like every ancient group did, like, “Are those the gods? Why are those things far away?” But I think that the Maya especially looked at it with a much more mathematical mind than most did. And so they watched these things move every night, and if you do that even today, you notice that all the stars move in tandem. They’re just this blanket, they’re like this curtain behind me. They’re the stage upon which some very important players are dancing, and that’s the Moon, the Sun and the planets.
That’s a question I’ve spent my entire career trying to answer. I think that they saw it as proof of the cyclical nature of life, and certainly, they saw, like every ancient group did, like, “Are those the gods? Why are those things far away?” But I think that the Maya especially looked at it with a much more mathematical mind than most did. And so they watched these things move every night, and if you do that even today, you notice that all the stars move in tandem. They’re just this blanket, they’re like this curtain behind me. They’re the stage upon which some very important players are dancing, and that’s the Moon, the Sun and the planets.
There’s five planets we can see visibly. So they started watching, like, “Why are just those seven moving differently than the rest?” And those are the things that they keyed on mathematically. The Sun, of course, was also involved in the agricultural cycle, so that was important in and of itself. But the planets, we can see them coming up with ideas, definitely doing the math, and seeing that there is a repeated cycle, and then coming up with mythology around them, like Venus for them was associated with war, and they had very ritualized times to go to war that had something to do with Venus.
Sometimes, in the classic period Maya, it was the first appearance of Venus as the Morning Star. That was a good time to go to battle with your neighbors. And when it became the post-classic, with Chichén Itzá being the capital of the Yucatan, then it looks like, if you watch Venus day after day, it goes slowly up every day, and then when it hits its highest point as Morning Star in the morning, it goes down to the Earth like three times as fast. All of a sudden, it just shoots down and hits the Earth. And so the people of post-classic Maya civilization saw that as the gods shooting a spear into the Earth, and that was a good time to attack your neighbors. That was like war time, when the spear is going to hit the earth.
Lex Fridman
All right, so this is fascinating. They just had at the foundation, a sense that life, existence at the various timescales is cyclical.
All right, so this is fascinating. They just had at the foundation, a sense that life, existence at the various timescales is cyclical.
Ed Barnhart
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That’s a starting point, and then you just look out there, and if you’re extremely precise, which is fascinating, how precise they were, you can just measure the cycles.
That’s a starting point, and then you just look out there, and if you’re extremely precise, which is fascinating, how precise they were, you can just measure the cycles.
Ed Barnhart
Yeah, and they did it really well. Now, of course, they are the only ones to develop a fully-elaborated writing system in all of the Americas. The South America had the quipu, but it’s so different than our writing. We’re still trying to figure out what the heck it is. We know there’s math there, too. But they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand it to the next generation, who would then do it more and do it more.
Yeah, and they did it really well. Now, of course, they are the only ones to develop a fully-elaborated writing system in all of the Americas. The South America had the quipu, but it’s so different than our writing. We’re still trying to figure out what the heck it is. We know there’s math there, too. But they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand it to the next generation, who would then do it more and do it more.
That’s how they figured out kind of the Holy Grail of ancient astronomy. How good were they was whether they could see the procession of the equinoxes, the fact that we’re just barely wobbling, and there’s a 26,000-year period where the stars as that backdrop will spin all the way around and come back. It’s 26,000 years. But the Maya we’re able to figure out, “Wait, it’s moving one degree every 72 years,” and did a calculation based on where it should be in the ancient past, and they were using constellations. They’re showing us they know by saying like, “This planet’s in this constellation right now, and 33,000 years ago, it would be in this constellation.”
Lex Fridman
It’s just fascinating that they were able to figure this out. I would love to sort understand the details of the scientific community, if you can call it that.
It’s just fascinating that they were able to figure this out. I would love to sort understand the details of the scientific community, if you can call it that.
Ed Barnhart
I think we absolutely could, and that’s actually one of the things that I’m hoping to move the needle on in my generation, with my career, is to give these cultures the respect they deserve, as standing toe to toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect. There are things that should be called science that are not being called science at the moment. Their math is incredible, their hydraulic engineering is incredible, their chemistry is incredible, and so I hope to talk about these things differently, as a way to get people to recognize the achievements in a different way.
I think we absolutely could, and that’s actually one of the things that I’m hoping to move the needle on in my generation, with my career, is to give these cultures the respect they deserve, as standing toe to toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect. There are things that should be called science that are not being called science at the moment. Their math is incredible, their hydraulic engineering is incredible, their chemistry is incredible, and so I hope to talk about these things differently, as a way to get people to recognize the achievements in a different way.
Mayan calendar
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean, unquestionably incredible scientific work in the astronomy sense, especially here. Can you speak to all the sophisticated aspects of the Mayan calendar that they’ve developed?
Yeah, I mean, unquestionably incredible scientific work in the astronomy sense, especially here. Can you speak to all the sophisticated aspects of the Mayan calendar that they’ve developed?
Ed Barnhart
Don’t know, you got another five hours?
Don’t know, you got another five hours?
Lex Fridman
Let’s go.
Let’s go.
Ed Barnhart
No, I’m kidding.
No, I’m kidding.
Lex Fridman
I should say that you also gave me the 2024 Mayan calendar.
I should say that you also gave me the 2024 Mayan calendar.
Ed Barnhart
Yeah, I do this just to show the world that calendar system is evergreen. It can go into the future or the past for billions of years in the system they made, just like our system is.
Yeah, I do this just to show the world that calendar system is evergreen. It can go into the future or the past for billions of years in the system they made, just like our system is.
Lex Fridman
So can you speak to the three components here as I’m reading? The Tzolk’in, the Haab, and the Long Count, what are these fascinating components of the calendar?
So can you speak to the three components here as I’m reading? The Tzolk’in, the Haab, and the Long Count, what are these fascinating components of the calendar?
Ed Barnhart
It’s neat how obsessed… They were really math nerds. It wasn’t good enough for them to just make one cycle to describe time. They had all these cycles that interlocked into each other, like cogs in a machine, though they never thought of it like that. But the Tzolk’in is their oldest one, and the one that still endures today. There are millions of Maya people that are living their lives based on a 260-day count. No weeks, no months. It’s just 13 numbers combined with 20 day names, for a total of 260 days, and then it goes again.
It’s neat how obsessed… They were really math nerds. It wasn’t good enough for them to just make one cycle to describe time. They had all these cycles that interlocked into each other, like cogs in a machine, though they never thought of it like that. But the Tzolk’in is their oldest one, and the one that still endures today. There are millions of Maya people that are living their lives based on a 260-day count. No weeks, no months. It’s just 13 numbers combined with 20 day names, for a total of 260 days, and then it goes again.
Everybody in the highlands knows what their birthday is in that calendar, knows what it means about their personality and the kind of jobs that they’re supposed to do. Each one of those days has their own spirit and what’s supposed to happen in those days. The Maya collectively call them the Mom, the Grandmother, Grandfather spirits, and they talk to each one of those days, and they pray to them. There’s now an association of some 8,000 people that are called [inaudible 01:31:33], that are daykeepers who are keeping the days, and they’re also like community psychologists, almost. People come to them and say, “You know, my life is mixed up. What’s wrong here?” “Well, let’s ask the Mom. Okay, well, it looks like you’re not doing this or that, or you know what, you’re an accountant? You’re not supposed to be an accountant. You’re supposed to be a midwife. What are you doing? You’re living your life wrong. You’re a Kibʼ. You need to start being a Kibʼ person.”
Lex Fridman
So they take extremely seriously the day on which you’re born, what that means, the spirit that embodies that day?
So they take extremely seriously the day on which you’re born, what that means, the spirit that embodies that day?
Ed Barnhart
Right. Like, I’m Kibʼ, I’m 13, Kibʼ, and it’s funny how accurate a lot of them are. Mine is basically, is I’m an irresponsible husband and parent, but people like me, so my family still prospers. Like, well, God, that’s horribly accurate.
Right. Like, I’m Kibʼ, I’m 13, Kibʼ, and it’s funny how accurate a lot of them are. Mine is basically, is I’m an irresponsible husband and parent, but people like me, so my family still prospers. Like, well, God, that’s horribly accurate.
Lex Fridman
I mean, some of it is also the chicken or the egg. If you truly believe, if you’ve structured society where this calendar is truly sacred, then it kind of like, the spirit does manifest itself in the life of the people that is born on that spirit’s day.
I mean, some of it is also the chicken or the egg. If you truly believe, if you’ve structured society where this calendar is truly sacred, then it kind of like, the spirit does manifest itself in the life of the people that is born on that spirit’s day.
Ed Barnhart
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
It’s interesting.
It’s interesting.
Ed Barnhart
And the Maya really feel this, in this system. So that’s the core system. This 260-day calendar was the very first calendar they made thousands of years ago, and it’s the one that’s most important today.
And the Maya really feel this, in this system. So that’s the core system. This 260-day calendar was the very first calendar they made thousands of years ago, and it’s the one that’s most important today.
Lex Fridman
Why 260 days, by the way? Is there a reasoning behind it?
Why 260 days, by the way? Is there a reasoning behind it?
Ed Barnhart
Most Maya agree with this today, and who knows what the original architects, thousands of years ago were thinking, but it’s nine months, it’s the human gestation period. So if you conceived on the day 13, monkey, chances are your kid’s coming out on or near 13, monkey, and I think it’s beautiful. I mean, if that’s right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together, when they thought about, “We need a count of time for us,” they didn’t look up into the heavens, they looked into their bodies. “What’s the first cycle that we actually go through as humans?” and they picked this nine-month thing. It really is our cycle, and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.
Most Maya agree with this today, and who knows what the original architects, thousands of years ago were thinking, but it’s nine months, it’s the human gestation period. So if you conceived on the day 13, monkey, chances are your kid’s coming out on or near 13, monkey, and I think it’s beautiful. I mean, if that’s right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together, when they thought about, “We need a count of time for us,” they didn’t look up into the heavens, they looked into their bodies. “What’s the first cycle that we actually go through as humans?” and they picked this nine-month thing. It really is our cycle, and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.
Lex Fridman
So that’s the oldest one and the sacred one that still carries through to today. What’s the second one, the Haab?
So that’s the oldest one and the sacred one that still carries through to today. What’s the second one, the Haab?
Ed Barnhart
The Haab is the solar calendar, the one that everybody on the planet eventually comes up with. We know it’s second, though, because when they start talking about it, they use all the symbols and the numbers from the 260 one. They say, “Well, we need a solar one, too. Let’s just keep counting this another 105 days, and we’ll get to 365.”
The Haab is the solar calendar, the one that everybody on the planet eventually comes up with. We know it’s second, though, because when they start talking about it, they use all the symbols and the numbers from the 260 one. They say, “Well, we need a solar one, too. Let’s just keep counting this another 105 days, and we’ll get to 365.”
Lex Fridman
Oh, interesting. They kind of carry the same.
Oh, interesting. They kind of carry the same.
Ed Barnhart
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
Got it, got it, got it, got it. And that’s useful, for all the sort of agriculture, all those kind of reasons?
Got it, got it, got it, got it. And that’s useful, for all the sort of agriculture, all those kind of reasons?
Ed Barnhart
Right. Though, interestingly, they never put a leap year in. The Haab is also called the vague year, because it’s just 365, which means every year, they’re off a quarter of a day, and eventually, it starts really adding up. In fact, it’s even caused modern problems. In this calendar here, I just do the straight math from 1,000 years ago. And so I place the beginning of the solar year differently than some Maya groups do, especially the guys in the highlands of Eastern Guatemala. They write me nasty emails saying, “I don’t know what time the year is,” but their relatives changed it in the 1950s, because their agricultural cycle was so far off. They moved it 60 days back to make it in the spring again, but it drifts, which is strange, because it’s not a very good thing for the agricultural cycle. It’s one of these mysteries we still don’t have an explanation for.
Right. Though, interestingly, they never put a leap year in. The Haab is also called the vague year, because it’s just 365, which means every year, they’re off a quarter of a day, and eventually, it starts really adding up. In fact, it’s even caused modern problems. In this calendar here, I just do the straight math from 1,000 years ago. And so I place the beginning of the solar year differently than some Maya groups do, especially the guys in the highlands of Eastern Guatemala. They write me nasty emails saying, “I don’t know what time the year is,” but their relatives changed it in the 1950s, because their agricultural cycle was so far off. They moved it 60 days back to make it in the spring again, but it drifts, which is strange, because it’s not a very good thing for the agricultural cycle. It’s one of these mysteries we still don’t have an explanation for.
Lex Fridman
So that’s the Haab, and then what’s the Long Count?
So that’s the Haab, and then what’s the Long Count?
Ed Barnhart
The Long Count’s their really mysterious, cool one, because it’s a linear count of days, which are not like them. It’s a bunch of cycles, like ours. You know, our weeks are a cycle, our months are a cycle, but it’s weird in that its estimation of the year in the Long Count system is only 360 days, so it’s miserably off a solar year. They count in base 20, so like we count in 10s, we’re decimal, they count in base 20 vigesimal.
The Long Count’s their really mysterious, cool one, because it’s a linear count of days, which are not like them. It’s a bunch of cycles, like ours. You know, our weeks are a cycle, our months are a cycle, but it’s weird in that its estimation of the year in the Long Count system is only 360 days, so it’s miserably off a solar year. They count in base 20, so like we count in 10s, we’re decimal, they count in base 20 vigesimal.
And so it should be there’s 1s, there’s 20s, there’s 400s, there’s 8,000s, there’s 160,000s. It goes just like our 10s, 100s, 1,000s, 10,000s, but it’s times 20. So they have days, months of 20 days, and then they have these years that should be, by their math, 400, but it’s only 360. And that throws the whole thing out of whack going further up. Then, they have a 20-year period and a 400- year period. 400 years to their calendar, but by that time, it’s only 396 years in our reckoning. So it’s mysterious that it’s… Why did they tweak it at the year to be only 360 days? That doesn’t follow any astronomy, that’s not the human cycle.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, but it’s interesting that they build up towards thinking about very long periods of time, like baktuns is 144,000 days.
Yeah, but it’s interesting that they build up towards thinking about very long periods of time, like baktuns is 144,000 days.
Ed Barnhart
Right, ar a baktuns is 400 of the Long Count’s years, so it’s kind of like our millennium. You know, we think it’s a big deal when we hit a millennium or a century. They have a 20-year period that they do a lot of celebrations on, called a k’atun, and then they have the 400 baktun, which is the big one. That’s like their millennium, and 13 of those baktuns occurred in the creation before us. They also think that the world has had multiple creations. They’re not alone in that. There’s lots of ancient civilizations who say that, but we’re technically in the fourth creation.
Right, ar a baktuns is 400 of the Long Count’s years, so it’s kind of like our millennium. You know, we think it’s a big deal when we hit a millennium or a century. They have a 20-year period that they do a lot of celebrations on, called a k’atun, and then they have the 400 baktun, which is the big one. That’s like their millennium, and 13 of those baktuns occurred in the creation before us. They also think that the world has had multiple creations. They’re not alone in that. There’s lots of ancient civilizations who say that, but we’re technically in the fourth creation.
And they have a creation story called the and the Popol Vuh, and the Popol Vuh is clear as day that the third creation ends with the help of these heroes called the Hero Twins, and the fourth creation begins. And so on the Maya monuments, we see them doing the math through the Long Count, and we can calculate it back very exactly. It happened, the fourth creation started on August 11th 3114 BC. And it doesn’t say it’s day one, it says it’s the last day of the 13th baktun of the third creation, which leads us to believe that a creation is only 13 baktuns long.
Lex Fridman
Right, and this would be the fourth creation? The calendar starts-
Right, and this would be the fourth creation? The calendar starts-
Ed Barnhart
This is the fourth creation. But if you do the math, going from 3114 BC, and count 13 baktuns forward, you get to 2012.
This is the fourth creation. But if you do the math, going from 3114 BC, and count 13 baktuns forward, you get to 2012.
Lex Fridman
And hence, the very popular notion, the 2012… Whenever that was December, something like-
And hence, the very popular notion, the 2012… Whenever that was December, something like-
Ed Barnhart
December 21st 2012.
December 21st 2012.
Lex Fridman
… will be the end of the world.
… will be the end of the world.
Ed Barnhart
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
So can you explain this?
So can you explain this?
Ed Barnhart
Those were very fruitful years for me. I had so many lectures around the country that it’s like Garrett Morris in Saturday Night Live. The apocalypse was very, very good to me.
Those were very fruitful years for me. I had so many lectures around the country that it’s like Garrett Morris in Saturday Night Live. The apocalypse was very, very good to me.
Lex Fridman
Ah, yeah, but that is pretty interesting. So technically, it would be, what, in the fifth? No.
Ah, yeah, but that is pretty interesting. So technically, it would be, what, in the fifth? No.
Ed Barnhart
Yeah, technically we’d be in the fifth, though my argument was that, actually, if you look through all the corpus of Maya mathematics and calendars, they never say anything like that. In fact, there’s a handful of dates that tell us that the fourth creation does continue farther on, that that baktun place should have 20 baktuns in it, like their counting system would dictate, not 13. And there’s a place in Palenque, there’s a place in the Dresden Codex, and one other place I’m forgetting, that all talk about time after 2012. So how does that happen? It’s a conflict.
Yeah, technically we’d be in the fifth, though my argument was that, actually, if you look through all the corpus of Maya mathematics and calendars, they never say anything like that. In fact, there’s a handful of dates that tell us that the fourth creation does continue farther on, that that baktun place should have 20 baktuns in it, like their counting system would dictate, not 13. And there’s a place in Palenque, there’s a place in the Dresden Codex, and one other place I’m forgetting, that all talk about time after 2012. So how does that happen? It’s a conflict.
Lex Fridman
Is there supposed to be an overlap of the… So it’s like 13 is the core of it, and it’s 20 long?
Is there supposed to be an overlap of the… So it’s like 13 is the core of it, and it’s 20 long?
Ed Barnhart
They love the number 13, it’s all over the place. It’s a magic number to them. My explanation, which I admit is not very solid, but I think that the magical deeds of the Hero Twins, in their creation story, at the end of the third creation, hit the magical reset button, and that it just restarted time right there, because of their magic, but that was not to say that the natural baktun cycle should be 13. And there are certain texts that go way forward in time or way backward in time, and whenever they want to do that, there are higher increments than just the baktun.
They love the number 13, it’s all over the place. It’s a magic number to them. My explanation, which I admit is not very solid, but I think that the magical deeds of the Hero Twins, in their creation story, at the end of the third creation, hit the magical reset button, and that it just restarted time right there, because of their magic, but that was not to say that the natural baktun cycle should be 13. And there are certain texts that go way forward in time or way backward in time, and whenever they want to do that, there are higher increments than just the baktun.
Above that, there’s the piktun, then there’s the kalabatun, then there’s alawatun, and it goes on and on. And these are like 160,000 years, huge increments of time. Whenever they want to do that, and they talk about a long period of time, they start putting 13s in all of those increments, those higher increments. And I think what they’re saying is they’re making an esoteric statement about the never-ending nature of time. That’s what I think they’re telling us in those texts, that time goes on forever, magically.
Lex Fridman
But they still had a conception that it didn’t go on forever before, right? That there was other civilizations that came before in there, and this is the fourth creation?
But they still had a conception that it didn’t go on forever before, right? That there was other civilizations that came before in there, and this is the fourth creation?
Ed Barnhart
This is the fourth creation, and the gods made everybody. The first ones made of mud and they melted. The second ones were made of sticks, but they were jerks to the animals. The third ones were like us, but flawed in some other way. And then, we’re finally made of the blood of the gods and corn. We’re made out of corn, so we’re perfect. And as it explains to us, the Popol Vuh does, we got it right this time. There’s no reason to believe that this creation has a set duration.
This is the fourth creation, and the gods made everybody. The first ones made of mud and they melted. The second ones were made of sticks, but they were jerks to the animals. The third ones were like us, but flawed in some other way. And then, we’re finally made of the blood of the gods and corn. We’re made out of corn, so we’re perfect. And as it explains to us, the Popol Vuh does, we got it right this time. There’s no reason to believe that this creation has a set duration.
One of the weird things is that the Aztecs, who we talked to a lot at contact, they also had the concept of multiple creations before us, but they were real clear to the Spanish that they weren’t all the same time element. Some of them were in the three hundreds of years, some of them were in the seven hundreds of years, but they were not the same time period. So our mathematical logic that if the third creation was 13, this one must be third creation, or also be 13, it’s in direct opposition to what the Aztecs told us about the nature of creations. They’re different time periods.
Lex Fridman
Why do you think there was the myth of the previous creations? Did they have some kind of long, multi-generational memory of prior civilizations?
Why do you think there was the myth of the previous creations? Did they have some kind of long, multi-generational memory of prior civilizations?
Ed Barnhart
It may have had some echo in the flood myths.
It may have had some echo in the flood myths.
Lex Fridman
Right, so same? It’s the same kind of major myths carried through long periods of time?
Right, so same? It’s the same kind of major myths carried through long periods of time?
Ed Barnhart
There’s a lot of different opinions about it. And if they were all 13, if we have 5 creations, like the Aztecs said, and they were all 13, they would come up to roughly 25,000 something years, which is very close to that processional cycle. So some people are like, “They designed it all to be one completion of the procession of the equinoxes.” I don’t believe that one, but that one sure sounds good, doesn’t it?
There’s a lot of different opinions about it. And if they were all 13, if we have 5 creations, like the Aztecs said, and they were all 13, they would come up to roughly 25,000 something years, which is very close to that processional cycle. So some people are like, “They designed it all to be one completion of the procession of the equinoxes.” I don’t believe that one, but that one sure sounds good, doesn’t it?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ed Barnhart
That’s going to get a lot of internet hits.
That’s going to get a lot of internet hits.
Flood myths
Lex Fridman
And one of the things I do obviously wonder about is why-
And one of the things I do obviously wonder about is why-
Lex Fridman
Wonder about is why the flood myth is part of most societies and most religions.
Wonder about is why the flood myth is part of most societies and most religions.
Ed Barnhart
I think that one’s pretty easy. It’s the end of the ice age, when the bathtub filled back up.
I think that one’s pretty easy. It’s the end of the ice age, when the bathtub filled back up.
Lex Fridman
So it’s just the ice age bathtub refilling.
So it’s just the ice age bathtub refilling.
Ed Barnhart
It’s the seas filling back up.
It’s the seas filling back up.
Lex Fridman
And they, without really understanding what happened, they just carried that story.
And they, without really understanding what happened, they just carried that story.
Ed Barnhart
Everybody knows that everybody’s nice coastal village went under water and they had to seek higher ground.
Everybody knows that everybody’s nice coastal village went under water and they had to seek higher ground.
Lex Fridman
And then just like people talking about the weather, everybody was talking about the weather for many generations as the sea level was going up, and then that myth carried.
And then just like people talking about the weather, everybody was talking about the weather for many generations as the sea level was going up, and then that myth carried.
Ed Barnhart
“Why do we live here, grandpa?” “Well, we used to live over there, but then the water came.”
“Why do we live here, grandpa?” “Well, we used to live over there, but then the water came.”
Lex Fridman
And then many grandpas later is just kind of permeates every idea.
And then many grandpas later is just kind of permeates every idea.
Ed Barnhart
It becomes mythology, but global mythology. So that one, there’s a lot of things I don’t have a reasonable explanation for, but the flood myth is almost certainly the rise in sea level.
It becomes mythology, but global mythology. So that one, there’s a lot of things I don’t have a reasonable explanation for, but the flood myth is almost certainly the rise in sea level.
Lex Fridman
So this idea that every day represents, carries a spirit. There’s modern day astrology. Most people kind of consider astrology this maybe a bit unscientific woo-woo type of set of beliefs, but do you think there’s some wisdom that astrology carries? From your scholarship of the Maya calendar, do you think if we carry that to the astrological perspective on the world, do you think there’s some wisdom there?
So this idea that every day represents, carries a spirit. There’s modern day astrology. Most people kind of consider astrology this maybe a bit unscientific woo-woo type of set of beliefs, but do you think there’s some wisdom that astrology carries? From your scholarship of the Maya calendar, do you think if we carry that to the astrological perspective on the world, do you think there’s some wisdom there?
Ed Barnhart
I don’t know. I have a woo-woo part of me. I would like to believe that stuff. But I don’t think as a scientist, I cannot come up with a biological scientific reason why that would be true. And when you look at it objectively, I mean really? Is everybody born with the sign Scorpio a moody person? That’s just objectively not true.
I don’t know. I have a woo-woo part of me. I would like to believe that stuff. But I don’t think as a scientist, I cannot come up with a biological scientific reason why that would be true. And when you look at it objectively, I mean really? Is everybody born with the sign Scorpio a moody person? That’s just objectively not true.
But it is funny how oftentimes these Maya horoscopes, for lack of a better word, do hit the mark. There was some student who surveyed like 300 people with the app I made and asked them about their Greek sign and their Maya sign, and his conclusion for his term paper was that the Maya one was working way better, which that’s fascinating. At least that’s fun. But no, I think I’m too much of a scientist to believe that. I just don’t have any foundation in science that would allow us to believe that the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny.
Lex Fridman
I agree. And yet there’s so much mystery all around us that … What I do like is the inbuilt humility to that worldview, that there’s this whole, you can call it a spiritual world, but a world that we don’t quite understand. And then you can wonder about what is the wisdom that that world carries. And then you can construct all kinds of systems to try to interpret that, and then there is where the human hubris can come in. But it’s good to be humbled by how little we know, I suppose.
I agree. And yet there’s so much mystery all around us that … What I do like is the inbuilt humility to that worldview, that there’s this whole, you can call it a spiritual world, but a world that we don’t quite understand. And then you can wonder about what is the wisdom that that world carries. And then you can construct all kinds of systems to try to interpret that, and then there is where the human hubris can come in. But it’s good to be humbled by how little we know, I suppose.
Ed Barnhart
I do love the mysteries of the world. And I would love to find an ancient civilization, but I don’t want to solve the mysteries of the world. I think they’re one of the things that make life worth living.
I do love the mysteries of the world. And I would love to find an ancient civilization, but I don’t want to solve the mysteries of the world. I think they’re one of the things that make life worth living.
Lex Fridman
That’s true. That’s true. You mentioned the Maya writing system. What are some interesting aspects of their language that they’ve used in the written language that they used?
That’s true. That’s true. You mentioned the Maya writing system. What are some interesting aspects of their language that they’ve used in the written language that they used?
Ed Barnhart
Well, one of the things that confound me as a guy who’s spent a better portion of my life studying it, I had the honor of being the student of Linda Schele right here at the University of Texas at Austin. She got the group together who broke the Maya code of hieroglyphics in the 1970s. So I learned from the best and loved every minute of it. I miss Linda.
Well, one of the things that confound me as a guy who’s spent a better portion of my life studying it, I had the honor of being the student of Linda Schele right here at the University of Texas at Austin. She got the group together who broke the Maya code of hieroglyphics in the 1970s. So I learned from the best and loved every minute of it. I miss Linda.
Lex Fridman
Can you speak to that code actually, the hieroglyphic code and what it takes to break it?
Can you speak to that code actually, the hieroglyphic code and what it takes to break it?
Ed Barnhart
Oh boy, what a thing. We had kind of a Rosetta Stone. We had a page out of Diego de Landa’s book. A priest who was converting the Maya in Yucatan asked his informants about their writing system and what every sound meant. And he was convinced they had an alphabet like we do. So he got this Maya guy, sat down in Spanish, and he said, “Okay, you’re going to write all the symbols right here in my book. Write an ah here, write a be here, write a ce here.” And that guy just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told him to write. They were actually syllables. They were vowel consonant combinations. They weren’t an alphabet, but that turned into our Rosetta Stone of sorts.
Oh boy, what a thing. We had kind of a Rosetta Stone. We had a page out of Diego de Landa’s book. A priest who was converting the Maya in Yucatan asked his informants about their writing system and what every sound meant. And he was convinced they had an alphabet like we do. So he got this Maya guy, sat down in Spanish, and he said, “Okay, you’re going to write all the symbols right here in my book. Write an ah here, write a be here, write a ce here.” And that guy just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told him to write. They were actually syllables. They were vowel consonant combinations. They weren’t an alphabet, but that turned into our Rosetta Stone of sorts.
The big key is that the Maya still speak that same language. There are millions of Maya people who are speaking a version of Maya. Now there’s where I get confused, that we’ve got a single writing system that is intelligible, we’ve broken the code, so we know that it’s basically the same writing system from the top of the Yucatan into Guatemala and El Salvador. But we have 33 Maya languages today that are mutually unintelligible. And we backwards project the language of what they spoke back then that the glyphs are in to something called Chʼoltiʼ, which is a combination of Chʼortiʼ and Ch’ol, two of those languages.
But it doesn’t work for me at all. If there was one language, maybe two back then, how did it flower into 33 mutually unintelligible languages in just 500 years during acculturation and horrible infectious diseases that killed 90% of the population? How did that happen? So we’re missing something huge here. I think it’s more like Chinese, where Chinese letters, writing can be read in multiple languages and still understood. I don’t know exactly the mechanics of how that would happen, but it just seems impossible that there are more languages, not less languages, in the Maya area after the last 500 years that they’ve been through.
Lex Fridman
So you think that there’s some kind of process of either rapidly generating dialects or there always has been these dialects, or I should say they’re distinct languages, even though there was a common writing system?
So you think that there’s some kind of process of either rapidly generating dialects or there always has been these dialects, or I should say they’re distinct languages, even though there was a common writing system?
Ed Barnhart
There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin? Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.
There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin? Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.
Lex Fridman
But we don’t really know, and there’s not clear evidence to fill in the gaps of how it’s possible to have that.
But we don’t really know, and there’s not clear evidence to fill in the gaps of how it’s possible to have that.
Ed Barnhart
Right. But we did realize, it was actually a Russian scholar named Yuri Knorozov who broke the code. The Americans and the Europeans were absolutely sure that the written language was a dead language. But Yuri not knowing any of that, not being filled with all of those thoughts from America and Europe, went about it in the way that he was taught in his grad school in Moscow and just went to the dictionaries. And he looked at Yucatec language that they’re speaking today, and he applied it to the symbol system, and he knew that there were certain sounds. He used Landa’s alphabet.
Right. But we did realize, it was actually a Russian scholar named Yuri Knorozov who broke the code. The Americans and the Europeans were absolutely sure that the written language was a dead language. But Yuri not knowing any of that, not being filled with all of those thoughts from America and Europe, went about it in the way that he was taught in his grad school in Moscow and just went to the dictionaries. And he looked at Yucatec language that they’re speaking today, and he applied it to the symbol system, and he knew that there were certain sounds. He used Landa’s alphabet.
His two key examples were a picture of a dog with a symbol over it and a picture of a turkey with a symbol over it. And the dog, a dog in Yucatec is tzul. So he saw two symbols and he said, “This one’s probably tzul and this one’s ul”. And then the Turkey was kutz, so it would be ku ending in tz. And he showed how, look, this is, this is tzul. Those two things that should be tz are the same symbol. And that began this process of unraveling the syllables that we’re still working on today.
Lex Fridman
That’s fascinating. Just that decoding process is fascinating. How do you even figure that out? And there’s probably still, are you aware of any written languages that haven’t been decoded yet?
That’s fascinating. Just that decoding process is fascinating. How do you even figure that out? And there’s probably still, are you aware of any written languages that haven’t been decoded yet?
Ed Barnhart
Yeah, there’s a number of them. There’s Easter Island script. I was just talking to, we’ve apparently made a few advances there now. It’s called Rongorono. And we only have about maybe 25 examples of texts, but we’re beginning to break that.
Yeah, there’s a number of them. There’s Easter Island script. I was just talking to, we’ve apparently made a few advances there now. It’s called Rongorono. And we only have about maybe 25 examples of texts, but we’re beginning to break that.
There’s also, the big one is Harappan. For a long time we used to say there were five independent scripts on the planet, and those were Chinese, Cuneiform, which is Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Maya, and then Harappan, which is from Northern India. That’s the only one that we’ve never cracked. And now all the epigraphers, the people, that’s the term, epigraphy is translating these languages, they’re all ganging up on Harappan and want to kick it off the list because we can’t break it. It had a big enough symbol set, but no one’s been able to crack it. And now they’re saying it’s just an elaborate symbol set and doesn’t reflect the spoken word.
Lex Fridman
That’s a hypothesis, which would explain why it’s so difficult to break.
That’s a hypothesis, which would explain why it’s so difficult to break.
Ed Barnhart
But we could just be faced with a quitter generation. Maybe somebody will pick up the baton next generation.
But we could just be faced with a quitter generation. Maybe somebody will pick up the baton next generation.
Lex Fridman
Kids these days.
Kids these days.
Ed Barnhart
The other one that fascinates me is from the Americas. It’s the quipu. The Inca had the quipu, this knotted string records, but it was definitely encoding more than just math. We know the math. I can do the math quipus and figure out what they’re totaling of things. Yeah, there’s a quipu right there.
The other one that fascinates me is from the Americas. It’s the quipu. The Inca had the quipu, this knotted string records, but it was definitely encoding more than just math. We know the math. I can do the math quipus and figure out what they’re totaling of things. Yeah, there’s a quipu right there.
Lex Fridman
“Quipu are recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of cultures in the region of Andean South America. A quipu usually consists of cotton or camelid fiber strings.” So there’s a set of strings and they’re supposed to what, to be saying something?
“Quipu are recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of cultures in the region of Andean South America. A quipu usually consists of cotton or camelid fiber strings.” So there’s a set of strings and they’re supposed to what, to be saying something?
Ed Barnhart
There’s one long string that the little ones dangle off of. And each one of the dangling strings have sets of knots on them. And the knots, some of them are mathematical quipus, and those, we can just do the math. We can prove that it’s math.
There’s one long string that the little ones dangle off of. And each one of the dangling strings have sets of knots on them. And the knots, some of them are mathematical quipus, and those, we can just do the math. We can prove that it’s math.
They also encoded language in there. They had entire libraries in Cusco where Spanish conquistadors were brought through, and the caretakers of the libraries would just, they’d say, “Pull that one down, read that one to me.” And he’d pull it out and just read a history of something that happened 200 years earlier. So it was definitely writing.
But in the 1570s, one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called quipucamayocs, gathered up, had them read all of their quipus and transcribe them into Spanish books, and then had the quipus burned and those people murdered.
Lex Fridman
Well, there you go.
Well, there you go.
Ed Barnhart
And so we can’t break the code still today, but we know it was absolutely a written language. Though it wasn’t written, it was weaved or knotted.
And so we can’t break the code still today, but we know it was absolutely a written language. Though it wasn’t written, it was weaved or knotted.
Lex Fridman
And there’s still some quipus available that could be-
And there’s still some quipus available that could be-
Ed Barnhart
I think now we’ve just crossed the 1,000 mark. So we have 1,000 quipus. There’s enough to break the code, and I think this generation might be the one that does it.
I think now we’ve just crossed the 1,000 mark. So we have 1,000 quipus. There’s enough to break the code, and I think this generation might be the one that does it.
Lex Fridman
It’s sad that so few have survived. 1,000 is good, but its-
It’s sad that so few have survived. 1,000 is good, but its-
Ed Barnhart
But see, Peru has barely scratched the surface with archeology. There’s so much out there. There was a priest I read about named Diego de Porres, who was one of the early people in Peru converting communities. And his chronicle is real clear that he wanted to teach this community of 3,000 people all the Spanish prayers, the important ones for them to be converted into Christianity. And he had the community’s quipucamayocs knot quipus for each person that told them that they could read them out and memorize the prayers. And if they were caught without their quipu in town, they were flogged. So he had 3,000 of the same quipu made and handed out to this community. If we find that community and find its cemetery, there is our Rosetta Stone.
But see, Peru has barely scratched the surface with archeology. There’s so much out there. There was a priest I read about named Diego de Porres, who was one of the early people in Peru converting communities. And his chronicle is real clear that he wanted to teach this community of 3,000 people all the Spanish prayers, the important ones for them to be converted into Christianity. And he had the community’s quipucamayocs knot quipus for each person that told them that they could read them out and memorize the prayers. And if they were caught without their quipu in town, they were flogged. So he had 3,000 of the same quipu made and handed out to this community. If we find that community and find its cemetery, there is our Rosetta Stone.
Lex Fridman
It is probably the case there is somebody in Peru and maybe a large community that knows this language that understands, and you just have to show up and ask them. And it’s like, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
It is probably the case there is somebody in Peru and maybe a large community that knows this language that understands, and you just have to show up and ask them. And it’s like, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Ed Barnhart
There are some communities that are using them. There’s a couple of them that we had high hopes for, and then it was apparent that they were just making shit up. They didn’t actually know how to read it. They just knew it used to be read so they made a bunch of stuff about what it says, and they bring it out and they act like they can read it. But then when you ask them the details, they don’t know.
There are some communities that are using them. There’s a couple of them that we had high hopes for, and then it was apparent that they were just making shit up. They didn’t actually know how to read it. They just knew it used to be read so they made a bunch of stuff about what it says, and they bring it out and they act like they can read it. But then when you ask them the details, they don’t know.
But then on a much simpler level, there’s llama herders who keep a string in their pocket and they’ve got the knots equaling how many llamas they have, and then they have subcategories of information like, this one’s sick, we’ve lost these ones, this one’s pregnant. So they have these more simple and more mathematical quipus, but they’re using them to affect as a record.
Lex Fridman
Is it possible through archeology to know what the social organization of the Maya was? Maybe if there was a hierarchy, maybe what the political structure was, if there was a leader, different roles, priests, who had the power, who was powerless, who had certain kinds of roles, is it possible to know that?
Is it possible through archeology to know what the social organization of the Maya was? Maybe if there was a hierarchy, maybe what the political structure was, if there was a leader, different roles, priests, who had the power, who was powerless, who had certain kinds of roles, is it possible to know that?
Ed Barnhart
Actually because of hieroglyphs, yeah, we know a whole lot. There’s basic things that archeology, which is a very blunt tool, can figure out like this guy lives in a rich house, this guy lives in a poor house. But the hieroglyphs tell us specific stuff about who can rule, that it was hereditary, that hereditary rule was based on royal blood that could be burned and connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that’s lived in the underworld. It also told us things about hierarchy like that there were councils of lords underneath the king who each represented clans who had their own neighborhoods, and that there were revolving positions of authority.
Actually because of hieroglyphs, yeah, we know a whole lot. There’s basic things that archeology, which is a very blunt tool, can figure out like this guy lives in a rich house, this guy lives in a poor house. But the hieroglyphs tell us specific stuff about who can rule, that it was hereditary, that hereditary rule was based on royal blood that could be burned and connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that’s lived in the underworld. It also told us things about hierarchy like that there were councils of lords underneath the king who each represented clans who had their own neighborhoods, and that there were revolving positions of authority.
There was the site that I mapped for my dissertation and spent years in the jungle there, Palenque, had a lord’s title named Fire Lord. That was one of the generals of their army. And we could tell that position changed over time. So there was one guy named Chak Suutz’ who was the Fire Lord for the early part of a reign of a king called Ahkal Moʼ Nahb. Then by the time he carves this other panel, there’s another guy in the position of K’ak Ajaw, which was the Fire Lord. And so he had-
Lex Fridman
Got promoted or demoted?
Got promoted or demoted?
Ed Barnhart
Well, he could have been killed in the case of that. But then we have the interesting case of in the Postclassic, they shed the idea of kings. They don’t like kings anymore. That’s probably a big part of why the Classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened. People just got sick of kings. And so they turn into this more council system at Chichen Itza.
Well, he could have been killed in the case of that. But then we have the interesting case of in the Postclassic, they shed the idea of kings. They don’t like kings anymore. That’s probably a big part of why the Classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened. People just got sick of kings. And so they turn into this more council system at Chichen Itza.
But then when Chichen Itza falls, there’s a new city that’s architecture looks a lot like Chichen Itza. It’s called Mayapan. But it has what is called the League of Mayapan. And it has a council of representatives from the communities from all around the Yucatan. And it is basically a democracy. It is a Maya democracy that happens. The individuals from all around the Yucatan are there. Each family has their own council house at Mayapan, though they live back at their place. It’s kind of like a Maya Congress.
Lex Fridman
Representative of democracy.
Representative of democracy.
Ed Barnhart
It really was. And this happens in, I guess, 1250 AD that this Maya democracy happens. And we know the names of them, we know the families. And of course, they were humans, so eventually they screwed it all up. One family murdered another family and the whole city burned.
It really was. And this happens in, I guess, 1250 AD that this Maya democracy happens. And we know the names of them, we know the families. And of course, they were humans, so eventually they screwed it all up. One family murdered another family and the whole city burned.
Lex Fridman
And of course, it’s probably some fascinating corruption, which is hard to discover through-
And of course, it’s probably some fascinating corruption, which is hard to discover through-
Ed Barnhart
Part of it was the Aztecs screwing things up. The Aztecs came down with all sorts of, “We’ll buy everything you’re making.” And then eventually they were like, “Could we maybe buy some humans?” And then one family was like, “No.” And the other family was like, “I don’t know, they’re making us a lot of money.” So then they murdered each other, and the water supply got polluted, and then the city burned.
Part of it was the Aztecs screwing things up. The Aztecs came down with all sorts of, “We’ll buy everything you’re making.” And then eventually they were like, “Could we maybe buy some humans?” And then one family was like, “No.” And the other family was like, “I don’t know, they’re making us a lot of money.” So then they murdered each other, and the water supply got polluted, and then the city burned.
Lex Fridman
It seems like slavery, murder, and disease is a large component of the story of humans. You mentioned different periods in the Maya, the Classic, the Postclassic, the Preclassic, the Archaic. Can you just speak to that? So Archaic is before there was really a civilization?
It seems like slavery, murder, and disease is a large component of the story of humans. You mentioned different periods in the Maya, the Classic, the Postclassic, the Preclassic, the Archaic. Can you just speak to that? So Archaic is before there was really a civilization?
Ed Barnhart
Archaic’s pretty much when everybody’s hunter-gatherers.
Archaic’s pretty much when everybody’s hunter-gatherers.
Lex Fridman
So the Classic period was the golden age. And then the Preclassic is the interesting time that we were talking about. And the Postclassic is when the democracy came about.
So the Classic period was the golden age. And then the Preclassic is the interesting time that we were talking about. And the Postclassic is when the democracy came about.
Ed Barnhart
Well, midway through it. Reverted back to council systems. The Maya loved to be part of councils.
Well, midway through it. Reverted back to council systems. The Maya loved to be part of councils.
So yeah, we have Preclassic is like the origins of civilization. They’re starting to build cities. They’re starting to create their calendar. They’re starting to create these wonderful works of art. And the Classic period, if you look at 10 different textbooks for the Maya, you’ll get 10 different dates that wiggle around in there. But basically that’s the age of kings to me. That’s when these cities decide that they’re going to organize themselves around elite royal families that have this magical blood that can contact their ancestors that are directly in contact with the gods. The Maya never contact their gods directly. They contact their ancestors who are up there who act like liaisons to the gods.
And so the Maya age of kings has these dynasties sprouting up where these people have basically snowed the rest of the people, that they’ve got a special quality of their blood and only their offspring can do the same trick and talk to the gods, where everybody, every Joe Maya can let their blood and burn it and contact their ancestor. But Joe Maya’s dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below and he’s got no influence over the gods. But the rulers, their spirits go down briefly, but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are and act as liaisons. So that’s the validation for this kingship that happens for about 400 years.
I know we say 250 to 900, which is kind of the encompassing edges of it, but it’s interesting that it’s actually specifically the ninth bakʼtun of their history. The ninth bakʼtun begins in like 426, and it ends in like 829. So it’s a 400-year period of time. And before that, there were no kings. And after that, there really aren’t kings. They’re heads of councils. So I call it the age of kings, where everybody’s following the directives of basically a despot. And for a while, that’s great. Cities build up, populations happening. I see it as kind of a cult of personality moment too. Strong, charismatic leaders inspire people to do great things together.
But eventually happens all the time with power, too much power corrupts. All of a sudden there’s this unwieldy huge elite class that has to be treated special by everybody else. And they start saying, “Well, I think we should fight with those guys and you guys should go take these things.” And people eventually get sick of it and they walk away from these cities, and that’s how we get the mysterious Maya collapse where all these cities are just gone.
Lex Fridman
That’s one of the great mysteries of the Maya civilization is that over a very short period of time, like a hundred years, it seems to have declined very rapidly. It collapsed. What do you think explains that? What happened?
That’s one of the great mysteries of the Maya civilization is that over a very short period of time, like a hundred years, it seems to have declined very rapidly. It collapsed. What do you think explains that? What happened?
Ed Barnhart
I think it’s a failing of archeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities populations moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses. And all archeology signature sees is that nobody lives in the city center anymore. We don’t see a bunch of mass bodies. There’s no evidence of people getting sick. There are certain cities that fought with each other at the end, and we see that signature plain as day. We know when a city was attacked and burned. Mostly that didn’t happen. People moved and migrated.
I think it’s a failing of archeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities populations moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses. And all archeology signature sees is that nobody lives in the city center anymore. We don’t see a bunch of mass bodies. There’s no evidence of people getting sick. There are certain cities that fought with each other at the end, and we see that signature plain as day. We know when a city was attacked and burned. Mostly that didn’t happen. People moved and migrated.
And it seems like right there around between 800 and 900, a lot of the elites that were on top, most of it was in the rainforests of northern Guatemala, they move. They move in two directions. Some of them move into the highlands of Guatemala, and some of them move up into the Yucatan. The city of Chichen Itza becomes the next big capital in Yucatan. But the word Itza is actually a word describing the people who lived around Lake Peten Itza in northern Guatemala. And all of the Maya are super clear about that, that the Itza came in as immigrants with these new ideas and created Chichen Itza. So the elites who were no longer welcome in their cities just moved and set up shops somewhere else.
Lex Fridman
So why was there a decline? What was maybe the catalyst? Was there a specific kind of events that started this? Was this an idea that kind of transformed the society?
So why was there a decline? What was maybe the catalyst? Was there a specific kind of events that started this? Was this an idea that kind of transformed the society?
Ed Barnhart
We are still debating that. I don’t think there is a single reason. I think humans are complicated. I think a lot of things led to this. One thing we can see archeologically is that every one of the cities became overpopulated. They were too popular. And we think that they pushed the limits of their capacity to feed and house people. We see it in lots of the cities at the end of the Classic period that people are seasonally starving.
We are still debating that. I don’t think there is a single reason. I think humans are complicated. I think a lot of things led to this. One thing we can see archeologically is that every one of the cities became overpopulated. They were too popular. And we think that they pushed the limits of their capacity to feed and house people. We see it in lots of the cities at the end of the Classic period that people are seasonally starving.
I remember really stark evidence in Copán, Honduras. Copán was this beautiful city, lineage of 17 kings. But the last kings and the last elite burials that we dig from the city center, the teeth are the telling part. They get this thing, when you’re growing up and you’re not getting enough food seasonally, it shows up in the enamel of your teeth. It’s called dental hypoplasia. And if somebody’s seasonally starving, it gets these lines in their teeth. And that last generation of Maya before they left Copán, even the rich people are seasonally starving. So there’s a problem there for sure.
But I also think, it’s a weird thing, it was not an empire. It was a group of independent city states like Greece. Some of them were allied, some of them were enemies. There was a huge civil war that settled out about the end of the Classic period. So if it was Europe, the victors would’ve taken over, the losers would’ve beat it and gone wherever they went. But when they abandoned these cities that were independent still, they all left both the guys that won and the guys that lost the war. So it couldn’t be just as simple as spoils go to the victor.
It’s such a wide area. Not everybody was starving like the people in the Copán Valley. So I personally think it was calendrically timed. It is interesting to note that that ninth period, that ninth 400-year period ends right then. And I think a lot of people, I can’t prove it archeologically, but I think a lot of people said we’re coming to the end of a great cycle and we need to renew. We need to change what we’re doing.
When you talk to the Maya today, like at the end of this 2012 thing, if you actually talk to Maya, say, “What happens at the end of a big cycle here?” They say cycles are a time of renewal and transformation, that it is all of our obligation to change our lives at the end of cycles. That change is coming. We can either be part of it or we can get steamrolled by it.
The Aztecs did this neat thing called the New Fire Ceremony every 52 years, which was the biggest their calendar would go. They’d burn down perfectly good temples. And they’d burn down their houses sometimes. And they would just, everybody in society would perform this, what they call the New Fire Ceremony, and they would renew the world. So I think my personal theory is that the Maya decided at the end of the ninth bakʼtun that it was time to renew the world.
Lex Fridman
I think this theory makes sense because they really internalized the calendar. That was a really big part of their culture, the sense of the cyclical nature of civilization.
I think this theory makes sense because they really internalized the calendar. That was a really big part of their culture, the sense of the cyclical nature of civilization.
Ed Barnhart
That’s what I think. I think that they created that calendar to perceive the cycle and to harmonize with it.
That’s what I think. I think that they created that calendar to perceive the cycle and to harmonize with it.
Aztecs
Lex Fridman
You mentioned the Aztec. What was the origin of the Aztec? Where did these people come from, at what time, and how?
You mentioned the Aztec. What was the origin of the Aztec? Where did these people come from, at what time, and how?
Ed Barnhart
Almost every one of the cultures we’re talking about now, we have two different versions of the answer to that question. We have the archeology version, and we have the Aztecs themselves. The Aztecs have this wonderful migration story where they say that they came from a place well to the north called Aztlán. And that they had this migration that went through kind of a hero’s journey where they go to this snake mountain place and they encounter the birth of the war god that they’ll worship after this. And how they stepped into the Valley of Mexico as the last, the lost brothers of everyone in the Valley of Mexico. They said that they all came from the north near Aztlán as a place, a cave with seven different passages called Chicomoztoc. And that all the people who spoke the language Nahuatl came from the cave. And most of them went early to the Valley of Mexico. And in the Aztecs’ story, they were just the lost tribe. They were the last brothers to come in.
Almost every one of the cultures we’re talking about now, we have two different versions of the answer to that question. We have the archeology version, and we have the Aztecs themselves. The Aztecs have this wonderful migration story where they say that they came from a place well to the north called Aztlán. And that they had this migration that went through kind of a hero’s journey where they go to this snake mountain place and they encounter the birth of the war god that they’ll worship after this. And how they stepped into the Valley of Mexico as the last, the lost brothers of everyone in the Valley of Mexico. They said that they all came from the north near Aztlán as a place, a cave with seven different passages called Chicomoztoc. And that all the people who spoke the language Nahuatl came from the cave. And most of them went early to the Valley of Mexico. And in the Aztecs’ story, they were just the lost tribe. They were the last brothers to come in.
But then they show up late game, and they become mercenaries. They just start working for communities in the Valley of Mexico. And this takes place in the 1300s. So about 200 years before Cortez shows up, the Aztecs show up to the Valley of Mexico. And they make themselves this indispensable group of mercenaries. They do the dirty work. All the civilized communities around Lake Texcoco, which is now Mexico City, it’s all dried up, but those guys were too civilized to fight with each other. But they could hire the Aztecs to do their dirty stuff. So the Aztecs did that and really changed the politics in the game of the Valley of Mexico.
Lex Fridman
The dirty stuff. They were the muscle.
The dirty stuff. They were the muscle.
Ed Barnhart
Yeah. They’d go in and they’d kill whoever you wanted killed, and now you’re the king of this area.
Yeah. They’d go in and they’d kill whoever you wanted killed, and now you’re the king of this area.
So one of these kings that they were working for really liked them and decided, I’m going to make the Aztecs part of our ancestry. I’m going to give them my daughter to marry the head of the Aztecs. And the Aztecs sacrificed her. And that really pissed that guy off. So he took his whole army and ran the Aztecs out for a while. They say they live in this horrible desert section eating lizards.
But then one of their priests say, “We’re going to walk around the lake, and my visions say that where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital.” And they see that, but it’s out on an island in the lake. And he said, “Well, I don’t know, that’s the place.” So they build up an island, they go to that island, and then they just start piling up lake muck until they make a whole city there in the middle of the lake. They make an island city. And all of this occurs in about a hundred years. So they show up about 1300. The capital of Tenochtitlan, as they called it, is really established. And from there, they quickly take over the entire valley. They make what they call the Triple Alliance, which is the two other big communities of the lake are now their allies, but they’re not really allies. The Aztecs were brutal. Those guys agreed to shut up and let the Aztecs run the show. And then the Aztecs spread like a wildfire all the way down into the Maya area. Everywhere they go, they rename everybody’s towns and make them pay tribute.
Lex Fridman
Pretty short lasting civilization. Spread extremely quickly. Famous. What are some defining qualities that explain that?
Pretty short lasting civilization. Spread extremely quickly. Famous. What are some defining qualities that explain that?
Ed Barnhart
I think they were very much like they had an attitude like Attila the Hun. They just had no problem ripping your skin off. Everybody else had become too comfortable and too civilized. And the Aztecs were just mercenary. They told everybody, “We can either rip your heart out or you can work for us. And if you work for us, you’ll be just fine.” They’d go to every town they’d go to.
I think they were very much like they had an attitude like Attila the Hun. They just had no problem ripping your skin off. Everybody else had become too comfortable and too civilized. And the Aztecs were just mercenary. They told everybody, “We can either rip your heart out or you can work for us. And if you work for us, you’ll be just fine.” They’d go to every town they’d go to.
The first thing they’d do is they’d show up with a bunch of merchants. There was a merchant class who were also military. They were really the people who assessed where they were going to attack next. They’d go in with a bunch of Aztec products and say, “We’d like to trade with you.” But all the time, they were assessing their military prowess, what products they had that they could take. And then soon after the pochteca were there would come the military with the reconnaissance.
Lex Fridman
So the Aztec had a huge warrior class, as you’re saying. So can you linger on their whole relationship with war and violence?
So the Aztec had a huge warrior class, as you’re saying. So can you linger on their whole relationship with war and violence?
Ed Barnhart
They worshiped a war deity. Their main temple was the Templo Mayor. It had two temples up on top. One was Tlaloc the Rain God, who liked a lot of sacrifice himself. But then the other one was Huitzilopochtli. That translates “The hummingbird on the left.” But he’s the war god. I love that he’s a hummingbird. Maybe he’s fast and he comes from the magical side or something.
They worshiped a war deity. Their main temple was the Templo Mayor. It had two temples up on top. One was Tlaloc the Rain God, who liked a lot of sacrifice himself. But then the other one was Huitzilopochtli. That translates “The hummingbird on the left.” But he’s the war god. I love that he’s a hummingbird. Maybe he’s fast and he comes from the magical side or something.
But then right next to the temple, on either side were the two temples of the warriors. One was the Eagle Warrior clan, the other one was the Jaguar Warrior clan. And they were symbolically in competition with each other, though a unified force. I guess probably an analogy between the Navy and the Air Force. They had a good-natured competition of who was better, but they were the same force. So those were their symbolic warriors.
Ed Barnhart
Force. So those were their symbolic warriors dressed up in all of their finery, and they would come at people with these two forces, and it was very unlike anything that had happened before in Mesoamerica. Again, I think I could draw a parallel to what happened in Europe. The famous Henry V moment in Agincourt where his kind of ragtag army wipes out half of France’s aristocracy with the Longbow. Up until that moment, Europe had a very war is for the elite classes kind of attitude. And then after France lost half their aristocracy, then it was like, maybe we should be hiring from the villages.
Force. So those were their symbolic warriors dressed up in all of their finery, and they would come at people with these two forces, and it was very unlike anything that had happened before in Mesoamerica. Again, I think I could draw a parallel to what happened in Europe. The famous Henry V moment in Agincourt where his kind of ragtag army wipes out half of France’s aristocracy with the Longbow. Up until that moment, Europe had a very war is for the elite classes kind of attitude. And then after France lost half their aristocracy, then it was like, maybe we should be hiring from the villages.
The same sort of thing happened with the Aztec that there was, Mesoamerica really didn’t have huge standing armies, but the Aztec put this army together and they intimidated people. They didn’t actually have to use it a lot. It was used to great effect in the valley of Mexico and for the rest of Mesoamerica it was mostly the fear factor.
Lex Fridman
But there also seemed to be a celebration of violence. I think you said that beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec, maybe like the Roman Empire, was it, they just had maybe a different relationship with violence, where that stood in the purpose of life, purpose of existence. Is that fair to say?
But there also seemed to be a celebration of violence. I think you said that beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec, maybe like the Roman Empire, was it, they just had maybe a different relationship with violence, where that stood in the purpose of life, purpose of existence. Is that fair to say?
Ed Barnhart
I would hypothesize so. I mean, I think it’s one of the wonderful things about studying these ancient cultures, knowing what our human capacity is and the Aztecs, when I said that statement, what I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and ripping people’s hearts out.
I would hypothesize so. I mean, I think it’s one of the wonderful things about studying these ancient cultures, knowing what our human capacity is and the Aztecs, when I said that statement, what I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and ripping people’s hearts out.
They had this just grotesque, violent bent, but in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance. The same Aztec king who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry or the poetry of famous statesmen that had come before him. And they spent money on things like flower gardens. All of the causeways leading to the Aztec capitol had beautiful flower gardens and they had a museum and they had an aquarium and a zoo, and they had an opera and they had a ballet. And these things existed together. There was not, in the Aztec mind, any conflict between witnessing someone’s heart getting ripped out one moment, and in the evening we’d go to the ballet.
Lex Fridman
How does that contrast the relationship with war and violence with the other civilizations of Mesoamerica and South America, maybe the Maya? What was their relationship like with war?
How does that contrast the relationship with war and violence with the other civilizations of Mesoamerica and South America, maybe the Maya? What was their relationship like with war?
Ed Barnhart
The Maya were certainly influenced by the Aztec at the end, so we get a skewed perspective from the contact period accounts because the Maya were much more violent and sacrifice-oriented in their post-classic rendition. But in the classic period, it was mostly the priests and the king who were doing the sacrificing of themselves that we know that the Maya kings would cut their penises and then bleed that blood onto paper and the paper would burn and become the smoke through which they’d commune with their ancestors.
The Maya were certainly influenced by the Aztec at the end, so we get a skewed perspective from the contact period accounts because the Maya were much more violent and sacrifice-oriented in their post-classic rendition. But in the classic period, it was mostly the priests and the king who were doing the sacrificing of themselves that we know that the Maya kings would cut their penises and then bleed that blood onto paper and the paper would burn and become the smoke through which they’d commune with their ancestors.
But they’d actually tie this paper onto their penis, cut it, and then dance. So the blood splattered, but it was them cutting themselves. It was different than killing a bunch of other people for it. It was a auto-sacrifice, we call it. Still very macabre, but very different than deciding a whole bunch of other people should die. It was a self-sacrifice thing.
Lex Fridman
Can you speak to the sacrifice a bit more? Animal sacrifice, human sacrifice. What role did that play for the Maya, for the Aztec, for the different cultures here. Was that religious in nature?
Can you speak to the sacrifice a bit more? Animal sacrifice, human sacrifice. What role did that play for the Maya, for the Aztec, for the different cultures here. Was that religious in nature?
Ed Barnhart
It was absolutely religious in nature, and the Aztecs were of the opinion that the war God demanded people were captured and sacrificed and it had to be valuable people. There was a lot of… before they made that big standing army, they had just ritual battles that they would have and they’d take captives. In fact, all around Mesoamerica, they wanted captives so that they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the gods and the Aztecs deciding to specifically follow the war God, did this more than anybody. They did it so much and so successfully that they didn’t have any enemies nearby.
It was absolutely religious in nature, and the Aztecs were of the opinion that the war God demanded people were captured and sacrificed and it had to be valuable people. There was a lot of… before they made that big standing army, they had just ritual battles that they would have and they’d take captives. In fact, all around Mesoamerica, they wanted captives so that they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the gods and the Aztecs deciding to specifically follow the war God, did this more than anybody. They did it so much and so successfully that they didn’t have any enemies nearby.
So they decided this one poor sucker group, not that far away, called the Tlaxcallans, that they were never going to make peace with them so that they could go close by every year and just have a little symbolic war with the Tlaxcallans and haul them back for a sacrifice. Cortes met those guys and he was like, here are people who hate their guts. I’ll just use these guys. So we say, oh, Cortes took over the Aztec world. It was Cortes and 20,000 super pissed-off, Tlaxcallans.
Lex Fridman
And the actual sacrifice, so there would be kind of these ritual battles or is it chopping off people’s heads? Like, is there some interesting rituals around the sacrifice?
And the actual sacrifice, so there would be kind of these ritual battles or is it chopping off people’s heads? Like, is there some interesting rituals around the sacrifice?
Ed Barnhart
It’s mostly heart extraction, sometimes heads, but they bring them up on top of the temple so everybody can see it. And they had a specific stone where they would bend them over so their rib cage would come out and they’d use a thick obsidian knife, and they had a really, just, tried and true way to do it. They’d stab it in in a certain place close, and then they’d push down on the sternum as they ripped up on the rib cage. So they’d just make a place where they could just rip it right out.
It’s mostly heart extraction, sometimes heads, but they bring them up on top of the temple so everybody can see it. And they had a specific stone where they would bend them over so their rib cage would come out and they’d use a thick obsidian knife, and they had a really, just, tried and true way to do it. They’d stab it in in a certain place close, and then they’d push down on the sternum as they ripped up on the rib cage. So they’d just make a place where they could just rip it right out.
Lex Fridman
With their hand?
With their hand?
Ed Barnhart
Yeah, with their hand. But they were really just surgical about it. They’d use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down, pull up and just [inaudible 02:27:00].
Yeah, with their hand. But they were really just surgical about it. They’d use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down, pull up and just [inaudible 02:27:00].
Lex Fridman
While the person was alive?
While the person was alive?
Ed Barnhart
Yep. While the person was alive. And the Aztecs had this idea, there was a horrible drought that went on that almost ruined the entire valley, and they came to this conclusion that it’s because we haven’t been killing enough people. We’ve got to bump this up. And then when they did and they decided, they really took it out on the Tlaxcallans, it rained again. So it was proof positive that they should just keep doing that. And they ate people as well. They really did.
Yep. While the person was alive. And the Aztecs had this idea, there was a horrible drought that went on that almost ruined the entire valley, and they came to this conclusion that it’s because we haven’t been killing enough people. We’ve got to bump this up. And then when they did and they decided, they really took it out on the Tlaxcallans, it rained again. So it was proof positive that they should just keep doing that. And they ate people as well. They really did.
Lex Fridman
As part of the sacrifice or?
As part of the sacrifice or?
Ed Barnhart
After the sacrifice, then they would eat them. And this was part of the drought and the famine thing that started, but then it was just kind of the thing to do when Cortes got there, they were still having certain special feasts that involved humans and it really upset the Spanish that they would be tricked into eating human. Like, “Hey, you’re liking dinner? That was a human.”
After the sacrifice, then they would eat them. And this was part of the drought and the famine thing that started, but then it was just kind of the thing to do when Cortes got there, they were still having certain special feasts that involved humans and it really upset the Spanish that they would be tricked into eating human. Like, “Hey, you’re liking dinner? That was a human.”
Lex Fridman
So the idea, was it actually having a taste for human flesh or is it just these kinds of ideas of if you eat a person’s heart that you can get their spirit and their strength?
So the idea, was it actually having a taste for human flesh or is it just these kinds of ideas of if you eat a person’s heart that you can get their spirit and their strength?
Ed Barnhart
In the case of the Aztecs, it seemed like they just liked it. This guy, Sahagun, who was a very responsible chronicler, that was pretty specific, that there was a distribution thing. The elites got butts. The butts were the best part, so the butt cheeks, those are the best parts to eat. And then it went down the chain until some people just got fingers and toes.
In the case of the Aztecs, it seemed like they just liked it. This guy, Sahagun, who was a very responsible chronicler, that was pretty specific, that there was a distribution thing. The elites got butts. The butts were the best part, so the butt cheeks, those are the best parts to eat. And then it went down the chain until some people just got fingers and toes.
Lex Fridman
Literally bought taste for the Aztec. Boy. All right.
Literally bought taste for the Aztec. Boy. All right.
Ed Barnhart
They really did. They really did. In fact, that’s what caused the, have you heard of the Noche Triste? The sad night? The night that the Aztecs really go nuts on the Spanish and kick them out. It’s all triggered by this one guy, Pedro de Alvarado, who’s left in charge by Cortes. As Cortes goes to the coast and tries to talk to the New Force, talk him into being for him, which he does.
They really did. They really did. In fact, that’s what caused the, have you heard of the Noche Triste? The sad night? The night that the Aztecs really go nuts on the Spanish and kick them out. It’s all triggered by this one guy, Pedro de Alvarado, who’s left in charge by Cortes. As Cortes goes to the coast and tries to talk to the New Force, talk him into being for him, which he does.
But Pedro Alvarado is left back in town in charge and they’re doing another one of these huge Aztec buffets and parties to honor them. And it happens. The guy says, “Hey, do you like dinner?” Like, oh yeah, it’s a nice dinner. “Well, it’s humans. You’re eating humans. See, I told you they were good.” And Alvarado just freaks out and he has the guards close the doors and he murders everyone in the party. Women, children, nobody has weapons. He just murders everyone.
And that’s what spazzes the Aztecs out to eventually murder Montezuma who was their captive and then try to murder all of them. And it was all Pedro Alvarado’s fault for freaking out about eating humans.
Lex Fridman
Just a little practical joke.
Just a little practical joke.
Ed Barnhart
Yeah. It was just, they thought it was funny. He did not.
Yeah. It was just, they thought it was funny. He did not.
Lex Fridman
That’s fascinating. I didn’t realize. So I kind of assume that some level of cannibalism would have to do with eating the heart to gain the spirit of the person or something like this, but.
That’s fascinating. I didn’t realize. So I kind of assume that some level of cannibalism would have to do with eating the heart to gain the spirit of the person or something like this, but.
Ed Barnhart
In certain deer hunting rituals, things for sure. But the Aztecs, no, they just liked eating humans. It was part of the fear factor too. I mean, they could walk into a new town and be like, you guys could either send us a number of quetzal feathers every month or we could eat you.
In certain deer hunting rituals, things for sure. But the Aztecs, no, they just liked eating humans. It was part of the fear factor too. I mean, they could walk into a new town and be like, you guys could either send us a number of quetzal feathers every month or we could eat you.
Lex Fridman
So that’s psychological warfare and actual warfare. It worked and that’s how they spread quickly.
So that’s psychological warfare and actual warfare. It worked and that’s how they spread quickly.
Ed Barnhart
And they were just about to take over the Maya when the Spanish came and messed everything up, they had the Maya surrounded and they were about to take over the whole Yucatan.
And they were just about to take over the Maya when the Spanish came and messed everything up, they had the Maya surrounded and they were about to take over the whole Yucatan.
Inca Empire
Lex Fridman
So you think without the Spanish, there would be this Aztec empire that would last for a very long time.
So you think without the Spanish, there would be this Aztec empire that would last for a very long time.
Ed Barnhart
I think there would’ve been an Aztec empire. I think they would’ve finished dominating everybody, but they did it through hate and everybody hated the Aztecs.
I think there would’ve been an Aztec empire. I think they would’ve finished dominating everybody, but they did it through hate and everybody hated the Aztecs.
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 02:31:09].
[inaudible 02:31:09].
Ed Barnhart
So it wouldn’t have lasted forever. They were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force. And that can only go on so long before revolution happens. The Inca Empire, I think that would’ve gone on forever. Because they were really community oriented. Once the Inca took over, no one in the Inca Empire starved, they built architecture. Everyone was safe. It was the society that could have lasted a long time.
So it wouldn’t have lasted forever. They were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force. And that can only go on so long before revolution happens. The Inca Empire, I think that would’ve gone on forever. Because they were really community oriented. Once the Inca took over, no one in the Inca Empire starved, they built architecture. Everyone was safe. It was the society that could have lasted a long time.
Lex Fridman
What was the origin of the Inca Empire?
What was the origin of the Inca Empire?
Ed Barnhart
Well, it was bloody at first. Like most of them are, but once they started taking over, what they did is they Empire built. Everybody else had just raided their neighbors to get the resources, but everybody they raided, they turned them into the Inca Empire and they created this incredible Mit’a system where you took turns working and they created the road system so they could get groups of workers back and forth. So a town of let’s say 5,000 people, the Inca would roll up with an army of a hundred, 200,000 people and say, would you guys like to be part of the empire? Or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire?
Well, it was bloody at first. Like most of them are, but once they started taking over, what they did is they Empire built. Everybody else had just raided their neighbors to get the resources, but everybody they raided, they turned them into the Inca Empire and they created this incredible Mit’a system where you took turns working and they created the road system so they could get groups of workers back and forth. So a town of let’s say 5,000 people, the Inca would roll up with an army of a hundred, 200,000 people and say, would you guys like to be part of the empire? Or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire?
And if your mayor here agrees, then he can have a town. He can have a house in Cusco. But then the very next month, a big work crew would show up and they’d start building agricultural terraces and storage units. And every month with the agricultural excess, they would have big parties and everybody would eat. So people lived well in the Inca Empire. It was a rough beginning, but everybody who agreed to be part of it immediately had access to a whole bunch of resources and security they never had.
Lex Fridman
So they started in South America and Peru and Cusco. Cusco was the center of it.
So they started in South America and Peru and Cusco. Cusco was the center of it.
Ed Barnhart
Cusco in their language, Quechua, it means navel or belly button, and it’s up in the mountains, but there’s four quarters that they called their empire Tawantinsuyu, the land of four quarters. And the center of those four quarters was Cusco.
Cusco in their language, Quechua, it means navel or belly button, and it’s up in the mountains, but there’s four quarters that they called their empire Tawantinsuyu, the land of four quarters. And the center of those four quarters was Cusco.
Lex Fridman
It sprung to life in 1200 A.D.C.
It sprung to life in 1200 A.D.C.
Ed Barnhart
We backwards project what it was, but it was probably mid-twelve hundreds when the first Sapa Inca, the first ruler came in, but it was the, I think it’s the ninth one, [inaudible 02:33:45] Pachacuti who really started being an empire builder.
We backwards project what it was, but it was probably mid-twelve hundreds when the first Sapa Inca, the first ruler came in, but it was the, I think it’s the ninth one, [inaudible 02:33:45] Pachacuti who really started being an empire builder.
Lex Fridman
Part of that, what really defined the empire, as you said, roads, they build a massive road network.
Part of that, what really defined the empire, as you said, roads, they build a massive road network.
Ed Barnhart
Roads, and in the same way that the Roman strategy of building roads and infrastructure, and then every place they took over, they’d create certain key pieces of Roman architecture that kind of made that city Roman and they’d rename it something. The Inca did the same thing. They had certain signature Inca architecture that they would build in as the administrative part.
Roads, and in the same way that the Roman strategy of building roads and infrastructure, and then every place they took over, they’d create certain key pieces of Roman architecture that kind of made that city Roman and they’d rename it something. The Inca did the same thing. They had certain signature Inca architecture that they would build in as the administrative part.
They’d send the Khipukamayuq, the guys who would weave or knot the khipus as accountants, and they would go through and say what everybody did. Okay, you’re a good farmer. You’re going to farm. You are a good weaver. You’re going to weave. All the men here are going to take a turn at being part of the army. And then they sent independent Khipukamayuqs too. Every community had five or six that were not allowed to work with each other, and they all had to independently send their Khipus back to Cusco. And if there were accounting discrepancies that were called to Cusco to figure out who was lying about what.
Lex Fridman
So there’s a super sophisticated record-keeping system.
So there’s a super sophisticated record-keeping system.
Ed Barnhart
Yeah. And that was the Khipu and the Spanish recorded what they could and then burned them all.
Yeah. And that was the Khipu and the Spanish recorded what they could and then burned them all.
Lex Fridman
But that’s an interesting development for an empire because that allows you to really expand and have some kind of management, some level of control.
But that’s an interesting development for an empire because that allows you to really expand and have some kind of management, some level of control.
Ed Barnhart
They couldn’t, at the end, they were at least 10 million people and there was just no way to do that without some sort of sophisticated record-keeping system.
They couldn’t, at the end, they were at least 10 million people and there was just no way to do that without some sort of sophisticated record-keeping system.
Lex Fridman
If the Inca had to face Aztec, who wins?
If the Inca had to face Aztec, who wins?
Ed Barnhart
Inca.
Inca.
Lex Fridman
Inca.
Inca.
Ed Barnhart
I mean, the Aztecs were psychotic, but the Inca had just reserves for miles and they had that essential hearts and minds. There was only one thing that everybody got pissed off about when they joined the Inca Empire. For some reason, everything was owned communally except the llamas. The llamas were the kings. And so that was the one thing that some of them would stay in town just to be work llamas, but you don’t own your llama anymore. And people are really attached to their llamas. To this day they are like family members. So it’d be like everybody walked in and said, everybody’s family dog is now mine. [inaudible 02:36:23] really upset people on an emotional level.
I mean, the Aztecs were psychotic, but the Inca had just reserves for miles and they had that essential hearts and minds. There was only one thing that everybody got pissed off about when they joined the Inca Empire. For some reason, everything was owned communally except the llamas. The llamas were the kings. And so that was the one thing that some of them would stay in town just to be work llamas, but you don’t own your llama anymore. And people are really attached to their llamas. To this day they are like family members. So it’d be like everybody walked in and said, everybody’s family dog is now mine. [inaudible 02:36:23] really upset people on an emotional level.
Lex Fridman
Well, I mean, so llamas got domesticated at some point, probably. I don’t even know when, but early on.
Well, I mean, so llamas got domesticated at some point, probably. I don’t even know when, but early on.
Ed Barnhart
We have rock art that progresses to make it seem like a progression from people depicted hunting them to people depicted standing next to pregnant ones. So it was still in that archaic period at least that they became friends.
We have rock art that progresses to make it seem like a progression from people depicted hunting them to people depicted standing next to pregnant ones. So it was still in that archaic period at least that they became friends.
Lex Fridman
But if you roll in and you own them, that’s?
But if you roll in and you own them, that’s?
Ed Barnhart
Yeah, that pissed everybody off. For some reason, the Inca owned everybody’s llama instantly, and he would take anything he wanted. A lot of them would just get carted away that day, just sent to Cusco. And they’d also take their mummies. That was a weird thing. Everybody mourns, they’re dead, but the Inca just ceased to accept it. They would just, the mummies were still there. Okay, he’s dead, but look, he’s still got clothes. He’s at the party. Let’s put a beer in front of him. They just kept people as mummies. And so the ancestral mummies of every town, part of being absorbed into the empire was, okay, your most important mummies are now going to have their own beautiful house in Cusco, but they would physically bring those mummies to Cusco to make now Cusco the spiritual heart of their belief system.
Yeah, that pissed everybody off. For some reason, the Inca owned everybody’s llama instantly, and he would take anything he wanted. A lot of them would just get carted away that day, just sent to Cusco. And they’d also take their mummies. That was a weird thing. Everybody mourns, they’re dead, but the Inca just ceased to accept it. They would just, the mummies were still there. Okay, he’s dead, but look, he’s still got clothes. He’s at the party. Let’s put a beer in front of him. They just kept people as mummies. And so the ancestral mummies of every town, part of being absorbed into the empire was, okay, your most important mummies are now going to have their own beautiful house in Cusco, but they would physically bring those mummies to Cusco to make now Cusco the spiritual heart of their belief system.
Lex Fridman
I mean, I could see how that would piss people off, but it’s also a pretty powerful way to say, the ancestors that you idolize, that you respect are now in the capitol.
I mean, I could see how that would piss people off, but it’s also a pretty powerful way to say, the ancestors that you idolize, that you respect are now in the capitol.
Ed Barnhart
They’ve been elevated. We didn’t steal them. We have given them a new place of honor, and you’re welcome to come visit them all the time. And they did. They have these festivals where everyone from all corners of the Inca world would come to Cusco.
They’ve been elevated. We didn’t steal them. We have given them a new place of honor, and you’re welcome to come visit them all the time. And they did. They have these festivals where everyone from all corners of the Inca world would come to Cusco.
Lex Fridman
And which of the civilizations mummified people?
And which of the civilizations mummified people?
Ed Barnhart
The Incas for sure mummified people and even did some of that kind of Egyptian- esque taking out of organs and preparing the body. They put straw inside the cavity and mummify them, but the Maya didn’t do it at all. The Maya, in fact, on purpose would flood tombs with water so that the skin would float off the skeletons faster, and then they’d get back in there. It was jungly. So I think the bugs probably had part of it too. But then they would get back in there to get the bones. They’d open it back up and take the bones out and paint them with red Cinnabar, the one that I was in, in Copan, we had evidence that they had gone in there four different times, and the last couple times they only took the skull out and repainted it and then put it back in articulated on the skeleton. But they didn’t mummify. They on purpose would grossly float the bodies so they could get the skin off faster and get to the bones.
The Incas for sure mummified people and even did some of that kind of Egyptian- esque taking out of organs and preparing the body. They put straw inside the cavity and mummify them, but the Maya didn’t do it at all. The Maya, in fact, on purpose would flood tombs with water so that the skin would float off the skeletons faster, and then they’d get back in there. It was jungly. So I think the bugs probably had part of it too. But then they would get back in there to get the bones. They’d open it back up and take the bones out and paint them with red Cinnabar, the one that I was in, in Copan, we had evidence that they had gone in there four different times, and the last couple times they only took the skull out and repainted it and then put it back in articulated on the skeleton. But they didn’t mummify. They on purpose would grossly float the bodies so they could get the skin off faster and get to the bones.
Lex Fridman
But would they keep the bones?
But would they keep the bones?
Ed Barnhart
Yeah, they’d keep the bones and they’d pull the bones out occasionally and do rituals to them or commune with them and then put them back in.
Yeah, they’d keep the bones and they’d pull the bones out occasionally and do rituals to them or commune with them and then put them back in.
Lex Fridman
So there’s still a deep connection to the ancestors through the physical manifestation of the ancestors then, whether mummified or bone.
So there’s still a deep connection to the ancestors through the physical manifestation of the ancestors then, whether mummified or bone.
Ed Barnhart
And to this day, if you do an excavation here in the United States, Native American people don’t like it. They don’t like their graves, which is fine enough. I wouldn’t want somebody digging up my grandma either. But the Maya, they love it.
And to this day, if you do an excavation here in the United States, Native American people don’t like it. They don’t like their graves, which is fine enough. I wouldn’t want somebody digging up my grandma either. But the Maya, they love it.
Lex Fridman
They love it.
They love it.
Ed Barnhart
And every Maya person, if we find a grave, they’re like, yeah, look at that. Bones, cool. Can I touch? They’re not spooked about it at all. They think it’s exciting. I, one time, helped out a physical anthropologist in town in Copan to get a osteology collection together of various animals. So if we got bones from an excavation, we could see what kind of animal it was based on the collection. And this family said, well, our family dog died last year and we buried him in the backyard. You could go dig him up. And so we were like, okay, yeah, I mean, we do need a dog.
And every Maya person, if we find a grave, they’re like, yeah, look at that. Bones, cool. Can I touch? They’re not spooked about it at all. They think it’s exciting. I, one time, helped out a physical anthropologist in town in Copan to get a osteology collection together of various animals. So if we got bones from an excavation, we could see what kind of animal it was based on the collection. And this family said, well, our family dog died last year and we buried him in the backyard. You could go dig him up. And so we were like, okay, yeah, I mean, we do need a dog.
We’ll go dig up your dog. And they were like, but the kids really want to help you. So their kids came out and this was like their puppy, and it died less than a year ago. When we got to it, one of them just grabbed up a bone and he was like, [inaudible 02:40:59] like little bitty bones. Yay. What a weird attitude. That’s your dead dog there. But they have a different relationship with the dead.
Lex Fridman
In some sense that’s a beautiful attitude, right?
In some sense that’s a beautiful attitude, right?
Ed Barnhart
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Why pretend like we’re not mortal and this is just the process of it. And as you say it now, it kind of will be cool.
Why pretend like we’re not mortal and this is just the process of it. And as you say it now, it kind of will be cool.
Ed Barnhart
That’s what Day of the Dead is all about. And I love Day of the Dead. Halloween’s this creepy thing where they’re all monsters, but Day of the Dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors. I convinced my kids after the movie Coco came out. Now we have an altar with all of our great-grandparents on the altar, and we talk about who they were and how they lived, and we put things on the altar that mattered in their life, and we remember them on that day and it turned something that was a weird eat too much candy and wear a monster mask thing into something beautiful where we discuss where we came from.
That’s what Day of the Dead is all about. And I love Day of the Dead. Halloween’s this creepy thing where they’re all monsters, but Day of the Dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors. I convinced my kids after the movie Coco came out. Now we have an altar with all of our great-grandparents on the altar, and we talk about who they were and how they lived, and we put things on the altar that mattered in their life, and we remember them on that day and it turned something that was a weird eat too much candy and wear a monster mask thing into something beautiful where we discuss where we came from.
Lex Fridman
I have to ask about the giant stones the Inca has been able to somehow move and fit together perfectly. Do you understand? Is it understood how they were able to do that so well?
I have to ask about the giant stones the Inca has been able to somehow move and fit together perfectly. Do you understand? Is it understood how they were able to do that so well?
Ed Barnhart
No. The moving of it, I think that we have reasonable theories. There are ways to pivot large weights. There’s a great guy named Wally Wallington, a retired contractor here in the US who built Stonehenge in his backyard in Minnesota, single-handedly showing how you can move big stones. So I think Wally’s already figured out how to move them. It’s the perfectly fit so carefully fit together that you couldn’t even put a dime in between the stones. That’s the one that I think still has people baffled. The common archeological wisdom that you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit, that there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammerstone. I personally think it’s acids.
No. The moving of it, I think that we have reasonable theories. There are ways to pivot large weights. There’s a great guy named Wally Wallington, a retired contractor here in the US who built Stonehenge in his backyard in Minnesota, single-handedly showing how you can move big stones. So I think Wally’s already figured out how to move them. It’s the perfectly fit so carefully fit together that you couldn’t even put a dime in between the stones. That’s the one that I think still has people baffled. The common archeological wisdom that you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit, that there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammerstone. I personally think it’s acids.
I think they melted them together. And there are weird places when you really look at closely to these stones, which I’ve done a number of times. I’m going back next month to Machu Picchu and especially Cusco. I walk around in the alleys where these 500 to a thousand-year-old walls are still there. And I see things like the crystals in the andesite are almost stitched together along the seams. The andesite around it is melted and the crystals haven’t. And there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall. It’s just melted. Like somebody took a rag and wiped it while it was soft. Lots of talk about soft stones turning hard too. I haven’t been able to prove it. This is one of these end of my archeological career chapters. I’m either going to prove myself wrong or prove it, but I think they used acids. My dad’s a chemist and he told me a long time ago that there’s no way, there’s no naturally occurring acids. But my current theory, actually, I got the idea initially from the show Breaking Bad.
I don’t know if you ever saw that show, but there’s a point in which they’re trying to dissolve a body and they’re using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling. That hydrofluoric acid is so fascinating. It won’t go through plastic, and you can also bring it in inert parts and then combine it. The Inca made tons of jewelry out of fluorite. Fluorite is big in the Andes, and they also mined a lot of things for gold and silver. And the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid.
You put sulfuric acid and fluorite together and it’s hydrofluoric acid, and that will burn through andesite or anything. And if you learned how to do it judiciously and you didn’t care whether servants lost an arm or two, then you could actually use them to fuse these together. And I think they’re fused together. I asked the city of Cusco if I could take some core samples, and they said, go away, gringo. Don’t touch our walls. So actually this next time I’m going to go try to talk to the more Quechua authorities in a place called Ollantaytambo and maybe I can convince them, but right now, they just think I’m a weird-ass gringo who wants to put holes in their walls.
Lex Fridman
That’s a fascinating theory. And so how could you get to the bottom of that? So getting core samples to see if there’s some kind of trace.
That’s a fascinating theory. And so how could you get to the bottom of that? So getting core samples to see if there’s some kind of trace.
Ed Barnhart
Chemists I’m working with say that if there was hydrofluoric acid in between these, that a core sample right along the seam, they can separate out the elements in there and detect whether there was actually elements of hydrofluoric acid. I wanted to go straight to burning rocks, but they were like, no, I mean we already know that’s true. I mean, yeah, we can burn some rocks, but it would happen. And that’s just chemistry. We got to prove that it would happen in the walls. So go get us samples. And that was before COVID and all sorts. You know how it is, you probably are the same guy where you’ve got a thousand ideas and the ones that are fruitful, you run with and the other ones you’ll get back to.
Chemists I’m working with say that if there was hydrofluoric acid in between these, that a core sample right along the seam, they can separate out the elements in there and detect whether there was actually elements of hydrofluoric acid. I wanted to go straight to burning rocks, but they were like, no, I mean we already know that’s true. I mean, yeah, we can burn some rocks, but it would happen. And that’s just chemistry. We got to prove that it would happen in the walls. So go get us samples. And that was before COVID and all sorts. You know how it is, you probably are the same guy where you’ve got a thousand ideas and the ones that are fruitful, you run with and the other ones you’ll get back to.
Lex Fridman
That’d be fascinating if true, and I hope you do show that it’s true or follow, either one.
That’d be fascinating if true, and I hope you do show that it’s true or follow, either one.
Ed Barnhart
I’ll try to disprove it.
I’ll try to disprove it.
Lex Fridman
Disprove it. Yeah. I wonder if we discount how much amazing stuff a collection of humans can do, because it just feels like if a large number of humans are just working a little bit chipping away at stuff. At scale, they can do miraculous things. So the question is, how can a large number of humans be motivated to do a thing? When we think about Stonehenge, some very challenging architectural construction, we don’t think about a large number of humans working together.
Disprove it. Yeah. I wonder if we discount how much amazing stuff a collection of humans can do, because it just feels like if a large number of humans are just working a little bit chipping away at stuff. At scale, they can do miraculous things. So the question is, how can a large number of humans be motivated to do a thing? When we think about Stonehenge, some very challenging architectural construction, we don’t think about a large number of humans working together.
Ed Barnhart
Well, that large number of humans are motivated to work together by a small number of administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another.
Well, that large number of humans are motivated to work together by a small number of administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Ed Barnhart
One of my favorite quotes is, and I’m probably going to misquote it here, but I think it’s Margaret Mead who said, never underestimate the power of small groups working together. And the truth is that those are the only people that have ever changed the world. That small dedicated groups of people are what changed the world, and they inspire big groups of people to embrace their vision.
One of my favorite quotes is, and I’m probably going to misquote it here, but I think it’s Margaret Mead who said, never underestimate the power of small groups working together. And the truth is that those are the only people that have ever changed the world. That small dedicated groups of people are what changed the world, and they inspire big groups of people to embrace their vision.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think we sometimes underestimate how much humans can do across time and across scale.
Yeah, I think we sometimes underestimate how much humans can do across time and across scale.
Ed Barnhart
And we are way less capable than we used to be. I mean, the average human had all sorts of skills that at least I personally do not. I’m wearing a shirt, but I can’t make a shirt. That’s for somebody else to do.
And we are way less capable than we used to be. I mean, the average human had all sorts of skills that at least I personally do not. I’m wearing a shirt, but I can’t make a shirt. That’s for somebody else to do.
Early humans in North America
Lex Fridman
You’ve also lectured, which I really enjoyed, about North America. And also helped teach me that there was a lot more complex societies going on here for a long period of time. So maybe can we start at the beginning? Who were the early humans in North America?
You’ve also lectured, which I really enjoyed, about North America. And also helped teach me that there was a lot more complex societies going on here for a long period of time. So maybe can we start at the beginning? Who were the early humans in North America?
Ed Barnhart
Well, we go through that paleo Indian and archaic period for thousands of years. As we started this conversation, probably 30,000 years is a conservative now, humans first entered the Americas, but the first cultures we get here are mound-builders around the Mississippi and to the east, and then also a totally separate group in what we call the American Southwest now, the four Corners, who will develop into mostly the people we call the Pueblo people who are still there today, like Zuni and Hopi people.
Well, we go through that paleo Indian and archaic period for thousands of years. As we started this conversation, probably 30,000 years is a conservative now, humans first entered the Americas, but the first cultures we get here are mound-builders around the Mississippi and to the east, and then also a totally separate group in what we call the American Southwest now, the four Corners, who will develop into mostly the people we call the Pueblo people who are still there today, like Zuni and Hopi people.
So we’ve got these two clusters. The very first major community in North America is in the most unlikely place. It’s in Northern Louisiana. People think I’m crazy when I say this, but there is a pyramid in Northern Louisiana, a big one at a site called Poverty Point that is 3,500 years old. So it’s the same age as the pyramids in Egypt, and it is a giant thing just poking out of the bayous of Louisiana. And people don’t believe me when I say it, but it’s there.
Lex Fridman
The Mound Builders, what was that society like in comparison to everything else we’ve been talking about in Mesoamerica [inaudible 02:50:41].
The Mound Builders, what was that society like in comparison to everything else we’ve been talking about in Mesoamerica [inaudible 02:50:41].
Ed Barnhart
They evolved over thousands of years. We call them Mound Builders. This is something I object to. I think we should have a better… We do. The last version of them, we call them Mississippians now. But generally speaking, we call all these guys Mound Builders, but what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone. That’s kind of our just inherent western bias. Something that’s built out of stone is sophisticated, and something that’s built out of dirt is rudimentary.
They evolved over thousands of years. We call them Mound Builders. This is something I object to. I think we should have a better… We do. The last version of them, we call them Mississippians now. But generally speaking, we call all these guys Mound Builders, but what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone. That’s kind of our just inherent western bias. Something that’s built out of stone is sophisticated, and something that’s built out of dirt is rudimentary.
But in their full living form, they did have cores of dirt, but then they also had kind of clay caps. So they had terraces. They had whole complexes of buildings up on top. There were kings that lived up there. There’s the biggest of the Mississippian cities is called Cahokia, and it’s right outside of St. Louis.
And it was huge. It had a population of 20,000 people and pyramids all over the place, a huge palisade wall around it. It was absolutely gigantic, a thriving metropolis. And we in America have kind of a collective amnesia. We never hear about these massive civilizations. Cahokia was the big first city, but then it spread from the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic. There were hundreds and hundreds of these big cities that had five to 10,000 people each.
Lex Fridman
Were they their own thing or was there some kind of thread connecting all of them.
Were they their own thing or was there some kind of thread connecting all of them.
Ed Barnhart
They had a unified religion and culture. They were, again, not an empire. So they were warring city-states. There were kind of territories that were owned by big kings, and then the cities around them were kind of the subsidiary lords and kings. And then one kingdom could either ally with a neighbor or have a fight. So they were kind of countries, I think for, yeah, we could safely say they were different countries within this patchwork that was Eastern United States. And it’s so weird that we don’t know this because it was clearly documented by the Spanish.
They had a unified religion and culture. They were, again, not an empire. So they were warring city-states. There were kind of territories that were owned by big kings, and then the cities around them were kind of the subsidiary lords and kings. And then one kingdom could either ally with a neighbor or have a fight. So they were kind of countries, I think for, yeah, we could safely say they were different countries within this patchwork that was Eastern United States. And it’s so weird that we don’t know this because it was clearly documented by the Spanish.
I’m not talking about just archeology. We find him in archeology now. But Hernando de Soto landed in Florida and went for three years from, he went up into the Carolinas and over down into Alabama and Louisiana, and he’s the first one to see the Mississippi up there. But for three years he went through city after city after city, unfortunately decimating them, eating all their corn, giving them diseases. But the documentation’s clearly there. He met collectively, millions of people in a very sophisticated and uniform civilization.
Lex Fridman
So it’s disease and stealing of resources. But was there explicit murdering going on?
So it’s disease and stealing of resources. But was there explicit murdering going on?
Ed Barnhart
Unfortunately, yeah. He was a murderer and a psycho and a liar. He snowed them that he was some kind of deity. Actually learned a trick from the Inca who he was with Pizarro in his first run and went back to Spain, was rich, had a wife, a castle. Then he got bored and he decided to have a reign of terror on Northern America for three years. But he had people burned at the stake. He had his dogs rip them apart. He was very, very brutal. He ruled that area through fear and had absolutely no respect for anybody. He made promises and broke them all the time. He was really a brutal man.
Unfortunately, yeah. He was a murderer and a psycho and a liar. He snowed them that he was some kind of deity. Actually learned a trick from the Inca who he was with Pizarro in his first run and went back to Spain, was rich, had a wife, a castle. Then he got bored and he decided to have a reign of terror on Northern America for three years. But he had people burned at the stake. He had his dogs rip them apart. He was very, very brutal. He ruled that area through fear and had absolutely no respect for anybody. He made promises and broke them all the time. He was really a brutal man.
Columbus
Lex Fridman
So this whole period when Christopher Columbus came, how did that change everything?
So this whole period when Christopher Columbus came, how did that change everything?
Ed Barnhart
Well, there’s a great anthropological body of literature.
Well, there’s a great anthropological body of literature.
Ed Barnhart
Anthropological body of literature. It’s called the Columbian Exchange based on Columbus. But it’s all this trade back and forth between the new world and the old world. And the old world got just wonderful stuff. All of a sudden their diet didn’t suck. All these vegetables came in. The new world got herd animals. It got pigs and cows and goats that it didn’t have, but it also got 13 infectious diseases. Europe had had wave after wave and kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things, but it didn’t actually go away. It just couldn’t spread like a wildfire through the community. So when they arrived to the Americas, all of a sudden these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people. I think in the first 20, 30 years, there were people who had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them.
Anthropological body of literature. It’s called the Columbian Exchange based on Columbus. But it’s all this trade back and forth between the new world and the old world. And the old world got just wonderful stuff. All of a sudden their diet didn’t suck. All these vegetables came in. The new world got herd animals. It got pigs and cows and goats that it didn’t have, but it also got 13 infectious diseases. Europe had had wave after wave and kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things, but it didn’t actually go away. It just couldn’t spread like a wildfire through the community. So when they arrived to the Americas, all of a sudden these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people. I think in the first 20, 30 years, there were people who had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them.
But the numbers, it’s a shameful part of history, and it wasn’t something that Europe perpetrated on them. Medical science at that time was still the four humors theory, that people were made of yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. And we did things like, well, you’ve got to bleed him. He’ll feel better then. So we had no idea what an infectious disease was, but the reality was that this horde of diseases hit everyone. And the numbers are now saying in the first 50 years that 90% of everybody was dead, and that the number of people has increased as well as far as our estimates. We’re thinking it’s somewhere around 150 million people and 90% of them died. And with them, all their knowledge. Just, I mean, imagine the moment where who dies when things get bad? It’s the young and the old. So all the knowledge keepers die suddenly.
The children die. This next generation that’s half taught and now completely demoralized thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their gods hate them, that the only way out of it is to accept this new Christianity. But they don’t want to have to bring kids into this world where everybody’s dying. And even if they do, they can’t teach them what the old people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn’t finish the transmission. So in a single terrible moment in human history, the generation loses all their knowledge. So a lot of the things these people knew just blipped out.
Lex Fridman
But with that also, just the wisdom of the entire civilizations-
But with that also, just the wisdom of the entire civilizations-
Ed Barnhart
So much of-
So much of-
Lex Fridman
… fades away.
… fades away.
Ed Barnhart
… what they knew was just lost at that moment. We have the Maya who had those hieroglyphs and that we’ve learned a lot from that.
… what they knew was just lost at that moment. We have the Maya who had those hieroglyphs and that we’ve learned a lot from that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. But not a significant integration of that wisdom into. So it wasn’t when the Europeans came, it wasn’t like the cultures were integrated. It was a story of domination. Of erasure, essentially.
Yeah. But not a significant integration of that wisdom into. So it wasn’t when the Europeans came, it wasn’t like the cultures were integrated. It was a story of domination. Of erasure, essentially.
Ed Barnhart
In North America, there’s a new term in the literature that I like. We call it the Mississippian Shatter zone. That Mississippian civilization was millions of people, but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries. And now we have this Shatter zone where we have ruins, and the people that were actually from those ruins are somewhere else on a reservation far away. And I’m just about to talk to a Cherokee man who listened to some of the things I had to say and says, “All those Ho-Chunk things you were saying from that Ho-Chunk culture, my grandparents talk about this sort of thing too. Can I talk to you by phone and tell you about these things?” So we’ve got this Shatter zone where we’re going to try to put the puzzle back together, especially in terms of Mississippian religion. I really think we’re making headway in this generation, and it’s exciting to be part of piecing this old religion and its mythology back together.
In North America, there’s a new term in the literature that I like. We call it the Mississippian Shatter zone. That Mississippian civilization was millions of people, but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries. And now we have this Shatter zone where we have ruins, and the people that were actually from those ruins are somewhere else on a reservation far away. And I’m just about to talk to a Cherokee man who listened to some of the things I had to say and says, “All those Ho-Chunk things you were saying from that Ho-Chunk culture, my grandparents talk about this sort of thing too. Can I talk to you by phone and tell you about these things?” So we’ve got this Shatter zone where we’re going to try to put the puzzle back together, especially in terms of Mississippian religion. I really think we’re making headway in this generation, and it’s exciting to be part of piecing this old religion and its mythology back together.
Vikings
Lex Fridman
Just as since a lot of people refer to Christopher Columbus as the person who discovered America, I read that the Vikings reached North America much earlier in 1000 C.E. And why do you think they didn’t expand and colonize?
Just as since a lot of people refer to Christopher Columbus as the person who discovered America, I read that the Vikings reached North America much earlier in 1000 C.E. And why do you think they didn’t expand and colonize?
Ed Barnhart
Because they got their ass kicked.
Because they got their ass kicked.
Lex Fridman
Okay. Simple.
Okay. Simple.
Ed Barnhart
It’s the truth. It is absolutely true that the Vikings were here. There’s a great site in Nova Scotia called L’Anse aux Meadows, which definitely has what’s left of a Viking colony. It was Leif Eric and his father Eric the Red, who they got kind of kicked out of Europe because they apparently couldn’t stop murdering people. And so they went to Greenland and then kind of island hopped over to Canada. But I think the culture that was in that area was named the Dorset, but they would have nothing to do with the Vikings.
It’s the truth. It is absolutely true that the Vikings were here. There’s a great site in Nova Scotia called L’Anse aux Meadows, which definitely has what’s left of a Viking colony. It was Leif Eric and his father Eric the Red, who they got kind of kicked out of Europe because they apparently couldn’t stop murdering people. And so they went to Greenland and then kind of island hopped over to Canada. But I think the culture that was in that area was named the Dorset, but they would have nothing to do with the Vikings.
They attacked the Viking settlement every day and did not give them an inch until they decided it was just worthless and they left it. The Vikings attacked Ireland, and they just found a bunch of monasteries full of gold with a bunch of guys going, “We’re men of God, we don’t fight.” And the Vikings were like, “This is great. That’s great. This will be easy, then. We’ll just loot all these Easter eggs.” But the Native Americans in Canada were not having it. They kicked their ass. In fact, Leif Erickson’s brother Thor died there. The natives killed him. He was supposed to be in charge of expanding the settlement, but they just killed him.
Lex Fridman
So a lot of the Native American cultures were also, I mean, they’re sophisticated, warring cultures also.
So a lot of the Native American cultures were also, I mean, they’re sophisticated, warring cultures also.
Ed Barnhart
Yes, they fought. Especially the Mississippians. Boy, they were tough. And so were the five nations. The Mohawk, the Huron, the ones that kicked the Vikings’ ass up there, they were probably Algonquin speakers. But they were connected just above the Great Lakes, but they were all very tough people.
Yes, they fought. Especially the Mississippians. Boy, they were tough. And so were the five nations. The Mohawk, the Huron, the ones that kicked the Vikings’ ass up there, they were probably Algonquin speakers. But they were connected just above the Great Lakes, but they were all very tough people.
Lex Fridman
When you think about the Spaniards and the Portuguese and the over a hundred million people that were killed, do you see that as a tragedy of history or is it just the way of history?
When you think about the Spaniards and the Portuguese and the over a hundred million people that were killed, do you see that as a tragedy of history or is it just the way of history?
Ed Barnhart
I think that the epidemics, I consider it a tragedy. That did not have to happen, and that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about it. There was just a tragic, perfect storm of events. I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what’s been called the Black Legend, that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That’s not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone.
I think that the epidemics, I consider it a tragedy. That did not have to happen, and that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about it. There was just a tragic, perfect storm of events. I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what’s been called the Black Legend, that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That’s not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone.
In fact, there was a really poignant story I read of a Spanish priest in the Amazon, in the Brazilian northern part of the Amazon where he made this utopian community and he was bringing people in that were getting sick, and he wrote, “I’m baptizing everyone. I have baptized 10,000 people a day, and yet God’s still killing them. Why is he doing this to them? They’re doing everything that I ask them to do. They are submitting to the will of God.” But this guy doesn’t realize that the same bowl of holy water that he’s baptizing them in, he’s just wiping the disease on everybody’s faces. He’s accelerating it when he doesn’t even realize. He thinks he’s saving them, but he’s actually killing them. That’s a tragedy. That’s not just like spoils go to the victor stuff. That’s just straight up tragedy.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. But that one is hard to know what to do with, like Black Death. I mean infections, they don’t operate on normal human terms, right? They just go through entire populations. Back to wild ideas.
Yeah, yeah. But that one is hard to know what to do with, like Black Death. I mean infections, they don’t operate on normal human terms, right? They just go through entire populations. Back to wild ideas.
Aliens
Ed Barnhart
All right, just my style.
All right, just my style.
Lex Fridman
I mean we didn’t really talk about how life originated on Earth or how humans have evolved, and we did talk about that there could be just a lot of stuff in ancient history we haven’t even uncovered yet. Do you think it’s possible that other intelligent civilizations from outside of earth, aliens ever visited?
I mean we didn’t really talk about how life originated on Earth or how humans have evolved, and we did talk about that there could be just a lot of stuff in ancient history we haven’t even uncovered yet. Do you think it’s possible that other intelligent civilizations from outside of earth, aliens ever visited?
Ed Barnhart
You had me right until the ever visited thing. That one I’m not entirely sure about. I’m not sure whether we have any… We certainly have no archaeological proof that I would cite or contemplate as the evidence of such. But the guys that discovered DNA, Watson and Crick, Watson who actually habitually used hallucinogens to invigorate his thinking, he said that he thought that DNA on this planet was way too complex to have developed over the time period that it had at its disposal. And that his guess was that our DNA was somehow seeded from outside of our planet. And take that for what it is. But the guy who we respect on many other levels also said that. So that’s interesting. But in terms of aliens visiting us, I don’t know. It does smack of a kind of human hubris that we think we’re important enough for some advanced species to give a shit about us.
You had me right until the ever visited thing. That one I’m not entirely sure about. I’m not sure whether we have any… We certainly have no archaeological proof that I would cite or contemplate as the evidence of such. But the guys that discovered DNA, Watson and Crick, Watson who actually habitually used hallucinogens to invigorate his thinking, he said that he thought that DNA on this planet was way too complex to have developed over the time period that it had at its disposal. And that his guess was that our DNA was somehow seeded from outside of our planet. And take that for what it is. But the guy who we respect on many other levels also said that. So that’s interesting. But in terms of aliens visiting us, I don’t know. It does smack of a kind of human hubris that we think we’re important enough for some advanced species to give a shit about us.
Statistically speaking, the universe is way too big. We can’t be the only sentient beings. There’s got to be somebody else out there. Whether they care about us, that’s a question. I’ve been on Ancient Aliens a number of times. I show up and I’m an educator. I mean, refusing to be part of the conversation is an immediate fail in my book. But there was one time where they asked me at the end, “Do you have anything else do you want to say?” And I said, “Well, y’all’s premise is that aliens came down a long time ago and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts of science and medicine, engineering, all these things. Today we also have a lot of stories of the aliens coming down, but now all they’re doing is mutilating cows and sodomizing rednecks.” Like whatever we did, we super pissed them off apparently.”
Lex Fridman
The quality of the gifts has decreased rapidly. It’s an interesting thought you’ve mentioned. What archeologically would you have to see to be like, this might be an alien?
The quality of the gifts has decreased rapidly. It’s an interesting thought you’ve mentioned. What archeologically would you have to see to be like, this might be an alien?
Ed Barnhart
A technology that doesn’t belong there first and foremost. I mean, if we just run with the premise that somebody was capable of making a vehicle that could get them from somewhere far away to here, that was almost certainly mechanical. Now, I love the aliens thing where biomechanical is something that certainly could be and that would disintegrate. We wouldn’t see that at all, but I would expect some kind of technology that showed up out of the blue and changed things. That would be something. But I would think mechanical or a substance that’s not from here.
A technology that doesn’t belong there first and foremost. I mean, if we just run with the premise that somebody was capable of making a vehicle that could get them from somewhere far away to here, that was almost certainly mechanical. Now, I love the aliens thing where biomechanical is something that certainly could be and that would disintegrate. We wouldn’t see that at all, but I would expect some kind of technology that showed up out of the blue and changed things. That would be something. But I would think mechanical or a substance that’s not from here.
Lex Fridman
But of course we would only see the results of that mechanical. You mean literally a mechanical thing?
But of course we would only see the results of that mechanical. You mean literally a mechanical thing?
Ed Barnhart
Right. Some sort of thing like that. The typical thing people say is how did they move these giant stones? But just look at that on the face for a second. Aliens come from across the universe to meet humans, and the thing they tell them is how to move rocks? Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, give them antibiotics or a combustion engine or something. They came across the universe and they showed them how to move big rocks? I mean, that doesn’t make any sense. That just doesn’t make any sense.
Right. Some sort of thing like that. The typical thing people say is how did they move these giant stones? But just look at that on the face for a second. Aliens come from across the universe to meet humans, and the thing they tell them is how to move rocks? Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, give them antibiotics or a combustion engine or something. They came across the universe and they showed them how to move big rocks? I mean, that doesn’t make any sense. That just doesn’t make any sense.
Earth in 10,000 years
Lex Fridman
What do you think earth will look like 10,000 years from now?
What do you think earth will look like 10,000 years from now?
Ed Barnhart
That’s an interesting question. I think it will be a lot more automated or it’ll be a smoldering pile. There is a possibility we could end ourselves. There’s always that possibility that we’ve really opened Pandora’s box in some regards. I did listen to one of your podcast guests with what would happen in the case of nuclear war. That was chilling. Her opinion was certainly we would burn everything to a crisp within minutes apparently. So we have that capacity. That’s scary. That’s a possible future for us. But I’m an optimist. I’d like to think that guys like you are going to make friendly robots who make my job better.
That’s an interesting question. I think it will be a lot more automated or it’ll be a smoldering pile. There is a possibility we could end ourselves. There’s always that possibility that we’ve really opened Pandora’s box in some regards. I did listen to one of your podcast guests with what would happen in the case of nuclear war. That was chilling. Her opinion was certainly we would burn everything to a crisp within minutes apparently. So we have that capacity. That’s scary. That’s a possible future for us. But I’m an optimist. I’d like to think that guys like you are going to make friendly robots who make my job better.
Lex Fridman
But 1,000, 10,000 years is a long time. And technology is improving and becoming more advanced rapidly, and the rate of that improvement is increasing ever more so.
But 1,000, 10,000 years is a long time. And technology is improving and becoming more advanced rapidly, and the rate of that improvement is increasing ever more so.
Ed Barnhart
That’s the part that frightens me actually. I don’t know, does that frighten you?
That’s the part that frightens me actually. I don’t know, does that frighten you?
Lex Fridman
Yes. Terrifying.
Yes. Terrifying.
Ed Barnhart
I heard somebody say, I forget who it was. But systems of any kind, human systems, biological systems can be put on a graph that’s change over time and any graph that the change is way faster than the time and the line starts going straight up, that is a system in crisis. In almost any biological system that has that fast to change over that little of time, any other thing you’d describe it as a crisis. When you apply that chart to technologies change, it’s a crisis.
I heard somebody say, I forget who it was. But systems of any kind, human systems, biological systems can be put on a graph that’s change over time and any graph that the change is way faster than the time and the line starts going straight up, that is a system in crisis. In almost any biological system that has that fast to change over that little of time, any other thing you’d describe it as a crisis. When you apply that chart to technologies change, it’s a crisis.
Lex Fridman
From that perspective, absolutely. But I also have a faith in human ingenuity that we humans like to create a really difficult situation and then come up with ways to get out of that difficult situation. And in so doing innovate and create a lot of awesome stuff and sometimes cause a lot of suffering. But on the whole, on average, make a better world. But with nuclear weapons, the bad stuff might actually lead to the death of everybody.
From that perspective, absolutely. But I also have a faith in human ingenuity that we humans like to create a really difficult situation and then come up with ways to get out of that difficult situation. And in so doing innovate and create a lot of awesome stuff and sometimes cause a lot of suffering. But on the whole, on average, make a better world. But with nuclear weapons, the bad stuff might actually lead to the death of everybody.
Ed Barnhart
I guess there’s always that chance, but I am an optimist. I think you’re an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said. I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate. And we are never more innovative than when we’re under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans over the last thousands of years have been about we didn’t change the world when we were comfortable. It was when we were in crisis. Necessity is the mother of invention. But I think we’ll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis is real and happening. I actually personally think that I’m going to answer a question that you didn’t even ask me.
I guess there’s always that chance, but I am an optimist. I think you’re an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said. I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate. And we are never more innovative than when we’re under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans over the last thousands of years have been about we didn’t change the world when we were comfortable. It was when we were in crisis. Necessity is the mother of invention. But I think we’ll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis is real and happening. I actually personally think that I’m going to answer a question that you didn’t even ask me.
I think we’re wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this. We’re delusional. I’m all for electric cars and being good stewards of the environment, but we are wasting our time not technologically adapting to what’s about to happen. We’re spending too much time pretending, the average American thinks if we all just drive electric cars, we’ll be okay. That’s bullshit. That’s not going to happen. We need to start making technologies that desalinize water, a host of things that we need to use our technological capacity to accept it and adapt, instead of Pollyanna thinking we can make it go away.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, kind of accept that the world will change and a lot of big problems will arise and just develop technology that addresses them.
Yeah, kind of accept that the world will change and a lot of big problems will arise and just develop technology that addresses them.
Ed Barnhart
I think you have some guys that have their finger on the pulse there. We need to start thinking about how we’re going to survive this, not that we’re going to make it go away.
I think you have some guys that have their finger on the pulse there. We need to start thinking about how we’re going to survive this, not that we’re going to make it go away.
Lex Fridman
And not just survive, thrive. Again, we’re pretty innovative in that regard. But if some catastrophic thing happens or we just leave this planet, what do you think would be found by aforementioned alien civilizations when they visit? The anthropologists, the grad student anthropologists that visit Earth and study, how much of what we know, have, and love and think of as human civilization will be lost do you think?
And not just survive, thrive. Again, we’re pretty innovative in that regard. But if some catastrophic thing happens or we just leave this planet, what do you think would be found by aforementioned alien civilizations when they visit? The anthropologists, the grad student anthropologists that visit Earth and study, how much of what we know, have, and love and think of as human civilization will be lost do you think?
Ed Barnhart
Well, time moves on and things that are perishable perish. So you didn’t put a time element in there, but I would say that everything that can perish will, and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn’t perish. So we’ll have buildings, plaques, but they won’t have any books. They won’t have any billboards. They’ll have the incomplete record I have. I one time did a talk in Sioux Falls and I said I drove in here and there was a big obelisk in front of the town. And everywhere I go, I see the names Lewis and Clark. And a thousand years from now, if I was an archeologist investigating this place, I would think that it was founded by the Egyptians and their kings were named Lewis and Clark. But the truth is, you know Lewis and Clark stayed one night here, but it’s just a big deal. So I would be so wrong about what I thought about your town based on what preserved.
Well, time moves on and things that are perishable perish. So you didn’t put a time element in there, but I would say that everything that can perish will, and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn’t perish. So we’ll have buildings, plaques, but they won’t have any books. They won’t have any billboards. They’ll have the incomplete record I have. I one time did a talk in Sioux Falls and I said I drove in here and there was a big obelisk in front of the town. And everywhere I go, I see the names Lewis and Clark. And a thousand years from now, if I was an archeologist investigating this place, I would think that it was founded by the Egyptians and their kings were named Lewis and Clark. But the truth is, you know Lewis and Clark stayed one night here, but it’s just a big deal. So I would be so wrong about what I thought about your town based on what preserved.
Lex Fridman
It’s so beautiful as a thought experiment. What would archeologists be really wrong about? And what would they could possibly be right about?
It’s so beautiful as a thought experiment. What would archeologists be really wrong about? And what would they could possibly be right about?
Ed Barnhart
Washington D.C. was clearly made by a combination of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans because that’s what all the architecture is.
Washington D.C. was clearly made by a combination of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans because that’s what all the architecture is.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And would they be able to reconstruct the important empires, the powerful empires, and the warring empires?
Yeah. And would they be able to reconstruct the important empires, the powerful empires, and the warring empires?
Ed Barnhart
For that matter, have me and my colleagues done that at all? I am almost certain that the Maya would just gut laugh at what I think I know what they were.
For that matter, have me and my colleagues done that at all? I am almost certain that the Maya would just gut laugh at what I think I know what they were.
Lex Fridman
I wonder, do you ever think about what we just as a human civilization are wrong about the most? Like mainstream archaeology. Just like a suspicion. What could we get completely wrong? Well, one way to get something wrong is totally lost civilization. An obviously gigantic civilization that was there along with the Maya or something like this in the 10,000 years ago.
I wonder, do you ever think about what we just as a human civilization are wrong about the most? Like mainstream archaeology. Just like a suspicion. What could we get completely wrong? Well, one way to get something wrong is totally lost civilization. An obviously gigantic civilization that was there along with the Maya or something like this in the 10,000 years ago.
Ed Barnhart
There’s certainly that. There could be things that were either wiped away or still hiding under the oceans that would completely change the way we think about things.
There’s certainly that. There could be things that were either wiped away or still hiding under the oceans that would completely change the way we think about things.
Lex Fridman
And everybody knew they existed and everybody interacted with them. It was [inaudible 03:15:31].
And everybody knew they existed and everybody interacted with them. It was [inaudible 03:15:31].
Ed Barnhart
I think it’s our estimation of their motivations that were probably most wrong on. My teacher Sheila a long time ago said, I’ve come up with all sorts of theories. I was always thinking about stuff. And she looked at me and she said, “If you don’t stop thinking like a western European and start trying to put yourself in the mindset of these people, you will never understand any of it.” Which I’ve always taken to heart. I mean, I really do. When I approach these things, I try to step out of my cultural assumptions, try to think like they would think as the best I could. And it’s very different. This whole, the Maya are cyclical, the whole sacrifice, we’re so obsessed with that. But that wasn’t an austere actual sacrifice on their part. They weren’t just, “Hey, let’s all get together and kill that guy that’s pissing us off.” I mean, they were giving the best of them. It was a different mentality. This was not brutal. This was a bonafide sacrifice on their part, a loss.
I think it’s our estimation of their motivations that were probably most wrong on. My teacher Sheila a long time ago said, I’ve come up with all sorts of theories. I was always thinking about stuff. And she looked at me and she said, “If you don’t stop thinking like a western European and start trying to put yourself in the mindset of these people, you will never understand any of it.” Which I’ve always taken to heart. I mean, I really do. When I approach these things, I try to step out of my cultural assumptions, try to think like they would think as the best I could. And it’s very different. This whole, the Maya are cyclical, the whole sacrifice, we’re so obsessed with that. But that wasn’t an austere actual sacrifice on their part. They weren’t just, “Hey, let’s all get together and kill that guy that’s pissing us off.” I mean, they were giving the best of them. It was a different mentality. This was not brutal. This was a bonafide sacrifice on their part, a loss.
Lex Fridman
Plus the whole mystery of the puppy that eventually starts having sex with [inaudible 03:16:44].
Plus the whole mystery of the puppy that eventually starts having sex with [inaudible 03:16:44].
Ed Barnhart
I’m going to unweave that one of these days.
I’m going to unweave that one of these days.
Lex Fridman
One of these days. Now that puppy appeared on Pottery?
One of these days. Now that puppy appeared on Pottery?
Ed Barnhart
All over Pottery. He’s everywhere. I got to write this book. This next year is the year I’m going to write my Fang deity book and I will have a whole chapter dedicated to the puppy.
All over Pottery. He’s everywhere. I got to write this book. This next year is the year I’m going to write my Fang deity book and I will have a whole chapter dedicated to the puppy.
Lex Fridman
The mystery solved. I mean, it could just be the birth of memes of humor. I don’t know. I mean, again, humor. You don’t know what the nature of their humor, of what their jokes are.
The mystery solved. I mean, it could just be the birth of memes of humor. I don’t know. I mean, again, humor. You don’t know what the nature of their humor, of what their jokes are.
Ed Barnhart
Oh, that’s a neat one too. And that’s so human. I’ll tell you a little side story here, that when I worked with the Maya people in Palenque, I spent three years making this map of the city and hiking through the jungle every day. And they would talk to each other in their own language. [Celtal 03:17:34] was the group I was working with. But I noticed after a while they were big jokers. They loved to make jokes and they would laugh at jokes, but then they would also, one of them would say something and the other ones would go, hoo hoo. And I eventually asked, “What is that? Why do you guys always make that hoo hoo noise?” And he said, “That’s because…” He made a really smart pun. It was like he said three different things at once. It was a turn of phrase that was smart. And they didn’t make laughs at that. They had a noise for when somebody said something just super clever. So there’s also that just clever turn of speech.
Oh, that’s a neat one too. And that’s so human. I’ll tell you a little side story here, that when I worked with the Maya people in Palenque, I spent three years making this map of the city and hiking through the jungle every day. And they would talk to each other in their own language. [Celtal 03:17:34] was the group I was working with. But I noticed after a while they were big jokers. They loved to make jokes and they would laugh at jokes, but then they would also, one of them would say something and the other ones would go, hoo hoo. And I eventually asked, “What is that? Why do you guys always make that hoo hoo noise?” And he said, “That’s because…” He made a really smart pun. It was like he said three different things at once. It was a turn of phrase that was smart. And they didn’t make laughs at that. They had a noise for when somebody said something just super clever. So there’s also that just clever turn of speech.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Wit.
Yeah. Wit.
Ed Barnhart
And I think about that when I’m a hieroglyphic translator. Here’s a beautiful thing that’s going to be like a poem or a political statement, and I’m just ploddingly looking in a dictionary of what that word means. There’s probably double, triple entendres all through this text. And the real meaning is the subtext. And I’m thinking they’re talking about corn and they’re talking about the nature of life.
And I think about that when I’m a hieroglyphic translator. Here’s a beautiful thing that’s going to be like a poem or a political statement, and I’m just ploddingly looking in a dictionary of what that word means. There’s probably double, triple entendres all through this text. And the real meaning is the subtext. And I’m thinking they’re talking about corn and they’re talking about the nature of life.
Lex Fridman
It could be satire, it could be as it was in the Soviet Union when there’s a dictator, maybe there’s an overpowering king. You’re not allowed to actually speak. You have to hide the thing you’re actually trying to say in the subtext, in all of that.
It could be satire, it could be as it was in the Soviet Union when there’s a dictator, maybe there’s an overpowering king. You’re not allowed to actually speak. You have to hide the thing you’re actually trying to say in the subtext, in all of that.
Ed Barnhart
There was a funny Maya ceramic that had, the ceramics are neat, because the monuments can be kind of broken records. I’m the king, I was born this time, I beat these people up. I married this woman, I died. But the ceramics will tell us things out of mythology stories. And there was this one with a rabbit looking at the merchant God. And nobody could translate the text. And finally this eastern European, actually a Ukrainian guy translated it and the rabbit’s saying to the merchant God, “Bend over and smell my ass.” And like, oh man, we were expecting this wonderful piece of mythology. But no, it translates bend over and smell my ass. That’s great. That’s human.
There was a funny Maya ceramic that had, the ceramics are neat, because the monuments can be kind of broken records. I’m the king, I was born this time, I beat these people up. I married this woman, I died. But the ceramics will tell us things out of mythology stories. And there was this one with a rabbit looking at the merchant God. And nobody could translate the text. And finally this eastern European, actually a Ukrainian guy translated it and the rabbit’s saying to the merchant God, “Bend over and smell my ass.” And like, oh man, we were expecting this wonderful piece of mythology. But no, it translates bend over and smell my ass. That’s great. That’s human.
Lex Fridman
As we mentioned previously, human nature does not change. You mentioned Palenque and mapping it. Just out of curiosity, what is that process like? It seems fascinating.
As we mentioned previously, human nature does not change. You mentioned Palenque and mapping it. Just out of curiosity, what is that process like? It seems fascinating.
Ed Barnhart
Oh, it was a great adventure. I loved it, but it was difficult. I woke up every morning thinking I will be hurt today somehow. I don’t know how. I don’t know badly, where on my body it will occur, but it’s going to happen. It was the jungle.
Oh, it was a great adventure. I loved it, but it was difficult. I woke up every morning thinking I will be hurt today somehow. I don’t know how. I don’t know badly, where on my body it will occur, but it’s going to happen. It was the jungle.
Lex Fridman
So in the jungle, what’s the process like? What do you have to do to map it?
So in the jungle, what’s the process like? What do you have to do to map it?
Ed Barnhart
Well, it was tricky too because it was also a national forest. So the forestry department didn’t want us to cut down anything more than we had to. So we basically just cut tunnels through the foliage and we’d map everything twice. The first thing we’d do is I’d go in, find a building, draw it on a piece of graph paper. And I’d say, “You guys go north. You guys go east, west. Find other buildings. And when you find them, pace back to this one.” And so I’d start making a map and I’d make the whole… One piece of graph paper was enough to. Then we’d bring the machine in, we’d bring the laser theodolite and get really accurate information. But on that piece of paper, I would write, “Don’t bring the machine this way. There’s a tree fall.” Or, “Stand on top of this building and you’ll see four different buildings at once from this one.”
Well, it was tricky too because it was also a national forest. So the forestry department didn’t want us to cut down anything more than we had to. So we basically just cut tunnels through the foliage and we’d map everything twice. The first thing we’d do is I’d go in, find a building, draw it on a piece of graph paper. And I’d say, “You guys go north. You guys go east, west. Find other buildings. And when you find them, pace back to this one.” And so I’d start making a map and I’d make the whole… One piece of graph paper was enough to. Then we’d bring the machine in, we’d bring the laser theodolite and get really accurate information. But on that piece of paper, I would write, “Don’t bring the machine this way. There’s a tree fall.” Or, “Stand on top of this building and you’ll see four different buildings at once from this one.”
Lex Fridman
And all of this is in dense jungle?
And all of this is in dense jungle?
Ed Barnhart
Right. And the deeper we got off the road, the deeper it was. Sometimes it would clear out, but certain places, if it was low, it would be such thick vegetation and it would grow back so fast. Sometimes we would cut just tunnels through tall grass and we’d come back five days later and they were gone. We couldn’t even find where our trails were. They would grow back that fast.
Right. And the deeper we got off the road, the deeper it was. Sometimes it would clear out, but certain places, if it was low, it would be such thick vegetation and it would grow back so fast. Sometimes we would cut just tunnels through tall grass and we’d come back five days later and they were gone. We couldn’t even find where our trails were. They would grow back that fast.
Lex Fridman
But you see the building, so you could see?
But you see the building, so you could see?
Ed Barnhart
Right. And that was the fun part. I mean, sometimes it would just be a little neighborhood with little low buildings no bigger than this table, but sometimes just five more meters in and I’m standing under a pyramid that nobody had ever mapped. Like, wow, I’ve just found another one. And some days on good days, we’d find three pyramids. And I felt that’s such a more exciting job than the typical excavation, say. All my buddies were all just in a hole for the whole week in the middle of the city. And where I’m dancing around through the jungle, I could find 10 buildings today. I might find a pyramid today. Who knows?
Right. And that was the fun part. I mean, sometimes it would just be a little neighborhood with little low buildings no bigger than this table, but sometimes just five more meters in and I’m standing under a pyramid that nobody had ever mapped. Like, wow, I’ve just found another one. And some days on good days, we’d find three pyramids. And I felt that’s such a more exciting job than the typical excavation, say. All my buddies were all just in a hole for the whole week in the middle of the city. And where I’m dancing around through the jungle, I could find 10 buildings today. I might find a pyramid today. Who knows?
Lex Fridman
What’s that feel like to find a pyramid or buildings that you are one of the only humans that are not from that civilization to ever see this thing? What’s that feel like?
What’s that feel like to find a pyramid or buildings that you are one of the only humans that are not from that civilization to ever see this thing? What’s that feel like?
Ed Barnhart
It’s great. I love that feeling. I am an explorer at heart, so finding something like that, when I was 25 years old, I found a whole Maya city. Got to name it, its name is Ma’ax Na. It’s off in the Belizean jungle. And that was just outrageous. I mean, it almost… That one almost depressed me. I had this great life ambition that I would find a lost city. And then I did it at 25 and I was like, God, now what do I do? I thought that was supposed to take me my whole life. I actually, I wrote a bunch of letters to NASA trying to get them to let me be the first archaeologist on Mars. I never got a single reply back. I’m sure I’m on NASA’s list as some weirdo.
It’s great. I love that feeling. I am an explorer at heart, so finding something like that, when I was 25 years old, I found a whole Maya city. Got to name it, its name is Ma’ax Na. It’s off in the Belizean jungle. And that was just outrageous. I mean, it almost… That one almost depressed me. I had this great life ambition that I would find a lost city. And then I did it at 25 and I was like, God, now what do I do? I thought that was supposed to take me my whole life. I actually, I wrote a bunch of letters to NASA trying to get them to let me be the first archaeologist on Mars. I never got a single reply back. I’m sure I’m on NASA’s list as some weirdo.
Lex Fridman
How’d you find a Mayan city?
How’d you find a Mayan city?
Ed Barnhart
I used a topography map of the area and I played the game. If I was a Maya, where would my favorite place to live in this big area be? I looked for the biggest mountain because they call all of their pyramids tune wheat stone mountains. I knew they loved mountains. And when I found that mountain, there were two others right next to it that made a triangle and they love those triads, and there were rivers in between them. And I thought, that’s it. That’s where I would build the city. And I hiked out there over two seasons with students. The other grad students were like, “He’s just having his students just wander in the jungle all day.” But I came back with a city.
I used a topography map of the area and I played the game. If I was a Maya, where would my favorite place to live in this big area be? I looked for the biggest mountain because they call all of their pyramids tune wheat stone mountains. I knew they loved mountains. And when I found that mountain, there were two others right next to it that made a triangle and they love those triads, and there were rivers in between them. And I thought, that’s it. That’s where I would build the city. And I hiked out there over two seasons with students. The other grad students were like, “He’s just having his students just wander in the jungle all day.” But I came back with a city.
Hope for the future
Lex Fridman
So given that you’ve looked into the deep past of humanity, what gives you hope about our future, maybe our deep future of this human civilization?
So given that you’ve looked into the deep past of humanity, what gives you hope about our future, maybe our deep future of this human civilization?
Ed Barnhart
That’s a good one, and I do have hope. I do have hope. I believe in the spirit of humankind. I as a person who have studied history, I kind of feel like history does kind of a sine wave. There’s highs and there’s lows, but no matter how low we go, we get up again and we climb. And I think that humanity will continue that. We will rise to the challenges. Now, some of the challenges may be created by ourselves as well, but we will adapt and overcome. That’s what we do.
That’s a good one, and I do have hope. I do have hope. I believe in the spirit of humankind. I as a person who have studied history, I kind of feel like history does kind of a sine wave. There’s highs and there’s lows, but no matter how low we go, we get up again and we climb. And I think that humanity will continue that. We will rise to the challenges. Now, some of the challenges may be created by ourselves as well, but we will adapt and overcome. That’s what we do.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, humans find a way, right? That’s the thing you see with history. Even when the empires collapse, the humans that come out of that, they pick themselves up and find another way. They build anew.
Yeah, humans find a way, right? That’s the thing you see with history. Even when the empires collapse, the humans that come out of that, they pick themselves up and find another way. They build anew.
Ed Barnhart
And the people I study believe in the cyclical nature of life. That you really can’t, life can’t continue without death being part of the cycle. We get our lows, we get our highs, but the cycle continues forever.
And the people I study believe in the cyclical nature of life. That you really can’t, life can’t continue without death being part of the cycle. We get our lows, we get our highs, but the cycle continues forever.
Lex Fridman
I should mention that you have a lot of great lectures on the great courses, but you have also an amazing podcast, ArchaeoEd. If people want to listen to it, this is a tough question, but what would you recommend? What episodes should they listen to? What’s the answer?
I should mention that you have a lot of great lectures on the great courses, but you have also an amazing podcast, ArchaeoEd. If people want to listen to it, this is a tough question, but what would you recommend? What episodes should they listen to? What’s the answer?
Ed Barnhart
Oh, that is a tough question.
Oh, that is a tough question.
Lex Fridman
What is the sampling? It’s like asking a chef what’s the best stuff on the menu?
What is the sampling? It’s like asking a chef what’s the best stuff on the menu?
Ed Barnhart
Well, different strokes for different folks. I do two different things on that podcast. Sometimes I just teach about cultures that you’ve never heard about. I love… I start off by saying, “It’s my podcast and I’ll talk about whatever the heck I want to talk about.” Sometimes I talk about really specific things like a tool type or an animal type, but my favorite ones have become when I just tell my stories of my adventures. I’ve got a lot of weird adventure stories and it’s been fun and they’ve been very well received. I can put my humor in there and I can talk about the things that went right, the things that went wrong. The adventures that I had are all part of this ArchaeoEd thing. ArchaeoEd’s kind of a double entendre. It’s me, I’m just Ed. But it’s also education.
Well, different strokes for different folks. I do two different things on that podcast. Sometimes I just teach about cultures that you’ve never heard about. I love… I start off by saying, “It’s my podcast and I’ll talk about whatever the heck I want to talk about.” Sometimes I talk about really specific things like a tool type or an animal type, but my favorite ones have become when I just tell my stories of my adventures. I’ve got a lot of weird adventure stories and it’s been fun and they’ve been very well received. I can put my humor in there and I can talk about the things that went right, the things that went wrong. The adventures that I had are all part of this ArchaeoEd thing. ArchaeoEd’s kind of a double entendre. It’s me, I’m just Ed. But it’s also education.
What I’m really trying to do with this too, it’s specifically the Americas. I want to be part of the reawakening that there were these great civilizations here, especially North America. I think that we have a group amnesia that there was no great civilizations here before Europe showed up. That’s simply not true. I think it should be part of our history books. In fact, I have a program called Before the Americas that would introduce as part of a American history, the part before European contact. And I think that kids in the K through 12 level should grow up not being told this fallacy that no one was here before we showed up in 1492. And one of these days I’m going to find a funder to help us put together Before the Americas and we’re going to make it part of the curriculum for every kid in the U.S. to know the full history of this country.
Lex Fridman
That’s a great project. Thank you so much. Thank you for talking today. Thank you for all the fascinating ideas that you put out into the world, and I can’t wait to hear your new course.
That’s a great project. Thank you so much. Thank you for talking today. Thank you for all the fascinating ideas that you put out into the world, and I can’t wait to hear your new course.
Ed Barnhart
Thank you so much, Lex. It was a real pleasure.
Thank you so much, Lex. It was a real pleasure.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ed Barnhart. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Joseph Campbell. “Life is but a mask worn on the face of death, and is death then but another mask? How many can say, asks the Aztec poet, that there is or is not a truth beyond?” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ed Barnhart. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Joseph Campbell. “Life is but a mask worn on the face of death, and is death then but another mask? How many can say, asks the Aztec poet, that there is or is not a truth beyond?” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.